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Last week, I heard Charlene Li speak at a business marketer’s luncheon where she gave a comprehensive overview of how social technologies are transforming business. Charlene laid out a framework for how businesses should be approaching the emerging (and at times daunting) consumer-controlled marketplace that nicely dovetailed with Jennifer’s recent post about the Scout Labs Hierarchy of Needs. The basic premise: There are low-level, but critical business needs (like crisis management) that social technologies can and do address readily, and that higher level business needs (like becoming a customer-centric organization) are also very well served by getting across CGM.

When asked about the biggest hurdle companies face when seeking to become more tuned in to CGM, Charlene responded that executive buy in was still a big hurdle for some marketers and by far the single largest factor that contributes to success when adopting a social media strategy.

I caught this piece in the New York Times yesterday that gave a nice list of healthy examples of top executives that have actively embraced the new world of social media. I thought it excellent ammunition for marketers who are looking for convincing arguments to the powers that be that it’s not only time to start listening, but to invest in tools and best-practices for keeping up with consumer-controlled conversations.

If that doesn’t do the trick, keep your eye out for Charlene’s soon to be released book, Groundswell: Winning in a World of Social Technologies, in which I’m sure the case for a well-supported social media strategy at will be aptly made.

We always enjoy a good data visualization, especially when it’s elucidating what we are doing here at Scout Labs! On Wired Magazine this weekend was a infographic of what happens after you hit “Publish” on your blog page. It’s called “The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits - to You”. If you can figure out how to click and hold your mouse down to zoom it and scan around, you’ll see a category called “Data Miners” and I guess that’s partly us — the ones who analyze the blogosphere (and social networks and image-sharing sites and video sharing sites and user reviews) to make sense of it for clients overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all. But we are also the “Corporations” (yes, “the Suits”), because real people at real companies are using our service to Scout what people love, hate, want, think and feel about their products, brands and services. What we are NOT: an ad network or aggregator trying to sell ads. We figure there are plenty of those out there desperately trying to get ads in front of eyeballs. Inspiring people to build better products and to build stronger relationships with customers sounds much more fun to us.

Rails provides a highly functional URL-to-action routing system. The core method used by #redirect_to and #link_to when generating URL’s is #url_for.

So, the question eventually pops up:
What is the opposite of #url_for?

The answer is built-in to Rails, used at the beginning of every request in dispatcher.rb to generate a route from the URL. It’s stashed inside a :nodoc: section of Rails’ source:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize_path

Depending on context, your call to #recognize_path may need to be prefixed by the top-level class prefix “::”.

#recognize_path only works on the path part of the URL. Passing a full URL with the protocol, hostname or query string will cause throw ActionController::RoutingError. Make sure you cleanse the path of those URL components.

In my case, usage looks like:

return_to_hash = ::ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize_path url.gsub(/\?.*$/,'')

The other day an analyst asked me about the different ways companies use Scout Labs-why they start using it, and all the ways they end up using it. It got me thinking about the evolution I see when companies decide to use a service to help them tune in to customers across the Internet. In fact, it reminds me Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In 1943, Abraham Maslow developed his Hierarchy of Needs, a theory to explain human behavior. Maslow suggested that psychological needs are hierarchical, and you can’t move up the pyramid until the underlying psychological needs are met. Many have since challenged his strict hierarchy, pointing out several exceptions to the rule. But as a pop-culture metaphor, it helps describe the various ways companies use Scout Labs.

Here is Scout Labs’ version of the Hierarchy of Needs:

1. Find and fight fires (or CYA)
Many organizations get interested in consumer-generated media (CGM for short) because they want to find fires - exploding laptops, rants from prominent bloggers, a rumor leak, a copyright violation - and fight them as quickly as possible. This is an absolutely essential use of a service like Scout Labs, and the reason why whatever service you select needs to:

• Be real-time (so you can find those fires as they happen).
• Find the fires for you, prioritizing what’s important / worth paying attention to right now.
• Have email alerts built in.
• Help you quickly act mobilize your response.

In this day of highly vocal customers who areconnected to each other real-time and whose seething blog posts about you can show up within the first few results on Google, companies worry about the sheer volume of CGM and their lack of visibility into it. There are huge dollars at stake. Finding and fighting fires is a fundamental reason to Scout the Internet, and one that your organization has to feel comfortable with. This means you need to have confidence not only in the tool you use, but in your team’s judgment and ability to take action in time of threat.

2. Seek out product and marketing feedback

Once an organization gets good at finding and fighting fires, we see them start to listen even more closely to what customers are saying. Rather than only monitoring a few, huge problems and trying to solve them, companies start listening every day for insight they can use to improve products and marketing. What do customers like? What don’t they like? Why don’t they like it? What do people wish we would do differently? Scout Labs makes it easy to answer these questions. When a company evolves to the point where it really listens to customers in this way, we typically see corporate communications /PR, brand managers, product managers, and marketing folks all using Scout Labs together to helpbuild better products, inspired by the voice of the people.

3. Build relationships with customers
Only after a company is a good listener can it jump in and start building relationships with customers. I think of it like a game of jump rope. The customer conversation has its rhythm, pattern and players, and you don’t want to barge right in before getting the lay of the land — you’ll just get all tangled up. (Scout Labs lore: at one point we toyed with the idea of naming the company Double Dutch!) Watch for a while. Learn who the key influencers are. Get a feel for the language, the concerns, the issues. And when you’re ready, jump in. Be part of the conversation. Answer questions, ask questions, inform the best you can.

And if you have a service like Scout Labs that helps you facilitate this engagement — communicate with each other about it. Keep a record of it so that you have organizational memory around it. Track the impact of these customer connections. At that point your organization will be able to build relationships with customers on a mass scale. It’s not easy to evolve to this place. You have to really understand your customers and their communities before you can be welcomed in. AND you have to trust your employees to have these conversations and build these relationships. But if you can get there, the rewards are great.

4. Be a customer-centric organization
The apex for an individual, according to Maslow, is self-actualization -making the most of your abilities and striving to be the best you can be. For an organization that wants to listen to customers, the pinnacle is being a truly customer-centric organization. For a company at this stage of evolution, customers are partners. Listening to customers and engaging with them to build better products and sell more is a strategic priority and part of a company’s culture. Everyone - from the CEO to customer service reps - is tuned in to what customers are talking about, coming up with new, customer-inspired ideas, jumping into conversations to build relationships, and truly innovating.

Being a customer-centric organization is more than a nice-sounding aspiration. We believe it’s a strategic competitive advantage. Whoever listens better, innovates faster, and builds personal relationships with customers wins.

Remember the game “Telephone”? You sit in a circle and one person whispers a phrase or sentence into the ear of the person next to her. That person repeats the message to the person next to him and so on. When the circle is complete, the originator speaks aloud his original message and the last receiver repeats what he heard. Uproarious laughter usually abounds (depending on how much beer is involved). What began as “faster than a heard of turtles” becomes “master of the nerdy girdles”.

The rumor mill is alive and well and operating at lightening speed online as Ford Motor Company found out today. It’s still a bit murky, but it looks as if Ford had an issue with the use of the Ford logo on the Black Mustang Club’s annual calendar and in no time rumors were flying across the BMC community that they were liable to be sued by Ford for taking pictures of the cars that they own.

It looks like Ford, in fact, did “wake up and smell the CGM” and dialed right into the conversation with a spring in their step. With impressive responsiveness, Ford dispelled the unfounded rumors and made clear their policies of trademark protection. Whether founded or unfounded, Bravo to the BMC members for ranting online about their perception of Ford and double Bravo to Ford for listening.

First came the Nature vs. Nurture debate: what makes us who we are? Is it nature — what our parents, at the moment of conception, brought to the genealogical table (or, bed, for those of us with more traditional parents)? Or is it where we lived and how those parents treated us in our early years and beyond? Then came the Taste Great, Less Filling conundrum. Today, at least in the web universe, rages the human versus machine controversy. At its core, the questions is: what returns the best, most relevant results (search results, relevant news, etc.)? Machine-generated algorithms or human “editors”? Google, with its mysterious search algorithms and millions of servers, is the poster-child for the “Machine” camp (although the reality is that their algorithms rely on human editors). In the “Wisdom of the Crowd” camp are the Web 2.0 likes of Digg, Wikipedia and del.icio.us. Like in the early days of the Nature vs. Nurture debate, (or Taste Great, Less Filling, for that matter) people are polarized over the issue — as if it’s one or the other. John Battelle sparked another round of debate on the matter just last week. Of course, the right answer is “both”.

Machines can do things that humans just can’t do very efficiently. They can process huge amounts of data very quickly (like the massive amounts of consumer-generated media that exist). And machines don’t need to sleep or take latte breaks, so they can monitor things around the clock, in real-time. Of course, the categorizations and the kinds of processing that machines can do are very “gross” — they can count things, extract links, and look for patterns and run analyses that humans devise (like, say, an Influence algorithm or a Significance algorithm or patterns in language to determine sentiment). Machines can also count, measure and incorporate HUMAN (user) actions and behaviors — both explicit and implicit — along with the technical data, and that’s where the lines begin to blur and where things get interesting. So, we desperately need smart machines, directed by far-smarter humans, for complex things things like search or monitoring the voice of the customer out across the Internet.

But people, especially teams of like-minded people with a common purpose, can do what no machine could ever do — draw conclusions, add insight and strategize. Humans can add the “so what”. A founding belief of Scout Labs is “Let technology do what it does best, and people do what we do best. Together, we’re a pretty good team.” We have architected the service to offer the best of both worlds, working together seamlessly. Of course all this is a means to an end. Our users just want to know what stuff she needs to pay attention to right now and to collaborate with her team to do something about it. We are excited that very soon, everyone will get a chance to use Scout Labs and see Man and Machine working together in peace and harmony. Taste Great vs. Less Filling will still be there to fight about.