Scout Labs: Brand Sentiments and Blogosphere Monitoring Matures
Posted by Filippo on December 20, 2007
We have been addressing the subject of corporate and brand ’sentiment’ monitoring a few times this year (here, and here). The latest addition to this space may well prove to be most powerful and sophisticated thus far. Scout Labs, currently in private beta, will offer brand ’scouts’ (search agents) that can not only weigh the relevance and frequency of positive vs. negative ’sentiments’ in blogs and news outlets, but do so going back to January 2007. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has taken the site for a spin and reported about it here. How this service could benefit Crisis Management teams and EW efforts remains to be seen as the product reaches commercial availability and speed, cost, and flexibility of ’scouting’ criterion become clear. Certainly one to follow closely as it may become the biggest player in this arena.
Jennifer Zeszut said
Hi Filippo,
Thanks for your note. I’m glad that you found us. We are being used by many brands for purposes of finding out what customers are saying, but as you noted, Scout Labs is a tool for ongoing monitoring of any type of topic. It can monitor a general topic or issue and alert you WHEN a crisis (of any kind) hits. Or, it can be used to track a specific crisis that you want to stay on top of. (e.g. track the propogation of consumer alerts or recalls to see how effective you’ve been at getting the word out — or I imagine, how newsworthy the media has deemed the crisis to be…). The thing I think is so exciting and different about Scout Labs is that it is true software as a service that you and your team own. Scout whatever you want, whenever you want. Once that kind of sinks in — that users have this (very near) real-time window on consumers’ thoughts and feelings, they get kind of giddy and start scouting all sorts of things. It’s very fun to see. So I think Scout Labs is useful to you and your readers probably as is, but we are definitely interested in any special needs that the crisis management and early-warning community might have. Thanks again for your note and we look forward to show you much more very soon.