Track Blog Reactions To Your Brands With Scout Labs
Michael Arrington
58 comments »
Scout Labs, a San Francisco based company, is in my opinion one of the more interesting startups to launch this year. It isn’t consumer focused. Rather, it helps companies make sense of the mass of positive and negative things that are said about their brands in blogs, user generated videos, and images.
The company has been in private beta for months with 40 or so companies. I have list of participants, which is impressive but mostly confidential. A few that have given permission to be named are CBS, eBay, AvenueA/Razorfish and BBDO West. Today they are opening up the private beta to additional users who request an invitation on their site.
Brand managers start by creating “scouts” for each brand they want to track. This can be anything that people might talk about - a thing (coca cola), a person (Hillary Clinton), a slogan (Just Do It), etc.
Scout Labs then creates the “scout,” going back in time to January 2007 when they first started populating their database of user generated content from blog search engines.
Any mention of the brand is cataloged. Users can then see each blog post, video or image that has to do with the brand, and the interface shows how mentions increase and decrease over time. But that’s when the difficult part begins. Scout Labs then analyzes each blog post and decides if it’s, broadly speaking, negative, positive or neutral to the brand. They also rank the source of the content to highlight more influential sources.
Users view the information on a single page dashboard. I’m including a few screen shots, although founder Jennifer Zeszut says they are in the process of redesigning the interface based on feedback from current beta testers.
Any data source can be clicked on and read via a pop up window, where it can be bookmarked, sent to others, marked for follow up, etc. Scout Labs will also facilitate commenting on the blog post if the brand manager feels that they need to respond.
The company created a Scout for both TechCrunch and Michael Arrington and let me review it last week. For the most part they got the hard part right - determining if a blog post was positive, negative or neutral. They don’t deal with irony well, though. One blog post about me called me “high and mighty.” Scout Labs thought it was positive when it was in fact highly critical. But I hit a button and switched the post to negative in a click. The company uses this feedback to train its system towards better future results.
The really cool part of the product is the fact that it looks at historical data, too (as I said, back to January 2007). So a brand manager can create a new scout and within moments see how the number of daily, weekly or monthly mentions increases or decreases, and how they fluctuate from negative or positive over time. I could easily see how periods where we were heavily criticized for something led to an increase in negative posts, and vice versa.
Zezsut gave me a number of examples of how beta testers have used this to help manage brands. In one case a company tracked a celebrity employee to help them decide if a contract renewal should be given (it was). Any startup could use this to easily track feedback on their new product, and respond to that feedback.
Scout Labs is pursuing a Salesforce-type business mode and charging per user per month. Beta testers are not being charged, and the company is still figuring out the appropriate fee structure.
Competition
Brand analysis was once done almost exclusively through human labor - consultants would clip stories, read them for opnions and aggregate the data. It was time consuming, trailed real time by weeks or months, and very costly. Using software to do this work speeds things up and is far cheaper. But correctly identifying opinions and categorizing them is very, very hard.
A number of companies try to automate part or all of the process. Key competitors include Umbria, BuzzLogic and Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
The company is part of the Minor Ventures incubator, which also launched Grand Central (acquired by Google for a rumored $50 million), 8020 Publishing, Swivel, Open DNS and others. Minor Ventures was founded by CNET cofounder Halsey Minor and is run by Ron Palmeri.
Look for a full public launch of Scout Labs in February or March 2008. The company has been through two rounds of financing with Minor Ventures (October 2006 and December 2007).
That’s the most tainted competitive matrix I’ve ever seen. As a VP marketing at a major CPG company, I’ve evaluated most of the players in the space and Umbria provides the deepest insights and seems to have the most robust software platform. I’ll be interested to see if Scout has any chops deeper than just basic positive/negative intelligence. I’d also be interested to see what they true reach is and ability to filter out “splog”
This certainly wouldn’t work on John Chow’s blog. Too many “sarcastic” people talk about his “money making” methods. It would end up being a very manula process.
of course it’s tainted - they created it.
The old saying goes… Any publicity is good publicity
i removed the competitive chart.
The RSS feed still has the opening paragraph as “things said… in bogs, user generated videos, and images.” Freudian slip? After all, in the slang sense of the word, both of them tend to be full of excrement.
I was very interested to read that you were able to tell the program that it had misread a post because of its use of irony, so that it could learn from it in the future. If Scout manage to create a program that, through whatever means, manages to accurately identify irony, they’ll be able to get rich on that without the PR application. It would be the biggest breakthrough in artificial intelligence since Microsoft invented that virtual Santa that talks to children about oral sex.
Imagine the applications. They could bundle it with all Internet browsers sold in countries where irony is not widely used and therefore often misunderstood (yes, the United States is one of them). Whenever someone in one of these countries read an ironic posting or article, a pop-up would appear with big flashing red letters reading “This Is Ironic. The Author Is Deliberately Using Words That Are Opposite To The Meaning He Is Conveying. Do Not Email Or Post Complaining That His Assertions Are Ridiculous.” The rest of the world would be finally liberated, able to use humour without having to spend hours explaining to confused foreigners what irony is.
In all seriousness, if I were them I wouldn’t bother trying to adjust the software to identify irony. Out of all the postings on the Internet, only a very small percentage try to be ironic - and only a small percentage of that percentage actually know how to do it. Misidentifying ironic postings as positive or negative shouldn’t throw off the overall results by that much. Irony is incredibly hard to define, depends hugely on context, and in the end I’d be surprised if a computer could even identify sarcasm, irony’s bigger, less intelligent brother. (Or rather, I /wouldn’t be at all surprised/ if these computers, since they’re /sooooo intelligent/, could identify sarcasm, I mean it’s /reeeaaaly easy/. Put that in your algorithm and smoke it.)
looks a lot like analytics
Michael,
Your enthusiasm for the power of monitoring social media is well-placed. But including ScoutLabs’ own version of the competitive landscape is, to say the least, misleading. Umbria is known for the rich insight and recommendations we provide, based on our scalable analytics and science… insight that is much richer than the other competitors they list on their chart. I would recommend removing the chart from your article to avoid further confusion.
Hi Rob. Jenny, here, from Scout Labs. You are absolutley right that Umbria does some great work in the CGM analysis space. But as far as I can tell, they are not a software company — they are not building tools for you and your team to use on your own. I believe they have some amazing technology that gets used internally, by consultants, but that the output is a report (ppt) that was laregly assembled by people. Obviously, humans do a GREAT job at insight, but they are expensive and they take coffe breaks, so they can’t be real-time. So while there are many many consulting firms out there, some with great internal technologies, we are building a product that gives as much insight as technology can offer, and allows you and your team to fill in the gaps. Eager to hear how you think we do…
ideas of “programming” the non-programmable look fine on paper, and may be in initial stages. But to make it to top, as you need to serve the wide range, companies have heard time doing it correctly, manytimes the reason being, these are just not feasible solutions, you simply cannot alogorithim’cally do certain things epsecially when the content is very dynamic and of huge wide range. Customers give business when they know for sure it works for them.
Oh look, pie charts in perspective!
Time for Scout Labs to ante up and hire a legit information designer already.
the irony of this conversation is that no-one seems to get that brands(as in business - small, medium, large) have been the most underserved market to date in the UGC space. first they were frightened to engage UGC content on their sites for fear of negative feedback, then when the conversation went elsewhere (where it lives today) they had no way to intelligently mine/keep abreast of that content. brand marketers live with the feeling that “someone is saying something about me and i don’t know what it is”. a tool for companies to keep in touch with their users “sentiment” about their brand.. please, its priceless.
Jenny@scout lab,
can you show us the analysis of scout lab on this site, see if it identifies the irony of the comments as well as negative vs positive?
This would be a good test for yourself and us to understand it.
also, how do you categorize “Any publicity is good publicity”
i found it negative, what would scout lab think? Appreciate your replys.
I believe there is a lot of opportunity in the blog/user-generated-content analytics market.
However, I think it’s mostly a technology issue. So if you don’t have the best tech, get out.
Reading this post reminded me of Monitor 110, which attempts to accomplish the same monitoring, discovery and rating functions for the professional investment community.
Again, I think technology is key here and that the best technology can be transferred to a number of verticals (brand management and investment analysis, were the two I mentioned but I’m sure there are many more).
I think the sector is primed for a “page rank” caliber breakthrough that will create real value for those with the most accurate AI.
To the commenter from
Umbria - I removed the chart at the request of scout labs. It was clearly noted that they created it and I found it interesting even if biased. But pleeease, cut the crap on journalistic integrity. Defend your product or move on
I think buzzlogic already does this? they have been around for awhile and presented at demo — http://www.buzzlogic.com
I signed up for an invite to the private beta… but I haven’t got one yet… Since the ScoutLabs team is reading this blog
let me tell you I am very interested in testing your software and seeing the scout for my company’s brand. Can anyone help me get a beta invite?
Collective Intellect has been tracking brands in social media for a while now including Chrysler, Fleishman, Old Mutual, the American Diabetes Association, the US Chamber of Commerce, as well as extracting tonal sentiment intelligence for Yahoo! Finance (widget on the Finance homepage)…and the reporting rules! (I use it)
I’m not completely sure what all the hub-bub is about these guys, because Collective Intellect has been quietly out in the market offering a real-time social media monitoring and analytics product for many months now.
What I will say is that being able to track a brand or product name in real time could be interesting, and there are others, including Collective Intellect, who do this already. What is generally more interesting to our customers across the board is being able to track trends for brands and products but also to be able to track campaigns — in real-time — to see how they are working. Plus tracking issues, brand comparison issues, etc.
What I am curious about is their Influencer sentiment. Its pretty clear from our research that influence isn’t static, so knowing the most influential post from 4 months ago isn’t going to be that helpful to marketers planning for upcoming social media campaigns. Knowing who the most current influencers are serves current marketing.
Mike:
Glad to see you providing your readers with an update on new entrants in the space. New companies are sprouting like weeds these days. Thought I would link to Nick’s coverage about us from September. The keys to success in this space will be technology based solutions that crack the code for influencer identification, conversational targeting, automated sentiment analysis, and the ability to engage and track impacts of conversations with bloggers.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....-series-b/
Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies
http://www.biz360.com has been doing blog market intelligence for some time…
The text mining for brand monitoring space has many problems, not the least of which is how to fit the resulting reporting structures into a decision support framework. How do steer decisions? None of the tools give repeatable results between different platforms, competitors, etc.
Furthermore, the fat part of the market for brand monitoring is being ignored: The intermediary sellers need these services most; multi-line retailers and distributors require monitoring of high end durable goods customer perceptions - not just of the product, but of the outcomes of interactions with customer service and the warranty chain.
I have some research here: http://bizcast.typepad.com/cli.....index.html
LGM, we are trying to get a good cross-section of industries and sizes of companies using the application during this closed, private beta period. So make sure you include your company or organization information when you apply on our site so that we can tell if you’re what we need to round things out. But LGM (and everyone who applies), you are definitely on the sneak peek list, in any case. We are glad you are excited too!
At the lowest end of the spectrum, how long will it be before automation-centric brand monitoring companies get wiped out if/when Google adds a sentiment metric to Trends/News/Blog Search?
I’ve done some research in this area, if anyone wants to chat drop me a line.
Automated sentiment, while exciting, technically (as witnessed by so many of your comments about that feature) is really just an input for us. We are here for marketers — and brand folks and product people and executives and agencies — any one who cares about customers, in any company that wants to make more customer-centric business decisions. What we think is exciting is what we DO with sentiment — how we bring that to life for our users in a way that inspires product and marketing innovation. Google can add a sentiment score, but Google will always go an inch-deep on insight, as it has to be all things to all people. Scout Labs is something different all together.
@Jen, you haven’t answered my questions.
I am not pleased with your human tracking technology.
Gives some pretty good data, try MSTracker ins.
With companies like Google and Yahoo offering customer reviews and their business search results, this tool is going to be a god send for folks looking to manage their online business reputation.
This is awesome! Probably the coolest way to track blogs and general comments I’ve ever seen. Great, great, great job Scout!
Very cool, I like it - I kinda half built something like this for our company the other day using Yahoo pipes, wasn’t quite as good but we kinda want to see everything written about us.
The actual list of competitors in this space is a bit longer than you’d think from the companies named here–my database includes over 100. For those who want to understand them, I publish the Guide to Social Media Analysis. http://www.socialtarget.com/research/
As Jenny pointed out (#9), companies are competing with different strategies. Most deliver finished reports and analysis, in addition to whatever client-facing software they offer. A few are going to market with software (SaaS) strategies, for clients who want to build an in-house social media analysis capability. Scout Labs can’t go head to head with both BuzzLogic and Nielsen BuzzMetrics (for example), because those two don’t really do the same thing.
The human vs. computer analysis question keeps coming up. Technology-based companies have made some strong claims about their reliability (close to human coders), while those with a human-analyst approach insist the tech isn’t good enough. The current state of the art seems to require an evaluation of a client’s specific needs and environment, leading to a blend of automated and human processes.
Traditional advertising is broken. If folks talked to you like TV commercials do, you would punch them in the face! Sentiment analysis is on the verge to making eCommerce and Online Advertising a whole lot more efficient. And online advertising will reach $20 billion this year and eCommerce is on track for $200 billions. 80% of consumers prefer asking friends or relatives to report on products rather than relying on the brands themselves. 3.5 billion brand conversations each day. Google gets about 8 hours of video every minute. And the Web does not expire! CGM is making messaging dilution and trust erosion major challenges for brand marketers, effectively shifting budgets from traditional off-line to online conversation marketing. Brand monitoring and sentiment analysis will play a mega role in making sense of all this WOM. Glad to see Scout Labs come out. There will be more and more consolidation around agencies, ad. serving, networks, analytics and measurement to accelerate.
I haven’t seen the chart and haven’t seen everybody’s capabilities and UI. This said, the market is just emerging and there is clearly room for lots of applications and models. Buzzlogic, Andiamo Systems, Visible Technologies, nStein, Collective Intellect, Umbria, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Sentimetrix, Cymfony, Biz360, Clarabridge and a few others are still tweaking there models, pitches, technology, target markets, applications, messaging … still early!
Spam, i.e. content seeded by social marketers (pay-per-post) is a challenge. Scalability is also a challenge as Peter mentioned; having human reviews of all these comments for scoring and semantic categorization won’t scale given the explosion and diversity of user generated content. This said, there is no reason for sarcasm, irony and double negatives not to be solved and properlyinterpreted. Algorithms have done harder things in the past and every campus seems to have a computational linguistic program these days. Sentiment Analysis draws on computational linguistic to transform unstructured online dialog into marketing insights. Brand monitoring is only one application of sentiment analysis; there will be many more, maybe all the way to predicting financial markets if data mining can start making sense of emotions.
Progress around tone polarity scoring (beyond just +/-), entity extraction, semantic categorization broken down by whatever … reach, influential segments, geo-mashups, temporal trends, … will turn branding into a more predictable business, accelerating the shift of budgets online; not unlike paid search, contextual placement, demo and behavioral targeting have over the past years.
-arnaud
I would like to enthusiastically second Nathan and Arnaud’s posts and sentiments!
The Computational scoring of the wild corpus is a science that is truly in its infancy; it just so happens that the first services out of the gate mimic the brand agency offerings of the old guard. There are implications for any number of forecasting models using stochastic means, and new metrics are, as we speak, being developed in the world’s research kitchens.
My redacted report on these agency offerings is available at: http://bizcast.typepad.com/cli.....ntsect.pdf
Point #1: Shameless plug for Cymfony: Since Forrester rated us as a “leader” along with Buzzmetrics, I modestly submit us for consideration…
Point #2: this is a nice interface with some good usability, but these are just the first layer of metrics. Probably OK for a small company but for a big brands the post volume will quickly overwhelm the user’s ability to really understand the gist of the conversation. These data tell you what is going on, but to be actionable you must dig in on the why behind this. This takes a lot more time that most marketers simply don’t have.
Point #3: the first stage of any social media strategy should be to listen and understand what consumers are saying, so the more that can be done to get marketers into listening mode, the better for the entire industry.
Michael: thanks for bringing this to the TechCrunch audience’s attention!
Nathan, thank you for pointing out that the human versus technology dichotomy that often emerges in this space is a false one. Some companies are trying pure automation, and some are true consulting firms, but to really do this right, it can, should and needs to be BOTH.
Some companies are putting smart technology in the hands of consultants to deliver insight for companies. Scout Labs has chosen to put smart, easy to use analysis tools the hands of teams of users (people at companies and their agency partners). Scout Labs offers real-time, automated analysis, insight and trend-spotting — moments after hitting “Go Scout”. But then users can append insight and make connections for their fellow team members to see, which not only adds another layer of insight, but it actually improves our technology, as our algorithms learn from and improve based on explicit and implicit user actions.
If you go to our site, you will see that one of the things “we believe” is: Let technology do what it does best, and people do what we do best. Together, we’re a pretty good team.
We’ve architected our entire system with this in mind.
But Arnaud is absolutely right. The glory days of controlling the conversations are over and there is a near-universal need for tuning in to the voice of the people. So, there is plenty of room for different approaches (and price points). In any case, looks like Scout Labs is going to shake things up a bit
so many self fake posts.
What about forums/message boards? I agree that blogs are a important source of consumer generated media (CGM), but they usually reflect only one individuals opinion. Forums and Message Boards are where the conversation is!
In addition, I agree with Jeniffer that the best approach for gaining consumer inside is a dual approach of technology and human research/analysis.
Mike, thanks for the interesting article and good luck to scoutlabs
I wonder if it parses only english language posts or even other languages ..
I was getting back-links from these guys earlier this year, which left me wondering what they were up to…
Interesting stuff Mike.
Although I believe that they get most of their cool widgets and analysis from a company called Lexalytics (www.lexalytics.com).
You should also check out their political trends website (www.politicaltrends.info) as well. Their CEO Jeff Catlin was interviewed about it on Fox News yesterday. This is truly cutting edge stuff.
Terry, this is Jochen Frey from Scout Labs. Thanks for highlighting Lexalytics since you are making a great point (and we indeed use a part of their toolset): Whenever reasonably available we are using existing cutting edge technology as opposed to trying to re-invent the wheel.
If we can help it, we will not compete for creating the best automated sentiment analysis system. There is simply too much good work to be done, whether it be application development or language processing research, to create a compelling application for marketers to be more successful in the changing landscape on the web. As Jenny mentioned in #26 above, we feel that it is much more important WHAT we do with the data, whether we create it ourselves or receive it from others.
This does seem really interesting – both Scout Labs and the fact that there are so many interesting responses to this type of technology.
Scout’s interface, especially, seems really cool to me. I’m less in awe of their sentiment analysis – looking through some of their examples (specifically for Hillary Clinton), I saw a couple of dramatically miscategorized posts.
I realize that there is a margin of error with all sentiment analysis/NLP programs, though. I can’t tell how their program actually works. Is their program relying primarily only on word co-occurrence?
I’m slightly biased against that approach, probably because I work for a company that relies on a rules-based NLP approach. We use a grammatical tagger to establish tone. You don’t have to have sentence-level or paragraph level tone; companies can just identify what’s being said specifically about them.
Mike thanks for spotlight on social media, and brand analysis. Nice job on introducing Scout Labs. My name is Rajiv Dulepet, and I am founder of Wise Window Inc, a Santa Monica, CA based startup. I don’t want to take up too much space nor do I want to demean any competition. I just want to say objectively what we do, and let market decide. We would welcome an opportunity to demo our product.
We scour the internet for all kinds of opinions data including social media such as blogs, message forums and consumer reviews. We have reached current count of 3.6M reviews alone (not including the blog feeds). We have developed domain agnostic automated technology that has taken a opinion search engine route, so we don’t use any pre-meditated approach to find what you want in the opinions. We visualize and quantify sentiment and buzz but underlying it is a opinion search engine that lets you as customer slice and dice in any which way you want.
For instance. lets take example of shampoos, we let you evaluate products based on their benefit type such as dandruff, dry, oily hair etc, or maybe based on price, or maybe based on size etc. Again everything gets defined automatically through crawling. You can do unfiltered,unadulterated drill down search of opinions in middle of night based on some hypothesis with absolutely no intervention. From our perspective, Consumer is one application and not the “THE” application for our engine.
I did recent interview with SoCalTech for those who are interested.
http://socaltech.com/interview.....12555.html
You can also visit http://www.wisewindow.com or shoot me email at rajiv@wisewindow.com.
We have seen lot of interest generated but rather than bickering and undermining competition, I would love partnership. UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL :-))
great idea… this will give brand managers the opportunity to create more powerpoint slides
but in all seriousness, I like the idea here
Aydin.
It’s worth mentioning that Radian6 (http://www.radian6.com/cms/solution) has had a similar solution out for sometime, and IMHO is a whole lot more interesting.
As a marketer, I agree that any tool that brings us closer to a better understanding of what prospects, customers and partners think of our products or services is a great thing! However, I’m interested in the interactions through all touchpoints, not only blogs. Indeed, the choice of medium to communicate is in itself a bias and may reflect a different part of the customer population. The vendor that will be able to characterize influencers, sentiment and interaction intensity in an on-demand easy to use application will win… CRM3.0?
Laurent Pacalin
http://www.laurentonmarketing.blogspot.com