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Living in San Francisco we’re surrounded by technological early adopters, so it’s hard to believe that some companies are *still* asking this question, but it’s true.

In response I came across this awesome video from timetogetsocial that helps answer that very question.

If you, or someone you know, is still questioning the usefulness of social media for businesses, I think this video will get you one step closer to understanding its relevance for all businesses. Are you listening?

Jenny, the CEO of Scout Labs, and I first met while working at an agency (er- it was called marchFIRST), and it was from an agency (Razorfish) that Jenny lured me when she started Scout Labs. So many of the things I wanted to do for my clients I could not efficiently execute, due to lack of tools in market. As a former agency strategist, I have a special affinity for Scout Labs’ agency customers and the use cases they have for our platform. Here are some of the reasons agencies give me for needing a social listening platform:

1. We need to know what is happening with the client’s brand to be effective strategists. Agencies’ stock in trade, especially digital agencies and high end marketing agencies, is that they are better placed than their clients to anticipate trends and craft breakthrough marketing strategies because they have the benefit of cross-company and cross-brand experience. It isn’t possible to maintain that positioning if the account team isn’t up to speed on what’s happening with the client’s brand on Twitter and YouTube, much less their competitors’ brands.
2. We are monitoring a particular campaign. Agencies are often responsible for the design, execution and tracking of marketing campaigns. As the power of social media to reach consumers grows, agencies are more and more interested in tracking campaign performance in this channel- or even in defining campaign success by social media criteria. After all, if your big campaign idea is to let a consumer shoot your Superbowl ad, you might want to know how many people saw it, if the people who saw it liked it, and if so, why. Forwarding around a couple of Google Alerts is just not going to cut it.
3. We are engaged in a social media listening program on behalf of a client. More and more of the agencies I talk to- PR, traditional, digital, media only, creative, branding, SEM, etc- are engaged in retained listening programs on behalf of their clients. These range from pay per tweet to ad hoc studies delivered in PPT for $5-50K to inclusion of social media data in traditional brand health measures for $20K+ to outsourcing response to Twitter and blog mentions and so forth for $100K+ month.


In almost every case, the agencies that we talk to decide that they need to standardize on a single platform that can provide the backbone of their monitoring and measurement program. They may do some additional work to add proprietary or other data, or to produce custom analyses, but there is usually a core content aggregation, analysis, and metrics platform that the agency team can build on.



4. We need a common digital dashboard/ application to share across the company and the agency. A really good agency is often deeply embedded in a client organization, more like an extra arm of the clients’ organization than a “vendor” to it. It’s essential for the holistic team to be able to share a single app for content, analysis, and response.


5. We needed a tool for our own internal research and business development. Sometimes the agency just need to look really smart in a pitch, or to engage in a little research that the client isn’t exactly paying for- yet. Sometimes the agency is in the business of market research, creative development, or even product development- all of which are morphing to account for the rise of social media.

Of course none of those reasons is totally unique to Scout Labs, nor is Scout Labs the only solution in market. I see agencies using everything from free tools like Google Alerts to other agencies to help them address these use cases. Here are some of the reasons I see agencies embracing Scout Labs:

1. Easy to use for the whole team. We get consistent feedback that Scout Labs is the easiest, most intuitive, user friendly application out there, for newbies and veterans. If you’re trying to drive social media awareness throughout a Fortune 1000, you need an application that the masses can use. A lone specialist does not organizational change create.
2. Ad hoc search. None of this advance commitment to a lone word or phrase- “Neutrogena”- and only that word, for which data begins accumulating when you contract for it. Agencies not only need data now, they need some trend on it- and who wants to wait 6 months for 6 months back data? And what if that initial scan turns up issues around self-tanning or an ingredient like pomegranate? Agencies need to see trends and data on those, too.
3. Real time market intelligence. People are flabbergasted at how fast it is get data across across all social media channels. Especially people who have used other platforms that have a lag to their data collection. Being able to not just retrieve the data fast, but get speedy analysis of it- frequent words, back sentiment, 6 month graphs- likewise gratifies the time starved agency strategist.
4. Saved items, graphs, and exports. So your deliverable needs to be on the agency PPT template/ HTML email/ Flash presentation. We understand. Scout Labs make it easy to do things like export graph data so you can make the line in the graph your client’s exact brand color, or add your client’s logo and your agency’s logo to the application header.
5. ROI! Having relatively low price points and plans with unlimited users makes this the biggest no-brainer purchase of the year. Go check out prices and see. With Scout Labs you get the productivity boost of a dozen interns for the cost of less than one, just on the content aggregation side- before you even get into metrics and insight from our NLP driven features that no intern is going to provide.

This isn’t a complete list of either use cases or reasons to choose Scout Labs, but it’s getting to be a long post. I’m always open to hearing from agencies about what they need to be more effective on behalf of their clients. Please share it- you might get pleasantly surprised by what we have in development for you.

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!

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!

Last Thursday I spoke on a panel at BlogWorldExpo (#bwe09) entitled “Social Secure-ity: Managing Your Brand’s Online Reputation.” Audience questions drove the discussion; I managed to jot down some of the audience questions/ panelist responses and have compiled them below. In my role at Scout Labs, I have seen a wide range of corporate responses to these questions, as I’m sure had the other panel participants- Connie Bensen of Techrigy, Amber Naslund http://altitudebranding.com/ of Radian6, Melyssa Plunkett-Gomez of Crimson Hexagon, and Aubrey Podolsky of Sysomos.

Thinking back on it later in the day, a lot of this advice just isn’t useful with some resources and corporate commitment to social media- and from the tone of many of the questions, resources and commitment are still an issue. There’s no doubt that social media is here to stay whether or not companies want to “formulate a response.” The real question is which companies are going to recognize that better understanding their customers through social media is a source of competitive advantage- whether they decide to turn Twitter into a customer service channel or not.

From a travel industry representative from Las Vegas: How should we deal with negative criticism? How should we respond to it?

• There will always be negative criticism. Develop a framework for what you need to respond to from a business perspective, and try not the take the rest too personally.


• There are trolls and there are people with genuine issues. You can’t please the trolls, so don’t try.


• Your social media presence can and should be about more than damage control to the brand.


• Let the community respond on your behalf.


• Get ahead of the negative criticism- change the business so that consumers aren’t complaining!

David Spinks, a community manager, asked about the importance of responding to content on sidewiki:

• The sources of feedback are multiplying and will continue to do so. Very few brand manager have the time to respond to every single last comment anyone has ever made on any platform. If Sidewiki gets more traction in the market, vendors like the ones on the panel will eventually help marketers figure out how to track and respond to it. Right now it’s a small blip on a crowded radar screen.

A gentleman who works for a hedge fund asked what to when everyone hates you:

• Having a social media presence can help humanize the brand or the industry, and demystify what it is that hedge funds do for the economy


• Whose opinion are you trying to influence, and why? Make sure you know and have the resources to follow through before you set your social media strategy- there are some inconsistent, useless attempts at building a community out there, and they’re not helping the brands they represent


• If you do something for your community that does not directly serve your own interest- for instance publishing free analyst repots- it build brand goodwill


• If they care enough to hate you, they may care enough to love you. There are things the company does that would help them to love you. Make people aware of them.

Kat French asked for thoughts on what to do about clients who only focus on the negative:

• Reframe the conversation through competitive analyses- what do people love or hate about your competitors? It’s myopic to only focus on the negative posts about your own brand


• Another way to reframe is to focus on the positive- what is it that customers like about the brand? What strengths can the brand build on? This is the long term strategic response to negative feedback- not just a crisis communications plan

Tracy Schmidt from ChicagoNow asked a question about policies for employee participation in social media:

• Have a policy in place helps guide employee behavior- and know that there will still be problems. Be prepared to deal with them as decisively as any other personnel problem


• Employees are trusted to have email addresses and phones- they are already representing the company. Employee behavior is a hiring and training issue, not a social media issue. If an employee can’t be trusted, they can’t be trusted


• Employee trust is an enormous issue for every organization. Social media is forcing massive organizational changes on companies, ones that are really challenging for managers and employees. This is a big change for everyone involved and training is crucial.

Last was a great question on how to deal with franchises, where much feedback comes about individual franchisees that impacts the overall brand:

• Monitoring customer satisfaction/ ability to meet corporate requirements is already a part of franchising. Extending that to social media will become a corporate function.

And Lacey Kemp from Seattle, I got your name but not your question- ask it again here and I’ll do my best to answer you!

I found it encouraging that there were a fair number of B2B marketers at the session- leveraging social media is just as crucial for them as it is for the B2C brands, if not more so, and they rarely get the same level of media love.

Some other memorable sessions at BlogWorldExpo were the ROI smackdown- very smart thinking and good examples from Deb Micek, Rob Kay, Beth Harte, and Stephanie Agresta- and the Real Time Web session from the ever thoughtful Louis Grey. The sessions were all taped and will theoretically available online at the conference site but I don’t see the links up yet. Much thanks to Jason Falls for organizing.

There is a lot of confusion out there. Many of the posts and tweets about social media monitoring and brand monitoring these days are asking, “What application should I use? Which app is the best? Who has used what? What do you think?” Very often, the RFPs I receive and the questions I am asked about our platform are pretty surface-skimming. “Does it have Twitter?” is a fine question, but there are so many more tough questions you should be asking all of us.

Don’t even ask me which platform is best. You already know my answer is Scout Labs. I have no credibility there. But, having thought about this and worked on the technology for nearly 3 years, I do think I have credibility in offering up a checklist of things to look for and to think about if you are choosing a social media analysis platform for your company. I will get the list started but I hope that you will add your own thoughts:

1. How many months of live data are you serving in the application? (I need to be able to read all the posts and also see trending graphs).
2. Do you price based on the number of results returned or otherwise limit the number of results that I can see? Or do you return all the search results for my topics?
3. What social media content types do you index?
4. Can I add sources if I don’t see them in your app? How fast does it take to see them in results?
5. How good are your spam filters? What percentage are your algorithms catching as compared to human-scores? How often do you mis-classify something as spam?
6. If you say its spam, can I see what you filtered out? Can I add them back in to my main results?
7. Can I curate the results for my team? E.g. If I think a result is either irrelevant or spam, can I flag it as such and will it be instantly removed from the results?
8. Can I order mentions within a given date range by importance - what’s most important to pay attention to - or is it just by date?
9. What sentiment-related features do you offer? Is it just positive and negative scoring, or can you identify other customer emotions?
10. With regard to sentiment (positive / negative / neutral) how accurate are your sentiment scores? Specifically, how often does your algorithm agree with human scorers? When is the last time you tested your algorithm versus human scores?
11. How are you improving your algorithms over time?
12. Do you do only go-forward sentiment scoring (as posts come in, after you create a search)?
13. Or can you back-fill sentiment scores for old things that were posted before I created my search? If so, is there an addition charge for backfill? How long does it take to back-fill sentiment for all my searches?
14. Does the application support multiple people / departments and groups in the company? Is it easy to add people? How much do you charge additional users or is it free?
15. Is there a way to “bookmark” and tag interesting content as my team finds things and people that we want to remember?
16. Can I annotate things I see with my own commentary and tags, so that my colleagues can see my thoughts?
17. From when a customer posts to when it is live in your application, what is the lag time (by media type)?
18. How long does it take for a dashboard to populate from search creation?
19. Is everything totally automated or do you have your analysts or outsourced labor doing some part of it?
20. How much honing and set-up of the results need to happen to get really good results?
21. How much training time would you say is required to become an expert at using the system?
22. What is the average number of users that are using your platform within a typical company. One? Twenty?
23. How do you price? What’s the cost for an addition person to get access? Is there any limit on the number of search results that you return to me?
24. If you do limit the number of searches that you return to me, (e.g. 10,000) and I do a search on “Google”, say, that clearly has far more than 10,000 results, what do subset do you show me? What am I not seeing?

We don’t mind the softball-inquiries when they are thrown to us. But we know that Scout Labs stands up to very rigorous scrutiny, so bring it on. I hope this makes you a more sophisticated reviewer of platforms and writer of RFPs. I also hope that this forces more data into the discussion about social media platforms and raises the level of discourse throughout the category.

On the front page of the Business section of the New York Times today, Alex Wright did a good write-up on sentiment analysis and how it is being used by companies on a daily basis to make better business decisions. He features Scout Labs and a use case from one of our clients, StubHub, on how they are proactively solving customer problems in the moment and also improving corporate policies as a result of the sentiment feedback they get from Scout Labs. “This is a canary in a coal mine for us,” said John Whelan, StubHub’s director of customer service, in the New York Times article.

In such a short format, Alex wasn’t able to talk much about how Scout Labs’ sentiment works and the unique way that we improve algorithms by learning from user feedback. Nor did he talk about how Scout Labs goes beyond just rants and raves, with emotions like Recommendations, Caveats, and Comparisons, delivered by our QUOTES feature. But we are honored that when he thought “sentiment for business” he thought of Scout Labs.

I’d like to give a huge thanks to the team at StubHub who spent time with Alex talking him through how StubHub organizes, staffs, prioritizes, acts and plans differently thanks to sentiment insight from Scout Labs. Only one story made it into the article (the story of the Yankees-Red Sox rain-out, the immediately customer service response, and the policy review underway), but I think it’s a great example because it highlights what is so important to us at Scout Labs: Insight + Action.

Really forward-looking companies like StubHub proactively identify operational issues and product opportunities, and assess marketing performance using opinions expressed in social media. Really smart companies are always looking for the why behind the buzz - the qualitative insights that help organizations understand better and innovate faster. Really competitive companies make tangible changes to products and policies in response to customers. StubHub is one company who is absolutely putting the voice of the customer at the heart of the organization and reaping great rewards.

The companies who can listen better and innovate faster DO have a strategic competitive advantage. We’re all too happy to help.

Nice picture of Margaret and Mars (and Julie in the background!)

Source: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

What are people twittering about? I’ve been studying sample tweets, looking for clues about how people use Twitter. One thing that’s clear is that lots of people use Twitter to share. All the numbers in this note are based on a sample of around 675,000 tweets, from early June of this year.

Approximately 20% of the tweets contain URLs. That is, one out of 5 says “Look at this! I want to share this with you!” So, what are they sharing? Figuring that out takes a little more work.

Most of those URLs (over 2/3) are shortened by services like bit.ly or tinyurl.com, with bit.ly (over half) the leader. If you start with a URL like http://www.scoutlabs.com/blog/ bit.ly will shorten it to http://bit.ly/OHe48.

That may not look like a big difference, until you remember that tweets are limited to 140 characters.

You might not know you’re using a URL shortener — a Twitter application may do this for you. Paste the shortened URL into your browser (or sometimes just click on it) and your browser will get the original URL from bit.ly and use that to fetch the web page. Or, you can simply ask bit.ly for the original URL. That’s what I did.

Of the URLs shortened by bit.ly, approximately 8% were links to YouTube. Others in the top 10 included blogspot.com, google.com (including Google Maps, Google News and Picasa, along with feedproxy), wordpress.com, nytimes.com, etsy.com, facebook.com, and flickr.com. The results for URLs shortened by tinyurl.com were similar, but they included fewer links to YouTube and Flickr, more links to craigslist.org and job sites.

Some sharing sites automatically generate short URLs — they don’t need bit.ly or tinyurl.com. Over 1 in 20 links in my sample were to twitpic.com, a site devoted to sharing photos via Twitter. About a quarter as many were to blip.fm, a music sharing site. There are a number of smaller sites dedicated to sharing maps, music, photos and video via Twitter.

Given the new integration between Flickr and Twitter I suspect that if I repeated my analysis with newer data, I would see significantly more links to Flickr.

So, what have I learned?

1. People use Twitter to share textual content such as blog posts and news articles.
2. People also use Twitter to share non-text content such as maps, music, photos and video.
3. The links in tweets are a good indication of what people are interested in— right now!
4. Because so many URLs are shortened (using bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc.) it’s essential to look up original URLs to discover what they’re tweeting about.

I’d be interested in hearing comments and questions, along with any insights you may have about how people are using Twitter.

Image “Tweeties” by Chris Wallace. Licensed under a CC 3.0 License.

We’ve been monitoring the Iran situation within Scout Labs for the last few weeks and its been very interesting to see the memes of conversation over even such a short period of time. Last week, in our “Iran” search, the new memes of conversation in the Frequent Words module included:

• riots
• twitter
• election

This week, “riots” has been replaced with “protests”. Twitter is a top meme, but it’s old news (no longer orange.) The top new emerging memes in the last 24 hours include:

• Obama
• condemns
• political
• video

(referring to the Youtube video of the woman being execution on the streets of Iran that even Obama said that had indeed watched.)

But a new word has appeared that we have not seen associated with the search “Iran” before: “HOPE”
Let’s hope we’re right.

A reporter asked me a few days ago if I believe that traditional branding (TV ads, billboards, logos) is dead, to be replaced by conversations. Scout Labs is called a “new marketing” platform, and in fact, money for Scout Labs often comes from traditional marketing budgets. So you might expect me to be on the “traditional branding is dead” bandwagon.

But I’m not.

Humans are wired to be receptive to branding. In fact, the brain reacts in a unique way when it spots a famous brand name, according to some research. Consumers reading a brand name do not treat it like any other word — instead they activate parts of the brain normally used to process emotions, one study claims. We literally have an emotional connection to brands. And advertisements (done well) are stories, told around the flickering, mesmerizing light of the modern-day-campfire called television. We love stories. We always have and we always will.

If you want to now just how primal and powerful branding is for humans, look to children and the ease with which they swim in the vast branding sea. From the Institute of National Media and the Family, children as young as age three recognize brand logos (Fischer, 1991), with brand loyalty influence starting at age two (McNeal, 1992).

Now, my children are a tad more ad-savvy than most children. They don’t watch TV much (just movies) but I talk to them about marketing and encourage them to be conscious advertising targets. They talk about ads and marketing quite often, but this was a particularly fruitful weekend.

Saturday, Rowan (age 4) and I headed to our favorite Santa Cruz News Café on Mission Street for some hot tea and conversation with the locals and their dogs. Mission Street is the commercial district of Highway 1, so lots of trucks inch by the Café, which Rowan loves. Usually he points out wheels and axles and engines, but yesterday he had brands on the brain.

“Look mom, a turkey truck!” I looked up and had no idea what he was referring to. All I saw was a huge COLUMBUS (the salami) logo on the side of a delivery truck.

Then it dawned on me: “Rowan, did you remember that logo from the turkey we get at Trader Joes?”
“Yeah!” said Rowan.

Then a FedEx truck came by, idling as it waited for the green light. “Do you see the white arrow mom?” Rowan pointed. Many in the branding circles know of the brilliant, hidden arrow in the FedEx logo. I didn’t know 4 year old were primed to spot it. But I guess they are.


(It may be that his reading skills are not that strong yet so he looks at a logo and sees colors and shapes - not words, but still, it was pretty remarkable.)

Then, later that night, the whole family (dog included) piled into the truck with bikes and helmets in tow and headed off to Happy Valley School where the kids could ride bikes on flat, open pavement until dark and Sam and I could sit and talk between wipe-outs. En route, Fiona looked out the back window and saw a grey Audi following us. She immediately said, “Ah, those guys saw the commercial and got that car.”

“What commercial? What car?” I asked.

“They saw the commercial that says, ‘if you have an old house that isn’t that cool, kind of like Great Grandmas, then you should change your house and make it more like Auntie Jesse’s or our house. And once you change your house, you should change your dog and get a better dog. And then once you’ve changed your house and your dog, then you gotta change your car.’ So they must have fixed up their house, then got that car.”

Anyone who watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics knows exactly what she’s talking about:

And she’s probably pretty accurate!