Didja see it?…Hear it?

Prove it.

“Traditional advertising” challenges the average American consumer with 247 targeted messages per day. No, wait-a-minute…another study says 600 exposures, and still another source estimates that figure to be more like 3,000. Remember, that’s just Radio, TV, Newspaper, Billboards, and other physical signs. I’m not including all the new messages we’re getting online and in social media.

So… no…I’m not sure at all that I saw it, or heard it. IT was lost in the noise.

That’s why any company that can claim to “…find signals in the noise…” in THIS day ‘n’ age deserves a serious look.

ScoutLabs, a company located in the Bay Area of California, is actually being modest when it makes that claim. Their numerous metrics make the most of Web 2.0 marketing, New Media, Social Media, Social Networking, and interactive feedback to give their clients an unprecedented look at what customers are saying…good AND bad.

Jennifer Zeszut, CEO, Founder

Jennifer Zeszut (say: Zeh’-zitt), the company’s CEO and only founder says it this way:  “Listening to my customers now is so important, it’s not something I want to outsource. I want to have it internally, I want the tools to make sure that my team is good at doing this. I want to teach my group to listen, I don’t want to outsource listening to someone else. It’s a big shift.”

I spent about 45 minutes with Zeszut on a SKYPE call the other day. She was effusive and glib about the company’s incredible 2-week-old roll-out. And why shouldn’t she be with heavies like Sony BMG, Nike, HP, CBS, Jott, Loopt and others on a list of early satisfied clients?

During that conversation, Zeszut ran me through a brief demonstration on GLANCE of a client account’s use of ScoutLabs. We looked through some NetFlix account information (without giving away company secrets, of course) so I could get a roundhouse idea of how their service works.

My head is still swimming with the inter-related possibilities.

For instance, imagine a CEO being able to access a report from any web-ready computer at any time that lists every (yes, probably every) negative mention of his company from Twitter, FaceBook, FriendFeed, Blogs, IM’s, ICQ, E-mail, MySpace, Digg, Stumble-Upon, Friendster, Utterli, Ecademy, LinkedIn, and God-knows-what-else for the last 24 hours.

Not only that, the same online report shows how that CEO’s public relations, sales, and marketing teams have used that data to track down the source of the negative comments…contact them, and through personal interaction, make them apostles, not antagonists for the company.

We keep hearing how the new paradigm for marketing is personal. This is where the rubber meets the road.

Like all other great ideas that just seem to “burst” on the scene, ScoutLabs evolved as a concept, then precipitated into a full-blown product only after fits ‘n’ starts, years of development, frustration, team-building and finally securing venture capital.

Mr. DeepPockets was none other than Halsey Minor, the man who founded CNET, and ran it into one of the first internet companies to achieve profitability. He was with Jeff Bezos at the beginning of Amazon, funded Scene-It, and was also a lead investor in Salesforce.com.

Zeszut gushes about her staff of 20…pointing out her VP of Engineering, Brian Pinkerton, the originator of WebCrawler — arguably the web’s first viable search engine. Others on her team include a number of Technorati and RazorFish alums, herself included.

The genesis of ScoutLabs grew out of Zeszut’s own frustration with running product and marketing for a (nameless) company. She explains that she could not convince them to think differently about how to engage in the give ‘n’ take with customers that is the hallmark of ScoutLabs, so she struck out on her own.

Now she is an unapologetic proselyte for New Media Marketing. ” I think we’ve all known that marketing needs to change, but now marketing teams and marketing organizations have to change the way they work together, and how they interact with customers…and that’s new.

While you can easily peruse the nuts and bolts of ScoutLabs’ inner workings on their website, I would draw your attention specifically to the work they’re doing in quantifying human interaction by analyzing linguistics. The way Zeszut puts it: “…it’s our job to, wherever humans are expressing themselves, that’s where we have to go, and we have to find a way to index it, and we have to find a way to crawl it, and we have to find a way to bring it in, and we have to find the meta-data around it, so that we can find the most important to bring your attention to.”

I think she expresses herself well.

Peter Corbett, CEO, iStrategylabs

But that’s what ScoutLabs does. In spades…and for the money…very economically.

That’s the opinion, anyway, of satisfied client, Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategyLabs.com, a digital word-of-mouth agency. Corbett says ScoutLabs helps protect branding. “…Many big brands don’t use buzz-monitoring, and they’re missing out.  People who are brand-terrorists, who want to damage a brand - can be converted to brand evangelist easily.”

There’s that mantra again.  The one which is dedicated to making believers out of naysayers. ScoutLabs puts it at the core of it’s approach, and they do it by managing and measuring what they call “sentiment”: “…the ability for the machine to judge whether or not the author of a story is expressing a positive or negative attitude towards a specific word or phrase…”

Click HERE to read their extensive blog explaining sentiment…it’s pretty convincing, and very well-researched.

Corbett says they build a collaboration platform using the ScoutLabs “buzz” and “sentiment” tools: “…now we have a streamline workflow to take care of that stuff,” Corbett explains.  He says ScoutLabs has been worth every cent in growing his business.

ScoutLabs’ pricing plans begin at a modest $99/mo. for unlimited users, 5 concurrent searches,  and 1 workspace.  That’s their “Standard” plan type.  Zeszut says not many clients stay with that level of service, though, once they find out what it can do, and how it improves their bottom line.  But the Standard plan might be great for a start-up web-based business being run by one person.  Top O’ the line metrics from ScoutLabs will run you about $750/mo for 5 workspaces.  Need more than that?  Call for pricing.

Click HERE to see their pricing chart.

I remember studying Psychology in college.  The Psych professors always seemed to think of themselves as the lost stepchild in the world of science because their field of study was so frustratingly unquantifiable.  Brainwaves could be measured, but how do you put a yardstick on emotions or run a plumbline on cause and effect.

ScoutLabs seems to be closer to gauging patterns in human inconsistencies better than Freud ever could, and their message doesn’t get lost in the noise, it is defined by the noise.

…..Dave Courvoisier

“Hang on, ’cause we’re pushing the envelope in a business paradigm that keeps reinventing itself by the hour.  Online media and the explosion of web 2.0 and social networking, is something I think that a lot of people are hugely interested in but may feel too intimidated to jump in for fear of looking behind-the-times,” stated Courvoisier.

According to Tactical Marketing Inc’s Joe Perez, “New Media Minutes was created to give our audience sixty second breaking reviews on new media and the newest technologies that are extremely newsworthy but not making the headlines.” Perez continues, “There are a lot of hungry folks out there yearning to learn about new advances in web 2.0 technologies and how these new platforms can be of value to them.”

New Media Minutes launched their flagship review on a newly launched social networking-based direct sales platform called Vi-Net. Vi-Net is an industry first in direct selling through a seamlessly integrated proprietary social network in the health and wellness space.

About New Media Minutes
A Tactical Marketing web property NewMediaMinutes.com takes 60-seconds of your day to concisely bring you a golden nugget from the first pan in the rivers of web 2.0.  Our information specialists take you to the people, the page-ranks and the platforms that are settling new communities of opportunity out on the range of New Media. We are the “scouts” that rode ahead.

Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM) company VISALUS has paid for me to attend this Red Carpet event for New Media Minutes.  As I enter, attendees are throbbing with exuberance and anticipation that the Health and Nutrition Products company is preparing to drop a big announcement today.

They won’t be disappointed.

In the room — the annointed Visalus (Viss-AL’-uss) distributors, regional directors, and officers, as well as those who may, on this day, decide Visalus is their future.

I have free access to the company officers, and as a journalist by trade, my job is to tell it as I see it.

A little Perspective, Please

Let’s face it, multi-level-marketers fall somewhere between Insurance salesmen and Jehovah’s Witnesses on the scale of people we most want to see knocking on our front door.

The questionable MLM’s tend to be judged as Ponzi schemes, and their CEO’s inevitably end up doing time.

The enduring ones, like Amway, Mary Kay, and Avon, produce quality products, and make tons of money.  In other words SOMEBODY…lots of somebody’s…are buying this stuff.

For budding entrepreneurs, MLM’s are intoxicating in the speed of return on investment.  Be the first into the market selling doohickies, and you can make a killing.  Even coming “second” to the market, can yield a handsome commission.

But ever since the original Fuller Brush salesmen, the basic sales design of an MLM hasn’t changed…until now, according to Visalus.

It should come as no surprise that the internet would change marketing, just as it has transformed virtually every facet of our modern digital world except maybe toilet paper.

Sure, MLM’s were early adopters of website exposure, electronic ordering, digital scheduling and inventory management, but that hasn’t made much difference to the local distributor who’s always garnered customers based on time-tested technique called word-of-mouth.

Choosing a Direction

Now VISALUS believes it has finally moved network marketing to an entirely new paradigm.

VISALUS has duly noted the ability of Social Networking sites to build huge kingdoms of participants based on a model that encourages human interaction.  Sites like MySpace and FaceBook, though, have so far failed miserably in finding a way to make much money on those hordes of happy talkers.

On the other hand, successful MLM’s can make oodles of money on a relatively small database of, say, a couple of million buyers.

Just think what could happen, VISALUS posits, if you could marry the proclivity of the social networking sites with the profit of the traditional MLM operations?

Out of that simple question, VISALUS made a crucial change in its vision.  It has thrown all its considerable muscle building a successful distribution network of health and nutrition products behind a new, innovative, and quite costly social network marketing initiative.

“Disruptive” Marketing

Back in the conference room upstairs at the LAX Raddison, a steady stream of the party faithful have made their way to the stage in a carefully orchestrated chain of events.  All of them extol the virtues of Visalus’ health and fitness products.  The company’s overall keywords are: LIFE, HEALTH, PROSPERITY.

The obvious enthusiasm in the room does tend to underscore the company’s point about “community”.  If you could extrapolate the energy from a gathering like this, onto a platform like a membership-only social network on the web, you’d have a little piece of magic, making a lot of money.

Visalus thinks they’re creating an entirely new paradigm…an evolutionary technology…something on this day they time and again called: Disruptive Marketing.

Ryan Blair, Chief Executive Officer

In fact, CEO of Visalus, Ryan Blair, says it this way: “  It takes a young company.  If you look at who has disrupted industries, it is a technology company in principle that attacks or goes after antiquated or legacy values.”  Blair goes on to explain that Amway makes billions of dollars on a relatively small set of networked customers; small compared to say, MySpace or FaceBook.  But those online social networks have yet to find a way to successfully monetize their popularity, Blair says.

DUE DILIGENCE

All this talk of evolution and disruptive marketing didn’t just fall from the sky.  Visalus is a direct selling business segment of Blyth, Inc., “A Home Expressions Company”.  Blyth has encouraged Visalus to be agile and innovative.  Their new social networking site is three years in the making, though, and was preceded by other social-networking experiments you may or many not have heard of: PathConnect, which was designed to help people make and achieve goals, SkiSpace, and the MaketheDifference Network, which was a social network based on charitable giving.

Barry Watkins, VP of Internet Product & Strategy

Barry Watikins, Visalus’ VP of Internet Product and Strategy says the product revealed for this event is actually six programs in one, each developed to be part of the whole.  “Vi-Net…it’s a social network, it’s a training system, it’s a marketing system, it’s a prospecting system…and back-office for payments and accounting.”  “We’re coming out of Beta here and now…today,” Watkins says.

Watkins goes on to say when he began doing market research, he was astounded to find a gap in the industry.  ” I did the competitive analysis…nobody else out there is doing this, so it is something that’s groundbreaking.”

SHARING AND CARING

Visalus doesn’t expect anyone is going to find their new social network unless they’re invited by a distributor of the company.  It’s a proprietary, not public network.  Members only.  Much like well-established weight-loss companies such as Jennie Craig and Weight Watchers — being accountable, and sharing your goals publicly are hallmarks of the Vi-Net success strategy.

Visalus encourages everyone in the company from the CEO on down to the new purchaser of it’s NEURO energy drink to share their experience on the new company social network, or Vi-Net.  Distributors share successful sales stories, find prospects, and learn marketing techniques.  The buyer shares a weight-loss success or an exercise regimen that works particularly well with the Vi-Pak, a nutrient supplement.

Networkers are free to share videos, pictures, stories, contact information, and even goofy party pics to the extent they’re comfortable.  In other words, every iteration of  human interaction you now see on MySpace or FaceBook is possible on the Vi-Net, with the added feature that users can make money — after all, that’s what MLM’s do.

“Social media tools…the Web 2.0 technology, basically means the collaboration of people, and allowing us to go out there and evolve the old ways of doing business,” says Blake Mallen, the Chief Marketing Officer of Visalus Sciences, and a founder of the company.

Blake Mallen, Visalus Founder, Chief Marketing Officer

“The power of going out there and getting people to share their stories, in a way that can happen 24/7 from the comfort of their own home,” he says, is the magic of this whole program.

Mallen explains that he and Ryan Blair discovered social networking while doing motivational public speaking at High Schools, and mentoring the students in follow-up e-mails.  They saw the magic of people sharing personal stories, was empowering.

THE CLOSE

The crowd in the conference room is now back after a break in the presentations.  The rallying cry from Nick Sarnicola, Chief Sales Officer is peppered with short memorable inspirational phrases that Sarnicola constantly asks the crowd to repeat: YOU. MUST. GET. STARTED.  Every few minutes, he and the other speakers hold sway by constantly having the crowd raise their hands in agreement to obvious statements: “Who here likes BMW’s?”

Oh yeah, that’s another thing.  The company freely offers BMW’s in it’s “Bimmer Program” for qualifying salespersons, it’s their most popular incentive.

Nick Sarnicola, Chief Sales Officer

I’ve excused myself from the rally in the room, and retreated to a corner of the hotel to ponder whether I really should drop out of TV news and become a Visalus distributor.  I begin writing this article instead.

Here are the facts:

- Visalus is a proven performer in a saturated health ‘n’ fitness market, and an overcrowded MLM market.
- They have a strong backer in Blyth, Inc. (in this economy, that’s a big plus).
- The young management team seems dedicated to their vision, their employees, and their pie-in-the-sky desire to help people.
- Vi-Net is an impressive and well-designed full-featured proprietary social network

The unanswered questions:

- Will people (especially buyers of the product) actually support the social networking system of sales?
- Can the newness of the social network paradigm work in favor of distributors/salespeople…or will the novelty wear off quickly?
- Has Visalus truly stumbled upon an evolutionary sales model that will vault them to the front of the class?

From the look of the dreamy smiles on the faces of the freshly-baptized apostles streaming from the conference room, the answers are a no-brainer.

……..Dave Courvoisier

View our social media release on Pitch Engine here, NewMediaMinutes Social PR

New Media is the New Frontier…complete with vast undiscovered territory, hidden wealth, risks ‘n’ dangers, colorful characters…even tribes and a little java now and then.

As pioneers in this new world, we know that some tracks will lead us astray, and others will involve long climbs through a craggy pass to the promise of better things.  Even though the wagon-masters along the trail had an idea of where they were going, they learned tough lessons along the way.

So it is with our challenge, one decade after the popped-dot-com bubble world…forging ahead on a virtual butte just over the multi-media mesa to find the fortune we’re all convinced lies ahead. 

And some people will make fortunes…while others will fail.  The map?  Reading it requires skill and knowledge.  We’ve got terabytes of that.  So who gets the edge? 

The one who brings a personal relationship and first-hand knowledge.

NewMediaMinutes takes 60-seconds of your day to concisely bring you a golden nugget from the first pan in the river.  Our information specialists take you to the people, the page-ranks and the platforms that are settling new communities of opportunity out on the range of New Media.

We’re the “scouts” who rode ahead.  Can you afford NOT to be on this wagon-train?