Scout Labs Could Change How PR Pros Track Brand Reactions

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By: John Cantwell

Michael Arrington had an interesting story yesterday about Scout Labs, a new startup that aims to help marketers, PR professionals and companies track blog reactions to their brands. Scout Labs’ clients (there are about 40 right now, most of whom are confidential) can create a “scout” for anything they’d like tracked - a person, a thing, a slogan, etc. The scout then locates every blog mention from January 2007 (when Scout Labs first compiled their database) onward and categorizes each mention into one of three categories - positive, negative or neutral - allowing users to get a global view of the blog impressions their brand or client has made.

(Note: this is just a general overview of Scout Labs’ services. Arrington does a nice job of breaking down the finer details - be sure to check out his article.)

A few thoughts about Scout Labs:

First off, this service sounds, at least in the abstract, like it could have a real impact on how PR professionals track their clients and develop strategies. Scout Labs allows users to be incredibly specific about the things they track. Imagine you’re promoting LeBron James’ new sneaker - you could now individually track blog reactions to the sneaker itself, to LeBron, to the television commercials, etc. You could then refine those initial searches further - now, when you analyze blog reactions to the sneaker, you can look how people responded to its design, its functionality … In short, Scout Labs provides a lot more information and a lot more context than a bunch of newspaper clips pulled from LexisNexis by some intern (no offense, interns).

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Scout Labs, though, is that it takes for granted the influence of the blogosphere. After all, any PR professional who believes that blog impressions aren’t important won’t have much use for Scout Labs. In today’s marketplace, though, companies may not have much use for any PR professional who doesn’t believe in the importance of blog impressions, either.