In today’s fast-paced business environment, ease of integration is extremely important.

It’s a time suck to copy and paste all of your information from one source to another every time you put together a report or a presentation.

Whether you are accommodating clients or creating internal communications, portability can sometimes be an issue.

Transporting data with ease from the Spark platform into your display materials will now be a lot easier.

In addition to the JPEG and Excel spreadsheet export functions that already exist, next week we are rolling out the ability to export text and graphics into PDF and Word documents on two reporting pages:

Insight Explorer (a detail-filled list of relevant URLs) and Excerpt Explorer (excerpts of relevant and overt sentiment).

First, you may want to filter your results page to your exact specifications with the Advanced Options. Only show URLs or comments that match the criteria you select.

You can use the check boxes and the display count options to pick out individual results or you can export unfiltered results if you like.

We hope you enjoy the new options this creates for your business and look forward telling you about more exciting product development that’s just around the corner!

Our product is in a constant state of evolution as we strive to give our clients the best possible platform for gathering useful business intelligence.

Spiral16 scours the Internet and returns the most relevant data based on our customers’ strategies, but as any good marketer will tell you, data means nothing without context and analysis.

That’s why we’ve been updating all the different sorting filters and searches to help you frame the data in a way that is the most useful to you.

Word Search/URL Search

The Word Search form in the Advanced Options box now offers the option of a URL search. This allows you to search all of your collected results for URL terms, instead of relying on a domain name to be in the text of a page.

You can now search either the text or URL itself for specific terms or websites. For example, if you want to see only URLs from Twitter, you would type in “twitter.com,” select “URL,” and click the search button.

(If you were searching for all the relevant nodes from one specific Twitter user, though, you could use the URL search by typing in the domain and username as it appears in Twitter’s URL: For example, “twitter.com/scenestealreric”)

Adding this to the word search function which allows you to drilldown into any post containing your search word adds one more layer of customization to your insight.

Bulk Reporting Options

Bulk Options have been expanded so that users can select results and keep them selected across multiple pages. Users now have greater control over mass actions without having to expand the display view or repeat an action across multiple pages.

You can click the nodes you want to select, go to another page of results and do the same thing, and have a single action affect them all.

This expansion applies to Insight Explorer (complete list of all relevant URLs) and Excerpt Explorer (list of URLs with overt sentiment).

This means there are whole areas of context than you can group together, display, or delete, depending on your needs.

This weekend saw a new rollout for Spark that streamlined the user interface, making it easier to see and interact with important information at a glance. One of the most noticeable changes is that the Insight Analytics page is now known as Insight Explorer.

This section of Spark is laid out in an intuitive fashion and has improved functionality. The new Insight Explorer section gives a more in-depth look at each data gathered for each individual insight by including a complete list of relevant URLs. These URLs can be sorted with the new global filter to find and highlight the material that is the most important to you.

The Bulk Options box can be checked to automatically select the individual boxes to the left of each URL. Use that option or select nodes individually and apply the Delete Selected Nodes feature or the Export Data icon.

Insight Explorer is laid out in an easy-to-read format that gives you a snapshot of the most important information, with the ability to delve further into each URL. Here’s a glance at some of the new features:

Site Type – Each site type is color-coded and has a corresponding abbreviation.

Sentiment – The circle next to the site type graphic will either be colored, red, green, or gray to represent the negative, positive, or neutral average sentiment level of each URL.

Page title – The title of the URL is displayed just to the right of the sentiment rating. It is bolded and in blue. If you click on the title, you will go to the Site Details page for that particular URL where more detailed information about that web page is shown.

Domain – Under the title on the left side is the domain of the URL. If you click on the domain, a direct link to the specific URL will pop up in a new tab in your web browser. If you roll your cursor over the domain, the full URL will appear.

Influence – This ranking orders each node in your insight according to Spark’s influence algorithm. This is the same proprietary algorithm as the Node Influence ranking on the Top Engagements Targets gadget.

Summary – This displays text from the URL that was indexed from RSS feeds or search engine APIs, and is often—but not always—the first words of the post. Each site will be different.

Options
• The Delete Node icon will delete the URL.
• The Favorite icon highlights that site by adding a favorite icon next to the sentiment score. Favorites can be used to develop a Daily Growth Report. Click the icon a second time to un-favorite a site.
• The Notes/Tasks icon allows you to add notes or tasks to the URL.

If the options exist for that URL, one to four feature icons may appear along the bottom of each listing.

• The Excerpt Available icon appears if Spark has captured at least one excerpt of overt sentiment. Click on the icon and a new box will appear below the listing with the text of the excerpt, its sentiment rating, and the date it was captured by Spark.

• The Notes/Tasks icon appears if one or more notes or tasks have been assigned by a user within the insight. Clicking on this icon takes you to the Site Details page, where all tasks and notes assigned are displayed.

• The Video Embed icon and External Comments icon will appear if a site offers API access to extra information such as videos or comment streams. Clicking on these icons takes you to the Site Details page, where the URL’s embedded video and comments section are displayed.

Last month, we rolled out a helpful new workflow management system. The tasks feature allows managers to assign tasks to employees within the Spark platform. A task can be created and assigned that relates to either a specific URL or insight, at which point assigner and assignee will receive email updates.

Spark’s new alert system can be set with user-specified parameters to email you when unusual traffic or spikes occur in your insight that need your attention.

An iterative development cycle is vitally important to our company. Spiral16 considers customer feedback to be essential and are fortunate to have engaged customers who share their time with us. As we move forward with improvements to Spark, our newly created S16 User Team will have our ear as we incorporate the following new features.

Here are some things Spiral16 is currently working on (not final layout–still in development):

Global Date Filtering
With the addition of a global date filter, users can now set a default date range and custom filters that will be automatically applied across all areas of an insight. One-stop filter and sorting options will save time and make it easier to build customized reports.

Insight Explorer
Based on usability best practices and client feedback, Spiral16 is redesigning the detailed list view of insights to include better at-a-glance information. This will help clients understand which URLs matter the most for each specific topic.

In addition, a new bulk-action option has been included to allow clients to quickly update sentiment scores, site-type categories, and date information on multiple URLs at once. A new visual layout will improve readability across the board.

Conversation Sentiment page
Spiral16 is redesigning our Conversation Sentiment page to match the Insight Explorer layout with a focus on readability, quick editing, and a better grasp of important sentiment nuggets at a glance.

Insight Summary page
In addition to ease of use with the global date filter (which will allow users to set a single date range for all reporting gadgets), Spiral16 is improving the Insight Summary page to allow users more control over how their reporting gadgets are displayed.

With a more dynamic feel, users can now control the layout more fully, greatly improving the reporting capabilities.

We are in the process of doing a series for demo videos to explain how Spark software works – and how you will benefit from various updates.

Here is a sketch and breakdown of the next changes, and what we will be adding to the eight video segments.

We post these sketches because it shows the process from illustration to finished product.

Many of our best work starts by sketching on anything we can get our hands on – from marketing elements to product enhancements.

Ultimately, we are a creative minded software company that pulls from diverse backgrounds to produce something special.

I posted a blog on Wednesday about our recording session for some marketing videos we’re getting produced with the help of Dan Welter.

Here is the audio from our “universe” video. This is going to be an all-in-one piece that helps people understand Spiral16, Spark and our company goals.

Listen to the track below.

[podcast]http://www.spiral16.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/spiral16_audio_whitney.mp3[/podcast]

We’re creating a set of videos for the Web site that help potential clients learn what Spiral16 and Spark are about.

Tamlyn, our assistant, is from South Africa. Vanessa, Tamlyn’s mom, has a wicked-amazing accent, so we tricked her into voicing the audio for us.

Tuesday was our first audio session at C.R. Sound with Dan Welter, our video producer. The Spark album should drop in late November. (That’s some rock star humor… get it? No? Kbye.)

Check out the video blog for a brief look at our recording session.

This one expresses ideas for repositioning data – and making it more valuable once it’s collected or provided.  Something we are constantly doing at Spiral16.

This was an experiment for me to find visuals that already exist that have relevance to S16 and Spark.

[MEDIA=aa2b6ecb]What I didn’t know at the time is that the music is relevant to what we are doing and why we are called Spiral16. I didn’t make the connection until I was digging deeper into the music and Fibonacci numbers.

The music (just 25 seconds of it) is Tool’s song Lateralus. Here is a little more from Wikipedia:

The band puts an emphasis on the sound of their songs and attempts to reduce the effect lyrics can have on the perception of songs by not releasing song lyrics with any album. Lyrical arrangements are often given special attention, such as in “Lateralus”. The number of syllables per line in the lyrics to “Lateralus” correspond to an arrangement of the Fibonacci numbers and in “Jambi” the metrical foot iamb is used.

So, it’s not going to show up on Unexplained Mysteries or Believe It Or Not it’s one of those strange things that helped me find a hidden connection.

This is a sketch that was done while on a conference call of what the Spark page of the web site will look like eventually.

The concept is built out and the video/audio is done (shame it’s me doing the voice over). Editor’s note: Stuart’s accent makes us sound fancy and smart. That’s why he’s doing the VO.

Sketch of Spark Detail page