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Mar
3
‘Scratch your VRM itch’ meeting
Filed Under VRM, Projects, Events | Leave a Comment
This is an all day meeting on Tuesday April 15th, the theme is VRM and how it addresses (and hopefully redresses) the imbalance between individuals and their relationships with vendors, companies or institutions.
The agenda will be set by attendees starting from why VRM appeals to you, where you see it going and how. Bring your assumptions, understanding and ideas to the table where others can examine it, challenge it, improve it or help you take them further.
Technical issues can be discussed although for focus on specifics I find smaller gatherings, more productive (so watch this space for ‘hacker sessions‘ announcements). This meeting will be more about what VRM can do for you as well as what you can do for VRM.
I envisage working in groups or all together depending on the situation and have chosen the venue to fit that purpose. Limit is about 35 people as greater numbers (especially in one room) become unwieldy and hard to focus on specific issues.
Date and time:
Tuesday April 15th 2008, from about 9.30 to 5pm
Venue:
Central London - October gallery near Holborn, in Club room with sofas, large table and chairs, wi-fi, flipchart, lunch and refreshments during coffee & tea breaks.
Price:
not more than £40 to cover cost for 35 people. As I am organising this as an individual, without any corporate backing, I will be able to go ahead with the event after 15 people sign up. This is to cover the fixed cost, any surplus will go towards the next VRM event of this kind. (Many thanks to Paul Doleman of iCrossing for offering to subsidise tickets to the tune of £10 each.)
Who this is for:
Been following VRM for a while, given it some thoughts, want to be part of it, wondered how to make it work, wondered where the money is, how to get businesses involved, how to build tools and applications, have it all worked out and want others to know, in short, have a VRM itch to scratch. :).
Who this is not for:
Heard about VRM, interested or intrigued, would like to know more but haven’t really thought much about it. Join us at VRM Hub meetings where you can imbibe VRM with drinks and informal chat.
Sign up for “Scratch your VRM itch” meeting on the VRM Hub wiki.
For those interested, here is a VRM one-pager and a white paper on Feeds based VRM.
Feb
27
VRM one-pager
Filed Under VRM, Projects | 10 Comments
Here is a brief summary, a taster of what VRM means to me:
Imagine being able to take charge of your information and data, notes and records about past transactions, your purchase history, future plans and ideas, preferences and knowledge about areas of your life. At the moment you are the last person to be able to benefit from all this accessible only via various platforms. Your ‘digital detritus’ is not yours, it is information that others harvest and use for their own purposes. Imagine to be able to do that with the same ease as checking email, posting to a blog, adding a bookmark to del.icio.us, searching Google, commenting on an article, uploading a photo to Flickr, managing your google or ical calendar, leaving a review on Amazon, adding an application on Facebook. All this whilst protecting your privacy to the degree you find comfortable, sharing your activity or data as you wish, not as mandated by the platform providing some functionality in exchange for your data (Facebook, Amazon etc).
Imagine having your customers share with you what they like, want and think of you. At the moment, you are dependent on market research, which is like looking through a keyhole at the rich ‘user-generated’ world. Imagine being able to relate to your customers, consistently and persistently, where they contribute directly to your supply chain where it makes sense - whether it is R&D, product design, distribution and marketing. Interaction with them is modular, intuitive and user-driven freeing much of your resources spent on marketing and transaction cost.
The above is part of the vision of the Project VRM. The name stands for Vendor Relationship Management and it originates from ‘flipping’ CRM - customer relationship management. Project VRM is a community-driven effort to support the creation and building of VRM tools. The project is headquartered at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and headed by Doc Searls, a fellow with the center. The project is building a framework that sets standards and protocols for a category of tools that enable individuals and organizations to relate and transact on more equivalent terms. By minimizing the leverage and control one party has over another in a (typically commercial) relationship, individuals and organizations can instead focus on creating and sharing value. The VRM opportunity is not rooted in us vs. them emotionally-driven arguments but in creating a more efficient and balance relationship between business and their customers, markets and companies, demand and supply.
What’s in it for the individual?
The ability to manage and analyze your data will give you better knowledge about yourself, the kind of knowledge that is the holy grail of most companies’ customer data management. The awareness of your preferences, understanding of your needs will help you to articulate them easier and strengthen your position with vendors.
What’s in it for businesses?
We live in an increasingly decentralized world with more customer choice, yet vendors continue to fiercely collect and control customer data and exploit the opportunities therein. The ultimate goal of VRM is better relationships between customers and vendors, by considering and constructing tools that put the customer in control of their data and ultimately their relationships with other individuals, companies and institutions.
Benefits of ‘letting go’ of customer data:
- Customers share the burden of storing and protecting the data - eases compliance, privacy & security concerns
- Increased access to information about customers - direct benefits to the customer to share more data rather than less.
- New services from previously unavailable access to customer data
For those based in London, who want to learn more and meet people with similar interests there are regular monthly VRM Hub meetings.
Jan
30
VRM meetings in London
Filed Under VRM, Projects, Admin, Events | Leave a Comment
Getting our VRM act together, Iain Henderson and I, have organised meetings for those who would like to know more about the project, meet those involved in it and find out what’s been happening. And hopefully meet some interesting people.
We plan to have regular monthly meetings, usually falling on the last Thursday of the month, unless there is a compelling reason to move it.
January meeting is tomorrow evening from 6-9pm in Grape Street Wine Bar in Shaftesbury avenue, private room.
February meeting is currently planned for 28th February, with a good chance of Doc Searls joining us.
For more details and sign up:
Oct
2
Thinking about why VRM…
Filed Under VRM, Projects, Marketing | Leave a Comment
…because a customer database doesn’t a relationship make.
Sep
22
Power equation
Filed Under Communication, Projects, Web/Tech | 4 Comments
I have been thinking about how to explain the shift in communications to professional communicators within companies. That communication is not a skill, it is a survival trait. It is considered a skill within a particular environment that requires specific ways of processing, broadcasting and receiving information. But if the environment changes, then the skill may no longer be relevant. And such shift has occurred in communications and media industries because of the internet.
We now have the POWER to do things we couldn’t do before, we have the tools and the technology that enable us to go direct and bypass. That’s a real power in the world where intermediaries form entire industries. The ‘power to the person’ is the most important development for me so far.
Then there is the rise of CONTEXT. The web has removed physical limitations on space. Data was expensive to create, store and move around and now it is not. This made room for context, which is becoming at least as important as the data. In fact, it is what make data and information the skeleton, giving shape to the flesh and skin but it is no longer the whole body and finish. The important thing is that context can be provided only by a human mind. It cannot be automated - when creating or absorbing it.
Finally, there is DISTRIBUTION. The networked nature of the web has changed the nature of the expensive part of the media - getting their content to the desired audience. But online, the content does not contain any more and people formerly known as audience are now co-producers and distributors.
All this adds up to many groovy things. The important one for communicators is that communication is now the default, not a skill.
Sep
22
Quote to remember
Filed Under Social web, Projects, Quotes | Leave a Comment
Web 2.0, Health 2.0, whatever you call it, that seems more to be the pretty packaging you can put something around it to help market it. People aren’t just “co-developers” in this relationship — they are true partners. People don’t want their intelligence “harnessed.” They want to engage in a two-way dialogue and conversation with their providers.
- John Grohol, E-patients and Health 2.0
Sep
12
Quote to remember
Filed Under Privacy & Security, Projects, Quotes | Leave a Comment
But rather than grieving over what BigCos do with our privacy, or getting straight exactly what Facebook is up to, I’d prefer to create tools that give us — each of us, natively — selective disclosure policies that we can pass along to the membership organizations of the world.
We’re so used to living in vendor habitats that we can barely imagine having real power and control in our relationships with them — for their good as well as our own. Selective disclosure has always been a basic tenet of VRM.
Power needs to start with the individual. In a pure VRM context, it’s about my relationship with FaceBook, or Peets Coffee, or United Airlines, or the corner cleaners.
- Doc Searls in Power to the person
Sep
12
Power to the customers
Filed Under Autonomy, Communication, Social web, Projects, Business | 1 Comment
A friend emailed me a link saying ‘you won’t like this’.
An Australian accounting software developer blames a “severe downturn in sales” on people who bad-mouthed its products in online user forums. It wants a judge to muzzle their comments.
Apart from being a serious contender for the Darwin Award - seriously, suing people for making comments about its products and services! - it is also a company with a mindset I ranted about recently.
Let’s have a look at the offending ‘word of mouth’:
Among the challenged statements are incendiary comments such as these:
If you deal in Foreign Currency at all, I would avoid it. It was one of the big issues we faced … and don’t get me started on the inventory and manufacturing system - what a joke.
and
I was put onto this forum recently after discussion with peers, about how frustrated, dissatisfied and ultimately ripped off I feel after purchasing 2clix earlier this year … Our company has been trying to implement 2clix for sometime now and we are still in the implementation process and feel like we are getting nowhere fast.
These are very mild comments indeed. They would hardly register on the heat scale in most flame wars in the blogosphere. So on top of a company that has bad products and services and doesn’t know how to treat its customers, we also have a software developer that has no clue about the web and the conversations it spawns.
And now for the good news:
Since January 2Clix has suffered a “severe downturn in sales” that cost the company about $750,000 over six months, according to the 2Clix complaint, which was filed in the Supreme Court of Queensland. (All currency amounts are in US dollars.)
Here we have the holy grail of quantification of the word of mouth! The marketers of the world rejoice! Not quite. The good news is that the impact can be significant and lasting. Started by a few comments by ‘unimportant’ people. This is a power of sorts, although not yet harnessed. It can be amplified by more tools and understanding of what’s going on. Similar to blogs capturing, networking and scaling the conversations that people have always had, and similar to social networks connecting people through their profiles and relationships, there are ways to do this to our interactions with businesses and markets. Preferably without silos, lock-ins and closed platforms.
It often seems to be that people forget the power starts from the individual. It is not merely about scale and aggregation. I am reminded of Doc’s post Power to the person, which strongly resonates, for obvious reasons. 
On the way to the airport this morning, my wife and I were talking about one of the big easily-defaulted misunderstandings of the VRM concept: that power for people only comes in numbers, in aggregation. The problem is with the word “only”. Power needs to start with the individual. In a pure VRM context, it’s about my relationship with FaceBook, or Peets Coffee, or United Airlines, or the corner cleaners.
Sep
6
Yeah, I signed. Happily.
We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:
* Ownership of their own personal information, including:
o their own profile data
o the list of people they are connected to
o the activity stream of content they create;
* Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
* Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.Sites supporting these rights shall:
* Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
* Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
* Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
* Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.
I do like it. Especially, the ownership, control and freedom over my own data principles.
I was happy to see a call for the ability to export any data online by their owners… very much in line with what we are trying to evangelise with Project VRM in all areas.
Aug
8
Open as in…
Filed Under Autonomy, Social web, Projects, Tools and applications, Web/Tech | 1 Comment
I linked to my post about social networks in a Facebook note, just to see how it works. I got an interesting response from Geoff Arnold who pointed out:
But how do you build an open version of a trusted third party? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
For instance, how could Paypal be open? Or Amazon’s new payment system? Could one create an “open” bank?
These are hard issues. There’s technical feasibility, and then there’s rationality. I assume that it is rational to prefer to be a monopolist….
Yes, I see what Geoff is getting and and also that I haven’t defined ‘open’ well enough. I agree, it can cover a multitude of sins, so let me clarify… Open as in not locked-in, open from the point of the user and his ability to use the data that is being collected by him and about him. It doesn’t mean indiscriminately open and accessible to everyone. Open as in offering much greater control over stuff that belongs to me, that I create and manage. Open as in opposed to siloed.
For example, all the data and purchase history I have on Amazon.com (actually it’s Amazon.co.uk). I would like to be able to put them somewhere, in a place that I can call my own. And then do clever stuff with it myself. Combine it with my reading habits, travels (to make sure I have reading material for those long airport queues), my calendar for people’s birthday, with my notes on vendors, my purchase history, my opinion about prices, trends and reading habits, share my views on books with my friends. (And not just use some silly widget somewhere on a blog but as a proper space, secure and private but shareable where I run my own affairs using not just a few apps like ‘to do’ or shopping lists but the entire range of tools that are available online, openly developed). Basically, a potential improvement on the sparse information available to me that Amazon and other vendors that they collect for their own purposes. Not mine.
The internet is an open platform, but it doesn’t mean everything is hanging out there for all to see. For example, open bank could mean that the safety deposit box belongs to you and only you can get inside it.
All this leads me to my current obsession project, which is VRM. We hope to address, or rather, redress the balance of power between the customers and vendors, individuals and companies, employees and processes…etc. So watch this space.
As for Quis custodiet ipsos custodes… how about Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow..
I tried to post this response on Facebook but, alas, could not. I got a message - comment is too long by 450 characters. Not enough space for a verbose blogger. So here it is, out in the open.
Aug
6
Doing it my way, all the way…
Filed Under Projects, Film | 3 Comments
And that is exactly what Kamal Aboukhater, the producer of the movie Blowing Smoke, has just done. He has produced the film his way - deeply un-PC screenplay about cigars, men and women using cutting-edge digital technology - and now he is releasing the movie via the Blowing Smoke blog.
So having done all that, getting good people on my side working with me, I didn’t want to become a slave to anyone. I didn’t want to wait for my movie to travel up the long and tedious chain of command until someone finally made a decision to release it.
…There will be no waiting. I can, audience willing, get immediate response and won’t be at the mercy of a movie studio or distributor. One thing I have learned about audiences, thanks to blogs, is that they are not a unified mass of "consumers." They are individuals, choosing something (like what to watch) for many and varied reasons. Some might want to watch Blowing Smoke because they like cigars, some might be drawn to the poker, and others may want their opinions about women and men confirmed. Whatever the reason, now they can do so easily. And, if they feel like it, they can let me know their reactions and opinions.
And he really does not like the studios, but he seems to like bloggers:
Major studios seem to be the last to adopt and adapt to innovation and trends. And, just like with video and DVDs, they are again missing the boat, unaware of the new possibilities for reaching their audiences. They might have caught glimpses of the future, such as Firefly, Global Frequency, and Garden State. This is thanks to a new band of warriors, better known as bloggers, who add strength to the voice of the fans, fighting for more choice for themselves and, in the end, all of us.
The point is that he can go all the way to his audience, by-passing the intermediaries. Sure, the path is not clear, the journey may be either uneventful or too bumpy, but Kamal is aware of the experimental nature of what he has done. He is enjoying the comments from those who understand and appreciate what he is trying to do. As he said after the ‘launch’:
It’s no longer just about the movie but about an opportunity to add another dimension to the infrastructure that’s already there - the blogosphere and the internet.
It has taken a while to get to this point both in terms of understanding and then realising the idea. I feel priviledged to have been part of that process and enjoy working with Kamal whose open mind has been instrumental in this adventure. In return, he can be blamed for my blossoming addiction to cigars, the quality of which would make any cigar afficionado weep with joy. Whilst discussing the final details of the Blowing Smoke ‘release operation’, I savoured a particularly good Hoyo de Monterrey. Who says the days of plotting in smoke-filled rooms are over… I shall leave you with an exhortation: Boxed BS. Available now! Get your own! Oh and, BS download is Coming Out Real Soon Now!
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London VRM meetings
