Scout Labs is one of the most famous publishers in the market for social media monitoring and reputation management. This start-up based in San Francisco was founded in 2006 and positioned itself as a publisher of software for the benefit of a wide range of clients : marketing agencies, advertising agencies, advertisers …

Their current offer is based on a SaaS business model varies according to the size and scope of the monitoring needs. The base price is $ 199 and up to $ 749 per month.

Scout Labs captivated from the first glance by its ergonomics and its clean and synthetic interface : a scoreboard and a professional grip of the most enjoyable. The implementation of standby time on a brand, product, or officer is fairly easy.

Through a configuration interface research, user can add more keywords and phrases that serve as components of alerts on the sources controlled by the application. Once queries setup, Scout Labs instantly restores your search results by dividing them by type of sources: blogs, forums, Twitter, news, reviews, photos and video.

Note that the current coverage for sources is predominantly English, little French results are indexed up to date. For videos, Scout Labs retrieves the content from Dailymotion, YouTube, Vimeo, Veoh to name a few.

Beyond the overall scoreboard, each subject watch has its own dashboard that summarizes the main and combined results. It is also possible to navigate more accurately in the data through several elements:

  • Mentions : To view the results mentioning the key words and phrases used, with considerable detail as to each item, a tab describes the identification of metadata: source, author, date, url … These results may be of search within, meaning that the user can search in the corpus in question. Scout Labs also presents for each corpus automatic selection based on the number of occurrences of keywords and phrases most frequently cited.
  • Sentiments : this is a major feature of Scout Labs, namely a proprietary algorithm for tone detection, which ranks results found in 3 categories: positive, negative and neutral. The results of tests carried out are not always satisfactory.
  • Graphs: it is the interface to display map data on a period of several parameters: the volume of published articles, the percentage in the index, the share of voice, tone …
  • Quotes: directly related to the analysis of tone, this feature allows to classify citations according to the terms used on the opinions and assessments: love, hate, recommend …

Scout Labs is also distinguished by a level of filtering very thorough, without necessarily having to go via search operators. The user can indeed choose different periods ranging from 6 months up to 24 hours, filter by type of source, type of tone, removing duplicates and spam …

Moreover, Scout Labs helps generate comparative dynamically across different subjects saver, which allows comparison of positions and allocation of voting shares between brands, products …

Each result can be saved and commented in a specific classification scheme, also available via the search engine. The alerts are also configurable at will, and direct reference in the subject line, the topic of the day, like Google Alerts.

Scout Labs has also provided the collaborative part of its application, allowing for a single space to share content with multiple users.

However, this offer software still contains some weaknesses in comparison with other market applications. I cite in particular:

  • The coverage of sources which to date remains English, with French can content. It is certainly possible to ask the integration of sources, but it still depends on the editor. I also note that social networks like Facebook are not taken into account …
  • The analysis of tones is still to improve, including foreign languages, but also to take in hindsight as it is a subject that still lacks maturity.
  • The ability to export the results of yesterday in deliverables watch pre-configured, even if it is possible to do in html or csv

It should be noted that with the position selected by Scout Labs, proposing the application for marketing and communication professionals, functional coverage and usability and ease of use are major assets to claim.

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