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?
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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!
Previously posted on scoutlabs.com/blog on Feb 9, 2010
