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Those of you who are existing Scout Labs customers may have noticed a whole heap o’ changes in the application when you logged in yesterday- all of them originally requested by more than one of you. While we often release new features, these changes present a particularly big leap forward on data and functionality. We are pretty excited about this release! In order of customer popularity:

• Assignments. Now all existing customers and Professional Plan subscribers have a feature that enables them to create a task based on any piece of social media data found in the application. Photo, video, Tweet or post, you can assign the item to a team member to read or respond to. Assignment are automatically emailed to assignees and status tracked in the application, which provides a nifty dashboard for seeing how fast your team actually responds. Of course there is an export available for all assignments. See Jenny’s recent post for a great rant on why this functionality is so key to the socially empowered organization.
• Forums data. With this release, Scout Labs now offers coverage of millions of English language forums. This is especially great news for our customers in the automotive, electronics, gaming industries. There’s always a breaking in period when we add new data to the system, so if there is a source you want and don’t see in our content coverage, please use the link at the bottom of every page to suggest the source to us, and we’ll do what we can to add it (you get an email back from the system). Take a look at how much recent Toyota client is on forums:


• Breakdown of volume by social media type. Now you can break down social media coverage by media type- blogs, Twitter, forums, etc. You can compare totals of individual media types for different searches- who’s bigger on blogs? On forums?


One caveat is that the graphable Twitter data is a historical sampling of Twitter data, representing about 5-10% of total Tweet volume. The only companies we know of that have full Twitter feed data right now are Twitter, MSFT and GOOG. We do hope that Twitter will soon make the full feed available more broadly. In the meantime you can click into the graphs to dive into the mentions for a particular data type and time period.





• News Data. There’s now a breakout of new data, so you can see the interaction between news stories and consumer attention as evidenced by social media activity. We define news as content from a traditional news provider (NYTimes), regardless of format (example: bit.blogs.nytimes), news articles coming from a syndicated news provider (an AP story published by a news aggregator), and articles coming from mainstream media publishers (Wired, Sport Illustrated). Under these criteria, well-established mega blogs like The Huffington Post are categorized as blogs, not news, even though they focus on newsy content.


We’ve heard for some time that showing some news content along with social media content is a great way for those team members who might be less familiar with social media to more directly see the correlation between items in the news, which everyone in the organization already takes seriously, and mentions in social media, which many are still struggling to evaluate.

• Save items inline. This feature replaces the previous Bookmarks feature, with some cool new twists. Now you can save an item right from the summary view, and email a colleague or team member right when you do it. Scout Labs saves these items indefinitely, so they never “disappear” from the system. Just another way Scout Labs is making it easier for you to collaborate within your team.

There are a host of more minor improvements sprinkled throughout the application, like the ability to review and/ or change sentiment values inline, but those are the big improvements. We hope you’ll agree they’re for the better!

I haven’t written a Scout Labs “vision” post in a while, but now is the time. Because the new enhancements that come online today take Scout Labs closer to our vision than ever before. Today’s release incorporates lots more data - more forums, more news, more Tweets - and offers more powerful (and beautiful) graphing capabilities. Our product team will detail those enhancements in an upcoming post. What I want to discuss today are the new collaboration features and place them on the backdrop of the Scout Labs mission.

We founded this company upon a fundamental belief: that brands are protected in “packs”; that listening should NOT be one person’s job, but the every day job of many. The un-mediated voice of the customer should flow to the desktop of everyone - Product teams, Marketing teams, Customer Service departments, senior executives, PR teams, and the Agencies and Agents of all of the above. When the voice of the customer is in the hands of knowledgeable people, innovation happens - new product ideas, new marketing ideas, new service ideas, new connections with customers.

Collaboration at Scout Labs
So, “collaboration” is a not a FEATURE for Scout Labs. It’s not a thing that we launch in month 10. It’s a belief system and vision that permeates our product, our UI, our pricing model and, yes, even our technology and our algorithms. Because if you believe that listening is the job of TEAMS, not an individual, you build your app in a very particular way:

1. You create an app that is intuitive and simple to use and understand instantly. If it’s a crazy flex app, people won’t use it. If it takes tons of training to figure out, people won’t use it. If you make people work hard or if it takes a long time to get actionable insight to come out the other end, people won’t use it. When people rave about Scout Labs’ ease of use, how intuitive it is, and how much insight they gain for so little work, we are very proud but we are not surprised or amazed. This is what we work at every day. Quick story: A major television network signed up as a customer recently and immediately had dozens of people logged in. When our account team reached out to welcome them and asked if anyone on the team needed a quick training the answer was, “Our team has taken to Scout Labs like fish to water. I can’t imagine needing training but I’ll ask around just in case.” How many other social media monitoring vendors / listening platforms can point to stories like that?



2. You focus on the functionality that the most people need every day to do their jobs better. You give them the insight they need in an easy to digest way and you remove confusing advanced controls (for most). Do people need to see social-graph-visualizations every day to do their jobs? Not very many, so we didn’t start there. If you layer in too much deep-dive researcher functionality, you will baffle the people who need the information the most and who can do the most with it - those on the front-lines.


3. You do NOT charge by seat. Charging by seat just limits the product’s viral potential and its effectiveness in the organization. If you care about teams really uniting around your dashboard, then, instead, you encourage team usage and sharing and find other ways to earn revenue. We choose to charge by the number of things (searches) your extended team tracks / we analyze on your behalf. So, if we are useful and valuable, you will rely on us more and more, and you will pay more.


4. You cherish collaborative interaction by teams and use it to get even smarter! At Scout Labs, we have architected for user feedback loops. As users work with each other and with the data - change a sentiment score, flag something as spam, etc. - we use that feedback as labeled data which can train our algorithms (which are almost all learning and adapting). This gives us a major competitive advantage, because we have thousands of highly motivated, highly skilled Scout Labs users unwittingly “labeling” data for us, which we use to improve algorithms and augment dictionaries and linguistic rules.

All of the above are core tenets of Scout Labs and fundamental to how our platform works and what makes us unique. It’s why Scout Labs is the hands-down platform of choice for extended teams that want to tune in to social media.

(One of the many things) New in this release: Assignments
If you are a customer of Scout Labs, you have a common, voice-of-the-customer dashboard and a common set of social media metrics to navigate by. You have adoption and usage throughout the company, and you have a robust platform for taking action. But you may also need help to NOT trip over yourselves - a way to coordinate your interactions with each other and with your customers. You need “Assignments”, a flexible ticketing and workflow feature which is what has launched today as a feature at the Professional level.

As Scout Labs users know, you have always been able to tag and discuss and route things via email to others on your team, and Standard level plans will have all those same capabilities, but this Pro feature offers:

• A built-in ticketing system so that any piece of content can be assigned to a person, given a status, and tracked by all.
  
• A team control panel showing how well you are doing at responding - # open tickets, # closed tickets, average days to close tickets, etc.
  
• A personal to-do list and stats for your own engagement metrics.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
This is not a new idea. Other platforms in our space have a workflow feature, BUT they do not as completely live and breathe collaboration the way Scout Labs does (see above), so the feature’s utility has been limited. If you charge by seat and hence hardly anyone buys additional seats, there’s no one to collaborate with! If the app is difficult to use and thus is mainly used by the one person who had training and can figure the thing out, what’s the point of a ticketing system? Scout Labs did it the other way around. We EARNED the honor of being the voice-of-the-customer dashboard to entire organizations, and now, with “Assignments”, we give our customers even more powerful ways to collaborate, coordinate and take action.

Again, the new Assignments feature in this release is in addition to major new data enhancements that everyone gets access to - lots more forum data, general news sources broken out, richer Twitter data options, and sexy new graphs. Look for a post from Margaret next that will give more detail on those enhancements soon.

Join me on February 17th at 11am PST when I’ll be giving a webinar on the updates we’ve made to the Scout Labs application, our focus on collaboration and what we have coming up for 2010. You won’t want to miss this! Sign up here.

In the mean time, enjoy the new release. Comments welcome!

Here at Scout Labs, we know there are some big corporations out there that are still standardized on IE6. We work with some of them, which is why to date we’ve supported IE6. We didn’t want to cut off IE6 users or subject them to a substandard application experience. We know most of them are stuck on IE6 because of IT admins who overinvested in proprietary apps that ONLY work on IE6, have NEVER been updated and never will be, are purposefully holding them back.

But the time has come: Support for IE6 is officially over. Not only is IE6 subpar with respect to speed, stability, and security, it limits the options we have in developing new functionality that relies on more modern, standards based browsers, specifically Javascript dependent interactions. As of our Feb 2010 release, we will finally have hit the wall with IE6: IE6 just doesn’t support the Javascript dependent interactions that our new Assignments functionality, and to a lesser extent upgrades to our graphing and collaboration features, require.

This is a decision point that old skool internet companies like Yahoo and Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and bellwethers in the SAAS space like Salesforce have already gone past. Hell, 37signals phased out IE6 support in October of 2008, which is the Internet equivalent of the Nixon era. Even Europe is following suit. But for those of you still using IE6, here are some options:

• If you have the necessary permissions on your computer, install and use any browser more modern than Internet Explorer 6. You can download Firefox or Chrome for free. As of Feb 2010 Scout Labs officially supports IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.


• Upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or 8. Even IE 7 is faster, more reliable, and better supported by Microsoft than IE 6. Though we’d pick IE8 over IE7 any day.


• If you don’t have the necessary permissions on your computer, find the person who does. If they wont help you, send them this link: http://www.ie6nomore.com/ Or this one: http://www.stoplivinginthepast.com/ Or this one, from a Microsoft employee: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IE6WarningStopLivingInThePastGetOffOfIE6.aspx Or….you get the picture.


• If you are denied permission to upgrade past IE6, go find a company executive who believes in the future. This is a great way for some up-and-comer to make everyone in the company more productive via upgraded internet tools and experiences, and themselves wildly popular (with all non-IT personnel) in the process.
  

The cool part is, now we get to support Chrome- which is a fun browser, and great news for users of Microsoft OS products of a more recent vintage. And for all you network admins who just can’t seem to get everyone off IE6 and Win2000? Better hurry up, before every SAAS app your workforce relies on becomes standard equipment on the corporate smartphone- and no one gives a hoot about that big old box with a ten year old browser on it, anyway.

Here at Scout Labs we figured the best holiday gift we could give our users would be some new features. So here’s a quick recap of recently released features, including some we deployed just last night:

• New search OVERVIEW page. Everyone wanted a single screen dashboard that would aggregate the most telling graphs, the leading indicators, and most important social media content. Welcome to the new OVERVIEW page. Instead of clicking from tab to tab within your search, you can now get a snapshot of buzz volume, sentiment trend and top stories from Twitter, Blogs, and everywhere else on a single page.

• Interactive graphs. We were as disappointed as all of you when we had to pull back from our earlier interactive graphs implementation, which used Flash technologies not universally supported by corporate sanctioned browsers, and rely on an image based solution that was not clickable. But now interactive graphs are back, and they’re bigger and better than before. You can hover over a particular day to see the counts; click into spikes to read what happened; and of course still customize your date range within the last 6 months or export the data in a .csv.
  One thing we did lose in the transition was the ability to export graphs as a .png. We’ll eventually bring it back for you, Steve Majewski, but in the meantime, take a screenshot- there new graphs are much better looking than their PNG predecessors!

• Ability to sign up your colleagues up to receive email alerts. Many of you asked for this feature because you wanted us to send your favorite email alerts directly to other team members, instead of having to forward them yourselves. Now, instead of forwarding Scout Labs alerts, you can simply CC other users on your alerts. And opting out is as simple as clicking on a link within the email. So now you can sign your teammates up for alerts for your brand, a competitor’s campaign, or whatever else you might be tracking.

• Links to source included in exports. Now the number of links to each source is included in the export files. Mike Arauz and Spencer Waldron, that one was for you guys.

There will be even more great new features coming out in the New Year. Bring on 2010!

We heard a tweet on the wire about Raphaël.js back in October. An open-source javascript library that abstracts vector drawing and animation across web browsers. The demoes show beautiful, fast, interactive graphics. Support for more computer platforms than Flash. Inspiring!

So, we began an experiment here at the labs to replace our static image graphs with dynamic, clickable visualizations, built on open internet standards (and Microsoft’s proprietary VML).

Could it work? Would it explode IE6?

Blog volume: San Francisco Bay Bridge

Those peaks in volume are Cracked I-beam Discovered on Bay Bridge and then Bay Bridge Closed After Crack Repair Fails.

Blog volume comparison: SF coffee scene

Blue Bottle Coffee, Ritual Coffee, Four Barrel Coffee, Sightglass Coffee

Hot browser abstraction action

Raphaël exposes simple Javascript constructs of circles, rectangles, paths with bezier control points, and text, along with ways to animate movement, color, opacity… With these ingredients, painting a picture through code, Raphaël generates open/free/standard SVG markup for Firefox and Safari, switching to VML output for Windows Internet Explorer.

Elder Firefox 2 is our only real casualty; the SVG support is nonexistant in that faithful dog. We fondly scoot along the three of you still on Firefox 2, toward Firefox 3.5.

So, yes, they’re here. All Scout Labs workspaces now have these interactive graphs.

New Palette: The first and most visible change you’ll see when you next login is a much lighter design palette. We pulled back on the darker background in part because we’re working on some new search dashboards that really require more whitespace to breathe. Stay tuned for more visual tweaks and dashboard enhancements!

Folders for Searches: We have had a lot of user requests for better ways to organize quantities of searches, so we’ve provided a way to easily group searches into folders and navigate between them. You can create and name a folder, then drag and drop searches into and out of it. Here’s how to get started: Go to the Manage Searches page by clicking the starburst icon at the top right corner of the left nav.

You can create a folder by clicking on the “New Folder” link at the top of the page. Once you create and name a folder, you can drag existing searches into and out of it. Just grab a search and drag it to the folder you want to place it in, or drag it all the way to the left to pull it out of a folder altogether.

My favorite part is that once you’ve set up folders and sorted some searches into them, you can collapse and expand the folders into the left nav to browse. This feature makes it really easy to browse lists of searches and get to all your content fast. The collapse and expand state of the left nav isn’t something you have to set up on Manage Searches page, you can just collapse and expand at will.

A couple notes:

• The buzz value that is shown for a folder is the highest buzz value for any search in that folder. That way you can see if there’s something going on within a folder that you might want to expand and check out. Take a look at the buzz on Eric Munson- pretty much what you’d expect when someone gets called up out of the minors!


• Folders can be deleted, whether they contain searches or not (you’ll be warned if they do) but they cannot be renamed.


• You can’t drag and drop in the left nav itself, only on the Manage Searches page.


• When you create or edit a search, you can’t specify the folder to drop it into- you have to drag and drop it on the Manage Searches page to move it around.

Those improvements will have to wait for another, later release. If you have other suggestions or comments, we’d love to hear them! Leave a comment here or in our GetSatisfaction forum.

The Scout Labs application has a whole new look and feel today and it supports an exciting new feature.

New Feature: QUOTES

When you dive into the dashboard of one of your searches today, alongside Sentiment and Graphs and such is a new tab called QUOTES. Scout Labs already give you lots of quantitative metrics to help you measure your brand (buzz is up, positive sentiment is down…) But QUOTES is a little different. Inspired by WeFeelFine (although much harder to execute, because we are looking for opinions and emotions about a particular product or brand), QUOTES offers qualitative insight into the mind of the customer, for companies wanting to know: “What do our customers love, hate, want, think and feel about us right now?”

The QUOTES feature pulls from social media customer opinions and emotions being expressed about any topic. Today, Scout Labs automatically populates QUOTES relevant to the following categories:
• Love: Raves for the product or brand
• Hate: Rants by unhappy customers
• Wish: What customers WISH your company would do, add, change, improve. Feature requests and ideas.
• Compare: Ways that your brand is being considered alongside others. Who’s better than who? What are customers switching to when the abandon you?
• Recommend: When people highly recommend you, what do they say? What’s the favorite thing? What do they recommend you do differently?
• Issues: What problems are customers having with you? What concerns are lingering?
• Caveat: Your brand advocates LOVE your product BUT… (or however….)

You can see how QUOTES turns social media chatter into a live focus group of millions. Scout Labs is already a leader in the use of natural language processing to analyze social media for the world’s best brands. With the addition of QUOTES, we raise the bar and deliver even more insight to the hundreds of marketers, brand managers, product managers, communications professionals and executives who rely on Scout Labs to help them build better products and sell more.

New Design
The changes to the user interface will be apparent as soon as you log in. We really wanted to make it easier to scan through all of your searches and to find your collaborative actions. We also wanted to lay an architectural foundation for new features, new data and new actions that will be coming live shortly. To those ends, we have made the following changes:

• Your list of searches are persistent on all pages now. This will make it easy to jump between searches. You can also choose to sort your searches now by alphabetical order or by the change in buzz. (A nice little touch: if you are looking at Twitter results for one search and you jump to another search, you will go to the Twitter results for the new one. That way you can scan through your searches by media type, now!)
• All team activity (bookmarks, discussions and alerts) are front and center, in the now-persistent left nav. We have added counts, so you know how much team activity is underway.
• Oh, and we made the design look simply AWESOME. We hope you like it.

And since we moved some things on you, here are a few important tips: to create a new search now, hit the little “plus” icon in the left nav next to “Searches”. To manage (delete, edit) your searches, click the “gears” icon in the left nav, right next to the Create a Search icon.

We get feedback all the time that our application is intuitive and easy to use, so we were careful not to mess anything up. Let us know what you think (we know you will!)

We’ve been kind of quiet lately because we’ve been working on some big new features. I can’t give you all access to them just yet, though you may have seen some calls for testers go out on Twitter. Testing new Scout Labs features is a great way to see what’s coming soon — tests usually take only about 15 minutes (and could get you a free t-shirt!) In the meantime, here are some enhancements to the application, released today.

• Easier bookmarking. It is now very easy to bookmark anything you see in the application on your initial viewing of it — just click the “Bookmark” link. You don’t have to click through to the detail page. This makes creating lists of interesting links for reports and such SUPER easy.


• Links to Google Blog Search and Twitter. Now you can see results for Scout Labs searches on Google Bog Search or Twitter with a single click. This is really handy because you can just set up a persistent search in Scout Labs and not have to try and replicate the same query on Google or Twitter to check across sources. If you find an interesting mention on Google that you’d like us to have in the Scout Labs application, to score sentiment on etc, then feel free to add it using the “Suggest a Source” link at the bottom of every page in the application.



• Pagination for media sources like Flickr and YouTube. Now you can page through all the results from photo and video sources like Flickr and YouTube, and have the same collaboration features active on all of them — bookmark them, email them, discuss them, and so forth.


• Turn off billing notices for admins on an account. If you are an admin but don’t want to receive billing notices for your account, just go to your profile and “Edit” to get to the profile setting that turns them off.


• Added permalinks to all email alerts. Now it is easy to get right to the content we’ve emailed you about from your email alert.

Keep the feedback coming — we always want to know what data/features are most important to you!

Last night we pushed some new features that users were VERY vociferous about wanting:

• New data in the application: Blog Comments
• Export of data: Now you can download a list of your bookmarks, or .csv or .html files of your blog results
• Custom date ranges: You can set date ranges for blog data, so that you can see results from a particular time period

New data in the application: Blog Comments

Now you can see comment mentions for blogs, the same as you can for Twitter, Photos, Videos, Blogs, etc. This is hugely helpful when the main blog post does not contain a reference to your search, for example oDesk or Motorola or Dippin’ Dots, but the comments on the post do.

Export of Data: CSV and HTML

You’ve always been able to download the source data for graphs as a .csv or a .png. This new feature enables you to get a list of links with their content in either .csv or .html format, so you can work with them offline, excerpt from them for reports, or just read them through without having to click on anything (those were the three main use cases customers told us about). After you decide to download and choose your file format, the application emails you a link where you can pick up the data. Typically this takes less than 5 minutes. The limit per export file is 1,000 results at a time, but if you really want to read all 60,000 Coke mentions for the last 6 months, you can do it in tandem with the custom date range feature.

Custom Date Ranges: Set any range within the last 6 months

We’ve been showing you data within a 24H, 1W, etc range based on today’s date. Now you can decide what date you want the date range to start or end from. So if you want to see data only from February 15 to March 15, select 1M ending on 3/15/09 and you’ll get blog mentions published within that time frame only. Choose “center” on a specific date to see all the posts around a newsworthy or other buzz generating event; for instance if you know that Web 2.0 was from March 31st to April 3rd and want to know what Jeremiah was doing around that time, center the search around April 1st and choose a date range.

There are a couple of other minor enhancements, like cooler buttons that show state and other nifty Javascript enhancements, but those are better experienced than described. Coming up we have greatly expanded Twitter data, so that you can get graphable trends back a couple months, use full Boolean search on Twitter content, use date ranges, get sentiment and see frequent words on Twitter content. We are also working on an amazing feature that uses NLP techniques to extract customer quotes from user generated content. You’ll be able to see what people love, or hate, or recommend or wish for about a product or brand or company or whatever you are searching for. It’s SO COOL, we can’t wait to show it to you! Have fun and stay tuned.

Today we have two new features available in the application: six months of data and agency co-branding of workspaces.

Agency co-branding is the ability to add a second logo to the workspace header, with custom text that will appear on the homepage and on click for the second logo. Agencies have been asking for the ability to co-brand the application for clients that they share a workspace with, like so:

This feature will support the addition of any second logo to a workspace, for instance the iPhone group within Apple, or the Basketball team within Nike. Go to the “Settings” tab and note that there are now two slots for uploaded images plus a agency info/custom text field. Just make sure you hit “refresh” after you upload new images to see your new assets in the header. It is possible to format text using basic HTML or the Markdown syntax such as * for italics or ** for bold and to include links in the text field. More detail on how to format the agency info area in our Support section.

Six months of blog data is also now available. We are hearing from all of you that two+ years of data is optimal, to do year over year trending and get a little more history, so expect more data to be made available soon. Sentiment is available only for the past three months. Six month graphs are also available with one caveat: because we are only supporting sentiment on the last 3 months of data, six month sentiment view may flat line more than three months back. If you get more, consider it the gift of an idle 8-core processor!

Next up: Blog comments, one of the two remaining must-have data types (the other is message boards, which won’t be available until summer). Also customizable date ranges for viewing blog data and export of data, both of which have been repeatedly requested by users who want to tailor the view within the application and work with data outside it.

In terms of other major features, we are working hard on full Twitter data, including graphs and frequent word lists. You’ll be able to plug in a search and use more exact search parameters than are supported by search.twitter.com and get trendable graph data, which no one else has. We’ll definitely let you know as soon as that one is ready!