We scooped this news last week but it’s official. Brand tracking application Scout Labs has been acquired by social CRM company Lithium Technologies, according to a blog post on Scout Labs’ site. We initially reported the acquisition price to be in the $20 million – $25 million range, in a stock and cash transaction.
We first covered Scout Labs in late 2007 when it was still in private beta. More recently the startup updated their UI and improved on the product. It’s one of the more compelling tools in helping brands and companies track and monitor what is being said about them on the web. Plus, its pricing model was affordable for both large and small businesses. → Read More
Scout Labs, a startup that lets brand owners track what’s being said about them on new and social sites, has been acquired by Lithium Technologies in a stock and cash transaction, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. We believe the purchase price is $20 million – $25 million.
We first covered Scout Labs, which was created in the Minor Ventures incubator, in late 2007 when it was still in private beta. More recently they updated their UI and improved on the product. We’ve found it to be best in class in auto-determining sentiment and giving brand managers a good real time overview of what’s being said about them. → Read More
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, is releasing a new version of its realtime, user-friendly dashboard.
Scout Labs has added several new collaboration features such as new ticketing and assignments notifications. So a user could see an important Tweet and assign and send the mention to another employee for follow-up. The new version also integrates more data, including forums, discussion boards, news sources, Twitter, to be analyzed in realtime. The release also includes more powerful graphing capabilities to break out data. → Read More
It has become increasingly important for marketers and PR folks to keep a pulse on the conversation surrounding brands on the web while also maintaining relationships with writers, bloggers and other influencers who are starting these conversations. There has been an emergence of “social CRMs” that help brand marketers and PR reps follow the buzz on the web. TechCrunch contributor Brian Solis recently wrote about the importance of both real-time monitoring and engagement in the social CRM space following TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream event.
Buzzstream, an Austin-based startup, has developed a social CRM and monitoring tool that is worth a look. Buzzstream’s application will automatically convert any blog or news story into a profile complete with author contact information, their requisite social networks information (Twitter handle, Facebook page), and also shows metrics for the writers’ publications. → Read More
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. → Read More
At a dinner tonight with a friend the conversation turned to Twitter. He just didn’t get it, and he’s certainly not the first person to tell me that. Specifically, my friend didn’t understand the massive valuation ($250 million or more) that Twitter won in its recent funding. I told him why I thought it was more than justified: Twitter is, more than anything, a search engine.
I told him what I thought of Twitter as a micro-blogging service: it’s a collection of emotional grunts. But it’s wonderful nonetheless. And enough people are hooked on it that Twitter has reached critical mass. If something big is going on in the world, you can get information about it from Twitter.
Twitter also gathers other information, like people’s experiences with products and services as they interact with them. A couple of months ago, for example, I was stuck in the airport and received extremely poor service from Lufthansa. I twittered my displeasure, which made me feel better – at least I was doing something besides wait in an endless line. I’ve also Twittered complaints about the W Hotel (no Internet, cold room) and Comcast (the usual Internet gripes). → Read More
The popularity of Google Trends, which lets users compare the relative popularity of words and phrases based on the quantity of search queries on Google over time, is starting to spawn similar services based on different data sets. Facebook now has Lexicon (launched April 15), which shows trends based on Wall posts. Twitter doesn’t have an official in house trends product of their own, but Flaptor just released one called Twist. Like the related Google and Facebook services, Twist looks at mentions of the queried terms in messages and graphs them over time. Users can also click on any of the terms and go directly to the recent Twitter messages containing that term. Flaptor also has a good Twitter search tool, as well as a number of other projects. Brand owners, researchers and others are always looking for more data, and these tools are very useful for that. Startups like Scout Labs are also emerging to help aggregate and make sense of as much of this data as possible. My guess is we’ll see them integrate as much of it as possible. CrunchBase Information Twist Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
