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Jott Networks operates a voice to text service that helps users capture notes, set reminders and calendar appointments, and interact with web sites and services. Since fall of 2008, the company had been offering both free and paid service levels to users, with about 30% of users converting from the free to the paid service.

In January 2009, Jott announced an end to its free service and the introduction of a new voicemail to text service. Jott has an active community of users who blog and tweet about the convenience and ease of the service and the company was not expecting all of them to welcome the news. As an internet startup, the marketing team is small and Doug Aley, the VP of Marketing, was handling public perception of the announcement and launch pretty much solo:

“We have a small marketing team here at Jott, which makes it all the more important to have efficiency tools like Scout Labs to manage web communications. Making sure we are on the pulse of what our customers are saying helps us be more responsive in everything we do, from product development to pricing.” — Doug Aley - VP Marketing and Business Development, Jott Networks, Inc.

Scout Labs helped Jott to find all the mentions of Jott that came up during the critical time period, prioritize items for response, and track which posts had been responded to. The Scout Labs application is still helping Jott do the work of converting users of a free service to paying customers by helping them find instances of social media they need to respond to. Jott also continues to use Scout Labs to monitor key competitors and provide insight into the personal productivity and voice to text space.

I am not one of those people who decorate for holidays. No fall wreaths on the door come October, no bowls of decorative Easter Eggs on the sideboard in April or green Jell-o desserts on St Paddy’s Day. Most of the year I can get away with this but at Christmas people find it shocking. Every person over my threshold after the first weekend in December invariably asks, “Where’s your tree?” So I explain about not wanting to kill even sustainably harvested trees and create fire hazards in the living room and spill water on the Ikea laminate flooring and that the kids are so small that ornaments would be a safety hazard and besides I don’t own any ornaments and we’re going to be on the East Coast starting on the 21st and…it all washes right over them. “You have to get a tree,” they pronounce, in tones of absolute finality. “For the kids. Everyone has a tree. It’s not Christmas without a tree.”

“They’re right,” my husband will say, after the door shuts behind every tree-happy visitor. “Everyone has a tree. Even the Jews next door have a tree.”

“Um,” I usually reply, looking over the edge of my laptop, or up from the floor where I am mopping up dried applesauce, or over from the couch where I am reading Ping to the kids for the 99th time. “You go right ahead.” But somehow my participation seems critical to getting it done and I just don’t prioritize holiday décor. I am Type A about enough things in my life that I can live with my lack of holiday decorating ambition. I put a dried wreath up on the front door back in November as my token offering to the season. It’ll get shoved on a shelf in the garage sometime before Valentine’s Day, missing a few more plastic berries and manufactured twigs, and I’m ok with that.

Back east for the holidays, the selection, erection, and decoration of the tree was a major event at both grandparental gatherings. While there is something magical about a well decorated Christmas tree, I was grateful to get on a plane and fly away from the post- Christmas cleanup ritual of picking pine needles and sap balls out of the rug, dealing with murky tree water and untangling light strings. Back in California, I found a box of secondhand tree ornaments on the front porch. They were a thoughtful Christmas gift from the aforementioned Jews next door, who apparently think we lack Christmas spirit and ought to get a tree next year.

All this got me thinking: Am I a Grinch? Am I the only mom in the world so lacking in holiday spirit as to NOT get and decorate some kind of tree for the holidays? Aren’t there other moms out there who are avoiding the tree ritual because they don’t have the time, the space, the desire, the sheer holiday energy to take on the whole tree thing when they are already baking and wrapping and cooking and shopping? Am I alone?

Turns out- I am alone. The only people who don’t have a Christmas tree are a) on antidepressants that clearly aren’t working, b) homeless, c) about to be abandoned by their feckless parents, d) victims of a natural disaster, or e) completely broke, in which case they are advised to decorate a houseplant or a build their own tree out of scrap wood. One of the greatest things about Web 2.0 is that you never really feel alone. There’s always someone else’s reality to immerse yourself in, a blog, a video, a flickstream, a twitter stream. There are people out there making aircraft out of bic pens and filming transgender OK GO tribute videos and raising worms on organic raisins. Somehow this awesome display of variety usually makes me marvel at the sheer range and exuberance of human endeavor, makes me glad to be a part of it all. This is first time it has made me feel completely alone.

Time to go scoop up some Christmas ornaments in the post holiday sales, I guess.

Hello. My name is Julie. I recently joined the Customer Support team at Scout Labs. I am very excited to be here, as I feel this product has incredible potential. (Obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be here!) A reminder to current beta users: feel free to send any questions or comments you may have about Scout Labs to me at beta scoutlabs com, as I am here to help you get the most out of using the app. To those of
you who have requested access and are still waiting, we will be extending access to you soon! It’s a promise.

I also look forward to blogging about interesting events in the social media monitoring space. So I just had to post about ‘Motrin Moms’ — the most recent ‘big story’ of corporate
social-media-mismanagement.

Motrin ran an ad
online and in print this fall regarding ‘baby wearing’, which is a term for carrying a baby in a sling, BabyBjorn, or one of those backpack-type devices. The ad claims that it is painful for moms to carry babies this way, and reminds moms that Motrin can help relieve
the pain. I’m not a mom, so I do not really know how offensive this could be, but apparently, it was REALLY offensive to A LOT of moms. They banded together with brute 2.0 force, and within days of the ad being aired, there were droves of moms Twittering and Blogging and Vlogging in outrage. Motrin, slow in their response, did not even acknowledge the movement until weeks later. When they did notice, they had no choice but to take the ad offline, but not before serious brand damage was done. They probably lost a lot of current customers, and more importantly, future customers. Mothers, being the major purchasers within households, are not a good group to alienate. (After all, that
was why they created the ad in the first place - to try and “connect” with this valuable market segment.) AdAge did a great job covering the episode, here.

This is a great example of why a service like Scout Labs should be mandatory for any company putting messages out in to the world. It is essential to put out these fires before they get out of control.

We always enjoy a good data visualization, especially when it’s elucidating what we are doing here at Scout Labs! On Wired Magazine this weekend was a infographic of what happens after you hit “Publish” on your blog page. It’s called “The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits - to You”. If you can figure out how to click and hold your mouse down to zoom it and scan around, you’ll see a category called “Data Miners” and I guess that’s partly us — the ones who analyze the blogosphere (and social networks and image-sharing sites and video sharing sites and user reviews) to make sense of it for clients overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all. But we are also the “Corporations” (yes, “the Suits”), because real people at real companies are using our service to Scout what people love, hate, want, think and feel about their products, brands and services. What we are NOT: an ad network or aggregator trying to sell ads. We figure there are plenty of those out there desperately trying to get ads in front of eyeballs. Inspiring people to build better products and to build stronger relationships with customers sounds much more fun to us.

I recently re-watched YouTube founders Chad Hurley & Steve Chen interviewed by Chris Anderson from Wired at the Commonwealth Club (5/23/07). Watch the Video. It’s fun to hear about the dinner party where the idea was born (once again, they had a personal need that wasn’t being met — to share home-made videos with friends). They also talk about the early days of the company and how the rapid growth of the site caught them completely off guard. My favorite is a story they tell about an early functionality planning meeting, when they rejected the idea of needing any search functionality on the site. They really could not imagine their little “YouTube” ever hosting more videos than could fit on the first page.

Now this may be just good story-telling. I’m sure if you ask the Sequoia Capital folks who funded YouTube, they certainly expected the site to need search! But I love this story because you can make guesses about how users will use new product, you can even ask them how they will use it, but you never really know until you get it in their hands. Scout Labs has been working with many companies since day one. They’ve told us what they need, they’ve reviewed wire-frames, they’ve prioritized functionality, and told us how they thought they would use it. But now that they have a real live application in their hands, they are using Scout Labs for all sorts of things that we (or they) never imagined. They are loving some things that they were mildly excited aboout before, and of course, now they have a million more feature requests. But this is the fun part of building new products and why it is so important to let your customers be your guide. We’ll be doing just that for the next several months, prior to launch.