Scout Labs, a SaaS dashboard that makes it easy to keep track of what people across the internet are saying about particular topics or brands, has added a new focus group-like feature that is worth a look.
The product, which we first reviewed in December 2007 while still in private beta, now includes a “Quotes” section which pulls in real-time quotes from people who are chattering or Tweeting about a brand or topic on the web. The feature scans the quote for sentiment, and breaks quotes down by positive, negative or neutral undertones. The algorithm that deciphers the quotes also categorizes them as “wishes,” “recommend,” “issues,” or “caveats.” Caveats indicates comments that include the word “but.” For example, a caveat quote would be “I like Netflix but…” And you can filter quotes from Twitter exclusively.
There are six main sections to the Scout Labs dashboard: Blogs, Sentiment, Graphs, Photos, Videos, and Twitter. Blogs displays all of the blog posts that have been indexed by Scout Labs related to a particular keyword or phrase. The Sentiment section breaks these blog posts down into positive, neutral and negative categories. Graphs provides visual analytics of the sentiment around a brand on the web. And photos, videos and tweets related to your brand are collected for display as well.
There’s no doubt that there is a need for companies to accurately and measure the real-time buzz around their brands on the web. Scout Labs seems to be a innovative tool to do this, and is reasonably priced. The dashboard costs $99 per month for tracking up to five brands. In its short lifespan, Scout Labs has been able to serve many big-name companies, including Coca-Cola, JetBlue, Netflix, McDonalds and Disney. Competitors in the space include ViralHeat and Radian6.
Thank you Leena for covering the launch of QUOTES. I’m excited that Scout Labs is pushing the envelope in terms of what technology can do to provide customer insight to companies. Analysis like this (loves, hates, issues, comparisons) makes social media relevant for many groups within organizations, all the way to the executive suite! More screen shots and further explanation of the new feature is our on blog.
Jenny
Great post. It will be interesting how big name companies will listen to their end user’s
quotes. If they listen,then they will be able to successfully reinvent certain aspect of their business that suck. Listen to us we ,and we will continue forking over our monies despite the recession.
hmmm….
let’s run the brand “ATT” through this app…..
Finally. I mean, a lot of web apps do this already. Just like http://AppUseful.com
This is pretty interesting. Hope it works out for them.
Haonan, did you try running AT&T through the Scout Labs application?
I just did it and it produced numerous great quotes. Contact me, so that I can send you a few samples if you’re interested.
Jochen
This is great stuff! Cant wait to see what you guys come up with next.
Thank you Tonya. Scout Labs is on an eternal quest to find signals in the noise that can help companies make more customer-centric business decisions. Stay tuned.
Leena said…
The algorithm that deciphers the quotes also categorizes them as wishes, recommend, issues, or caveats. Caveats indicates comments that include the word “but.”
That’s call multi-class labels or multi-category classification. There are many multi-class classification available today, but SVM (support vector machine) is very popular and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using SVM.
Leena said…
The algorithm that deciphers the quotes also categorizes them as wishes, recommend, issues, or caveats. Caveats indicates comments that include the word “but.”
That’s call multi-class labels or multi-category classification. There are many multi-class classification available today, but SVM (support vector machine) is very popular and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using SVM.
It looks like that they’re using a multi-label classification algorithm and it is probable the popular SVM (support vector machine) algorithm they’re using, since it is both binary & multi-class.
Leena, you can delete the last 3 messages of mine (including this one), since when I first pressed the submit button , my message didn’t appear, then I took the URL out & re-submitted it again, thinking that the spam-filter filtered my first message because of that, but the 2nd message didn’t appear either. I tried for the 3rd time, but no luck, so I gave up. Only the first one that should be saved and the rest should be deleted (ie, the last 3), if you wish to.