Category: VRM+CRM (page 8 of 10)

Your actual wallet vs./+ Google’s and Apple’s

March 6, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Now comes news that Apple has been granted a patent for the iWallet. Here’s one image among many at that last link:

iwallet

Note the use of the term “rules.” Keep that word in mind. It is a Good Word.

Now look at this diagram from Phil Windley‘s Event Channels post:

event channels

Another term for personal event network is personal cloud. Phil visits this in An Operating System for Your Personal Cloud, where he says, “In contrast a personal event network is like an OS for your personal cloud. You can install apps to customize it for your purpose, it canstore and manage your personal data, and it provides generalized services through APIsthat any app can take advantage of.” One of Phil’s inventions is the Kinetic Rules Language, or KRL, and the rules engine for executing those rules, in real time. Both are open source. Using KRL you (or a programmer working for you, perhaps at a fourth party working on your behalf, can write the logic for connecting many different kinds of events on the Live Web, as Phil describes here).

What matters here is that you write your own rules. It’s your life, your relationships and your data. Yes, there are many relationships, but you’re in charge of your own stuff, and your own ends of those relationships. And you operate as  free, independent and sovereign human being. Not as a “user” inside a walled garden, where the closest thing you can get to a free market is “your choice of captor.”

Underneath your personal cloud is your personal data store (MyDex, et. al.), service (Higgins), locker (Locker Project / Singly), or vault (Personal.com). Doesn’t matter what you call it, as long as it’s yours, and you can move the data from one of these things into another, if you like, compliant with the principles Joe Andrieu lays out in his posts on data portability, transparency, self-hosting and service endpoint portability.

Into that personal cloud you should also be able to pull in, say, fitness data from Digifit and social data from any number of services, as Singly demonstrates in its App Gallery. One of those is Excessive Mapper, which pulls together checkins with Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter. I only check in with Foursquare, which gives me this (for the U.S. at least):

Excessive Mapper

The thing is, your personal cloud should be yours, not somebody else’s. It should contain your data assets. The valuable nature of personal data is what got the World Economic Forum to consider personal data an asset class of its own. To help manage this asset class (which has enormous use value, and not just sale value), a number of us (listed by Tony Fish in his post on the matter) spec’d out the Digital Asset Grid, or DAG…

DAG

… which was developed with Peter Vander Auwera and other good folks at SWIFT (and continues to evolve).

There are more pieces than that, but I want to bring this back around to where your wallet lives, in your purse or your back pocket.

Wallets are personal. They are yours. They are not Apple’s or Google’s or Microsoft’s, or any other company’s, although they contain rectangles representing relationships with various companies and organizations:

Still, the container you carry them in — your wallet — is yours. It isn’t somebody else’s.

But it’s clear, from Apple’s iWallet patent, that they want to own a thing called a wallet that lives in your phone. Does Google Wallet intend to be the same kind of thing? One might say yes, but it’s not yet clear. When Google Wallet appeared on the development horizon last May, I wrote Google Wallet and VRM. In August, when flames rose around “real names” and Google +, I wrote Circling Around Your Wallet, expanding on some of the same points.

What I still hope is that Google will want its wallet to be as open as Android, and to differentiate their wallet from Apple’s through simple openness.  But, as Dave Winer said a few days ago…

Big tech companies don’t trust users, small tech companies have no choice. This is why smaller companies, like Dropbox, tend to be forces against lock-in, and big tech companies try to lock users in.

Yet that wasn’t the idea behind Android, which is why I have a degree of hope for Google Wallet. I don’t know enough yet about Apple’s iWallet; but I think it’s a safe bet that Apple’s context will be calf-cow, the architecture I wrote about here and here. (In that architecture, you’re the calf, and Apple’s the cow.) Could also be that you will have multiple wallets and a way to unify them. In fact, that’s probably the way to bet.

So, in the meantime, we should continue working on writing our own rules for our own digital assets, building constructive infrastructure that will prove out in ways that require the digital wallet-makers to adapt rather than to control.

I also invite VRM and VRooMy developers to feed me other pieces that fit in the digital assets picture, and I’ll add them to this post.

How about using the ‘No Track’ button we already have?

February 23, 2012 / / 3 Comments

left r-buttonright r-buttonFor as long as we’ve had economies, demand and supply have been attracted to each other like a pair of magnets. Ideally, they should match up evenly and produce good outcomes. But sometimes one side comes to dominate the other, with bad effects along with good ones. Such has been the case on the Web ever since it went commercial with the invention of the cookie in 1995, resulting in a calf-cow model in which the demand side — that’s you and me — plays the submissive role of mere “users,” who pretty much have to put up with whatever rules websites set on the supply side.

Consistent with Lord Acton’s axiom (“Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”) the near absolute power of website cows over user calves has resulted in near-absolute corruption of website ethics in respect to personal privacy.

This has been a subject of productive obsession by Julia Anguin and her team of reporters at The Wall Street Journal, which have been producing the What They Know series (shortcut: http://wsj.com/wtk) since July 30, 2010, when Julia by-lined The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets. The next day I called that piece a turning point. And I still believe that.

Today came another one, again in the Journal, in Julia’s latest, titled Web Firms to Adopt ‘No Track’ Button. She begins,

A coalition of Internet giants including Google Inc. has agreed to support a do-not-track button to be embedded in most Web browsers—a move that the industry had been resisting for more than a year.

The reversal is being announced as part of the White House’s call for Congress to pass a “privacy bill of rights,” that will give people greater control over the personal data collected about them.

The long White House press release headline reads,

We Can’t Wait: Obama Administration Unveils Blueprint for a “Privacy Bill of Rights” to Protect Consumers Online

Internet Advertising Networks Announces Commitment to “Do-Not-Track” Technology to Allow Consumers to Control Online Tracking

Obviously, government and industry have been working together on this one. Which is good, as far as it goes. Toward that point, Julia adds,

The new do-not-track button isn’t going to stop all Web tracking. The companies have agreed to stop using the data about people’s Web browsing habits to customize ads, and have agreed not to use the data for employment, credit, health-care or insurance purposes. But the data can still be used for some purposes such as “market research” and “product development” and can still be obtained by law enforcement officers.

The do-not-track button also wouldn’t block companies such as Facebook Inc. from tracking their members through “Like” buttons and other functions.

“It’s a good start,” said Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “But we want you to be able to not be tracked at all if you so choose.”

In the New York Times’ White House, Consumers in Mind, Offers Online Privacy Guidelines Edward Wyatt writes,

The framework for a new privacy code moves electronic commerce closer to a one-click, one-touch process by which users can tell Internet companies whether they want their online activity tracked.

Much remains to be done before consumers can click on a button in their Web browser to set their privacy standards. Congress will probably have to write legislation governing the collection and use of personal data, officials said, something that is unlikely to occur this year. And the companies that make browsers — Google, Microsoft, Apple and others — will have to agree to the new standards.

No they won’t. Buttons can be plug-ins to existing browsers. And work has already been done. VRM developers are on the case, and their ranks are growing. We have dozens of developers (at that last link) working on equipping both the demand and the supply side with tools for engaging as independent and respectful parties. In fact we already have a button that can say “Don’t track me,” plus much more — for both sides. Its calle the R-button, and it looks like this: ⊂ ⊃. (And yes, those symbols are real characters. Took a long time to find them, but they do exist.)

Yours — the user’s — is on the left. The website’s is on the right. On a browser it might look like this:

r-button in a browser

Underneath both those buttons can go many things, including preferences, policies, terms, offers, or anything else — on both sides. One of those terms can be “do not track me.” It might point to a fourth party (see explanations here and here) which, on behalf of the user or customer, maintains settings that control sharing of personal data, including the conditions that must be met. A number of development projects and companies are already on this case. All the above falls into a category we call EmanciTerm. Much has been happening as well around personal data stores (PDSes), also called “lockers,” “services” and “vaults.” These include:

Three of those are in the U.S., one in Austria, one in France, one in South Africa, and three in the U.K. (All helping drive the Midata project by the U.K. government, by the way.) And those are just companies with PDSes. There are many others working on allied technologies, standards, protocols and much more. They’re all just flying below media radar because media like to look at what big suppliers and governments are doing. Speaking of which… 🙂

Here’s Julia again:

Google is expected to enable do-not-track in its Chrome Web browser by the end of this year.

Susan Wojcicki, senior vice president of advertising at Google, said the company is pleased to join “a broad industry agreement to respect the ‘Do Not Track’ header in a consistent and meaningful way that offers users choice and clearly explained browser controls.”

White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer Daniel Weitzner said the do-not-track option should clear up confusion among consumers who “think they are expressing a preference and it ends up, for a set of technical reasons, that they are not.”

Some critics said the industry’s move could throw a wrench in a separate year-long effort by the World Wide Web consortium to set an international standard for do-not-track. But Mr. Ingis said he hopes the consortium could “build off of” the industry’s approach.

So here’s an invitation to the White House, Google, the 3wC, interested BigCos (including CRM companies), developers of all sizes and journalists who are interested in building out genuine and cooperative relationships between demand and supply::::

Join us at IIW — the Internet Identity Workshop — in Mountain View, May 1-3. This is the unconference where developers and other helpful parties gather to talk things over and move development forward. No speakers, no panels, no BS. Just good conversation and productive work. It’s our fourteenth one, and they’ve all been highly productive.

As for the r-button, take it and run with it. It’s there for the development. It’s meaningful. We’re past square one. We’d love to have all the participation we can get, from the big guys as well as the little ones listed above and here.

To help get your thinking started, visit this presentation of one r-button scenario, by Adam Marcus of MIT. Here’s another view of the same work, which came of of a Google Summer of Code project through ProjectVRM and the Berkman Center:

(Props to Oshani Seneviratne and David Karger, also both of MIT, and Ahmad Bakhiet, of Kings College London, for work on that project.)

If we leave fixing the calf-cow problem entirely up to the BigCos and BigGov, it won’t get fixed. We have to work from the demand side as well. In economies, customers are the 100%.

Here are some other stories, mostly gathered by Zemanta:

All look at the symptoms, and supply-side cures. Time for the demand side to demand answers from itself. Fortunately, we’ve been listening, and the answers are coming.

Oh, and by the way, Mozilla has been offering “do not track” for a long time. Other tools are also available:

VRM and CCOs

February 12, 2012 / / Comments Off on VRM and CCOs

In The Rise Of The Chief Customer Officer, Paul Hagen of Forrester begins,

Over the past five years Forrester Research has observed an increase in the number of companies with a single executive leading customer experience efforts across a business unit or an entire company. These individuals often serve as top executives, with the mandate and power to design, orchestrate and improve customer experiences across every customer interaction. And whether firms call them Chief Customer Officers (CCOs) or give them some other label, these leaders sit at high levels of power at companies as diverse as Allstate, Dunkin’ Brands, Oracle and USAA.

Other titles meaning roughly the same thing are Chief Client Officer and Chief Experience Officer. All, Paul writes, “are charged with improving the customer experience.”

From the VRM perspective, that’s all we need to know. We’re the customers, and we’re charged with improving our experience too.

So I dug around a bit, and came up with a few leads and links that I’ll post here as a shout-out to the folks and disciplines involved.

First is the Chief Customer Officer Council, founded and led by Curtis Bingham (whom I see by LinkedIn is, like me, in the Boston area). Next are (via the CCOC),

These are people VRM-equipped customers are going to meet in the new middle. This small post is toward making the acquaintance.

Complaining vs. Buying

February 8, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Q: “What’s the difference between a tweeter and a customer?”

A: “One complains, the other buys.”

Just had to write that down. The Q and the A came in the midst of a VRM conference call that also touched on CRM, VRM+CRM, sCRM, trust frameworks, identity and other stuff.

Not saying that’s a fair characterization, by the way. Just that it’s an interesting one.

Customers are personal, cont’d

January 17, 2012 / / Comments Off on Customers are personal, cont’d

There are so many excellent comments and questions following my last post, Consumers are social, Customers are personal, that I decided it would make more sense to address them in a new post than in comments under that one. So here goes.

Joshua Marsh, the CEO of Conversocial, writes,

I’m interested in your comment that social media is only semi-personal – could you expand on that point?

I think what you could be getting at is the current lack of tie up between social identity and customer records, which is a challenge (but one that can be overcome), and one we are working on. Or do you mean something else?

There can be additional benefits to customers for taking their customer service issues into social media over other channels. Once companies wake up to the fact that there are public complaints and issues on their Facebook pages, in tweets when people search for their company names etc, they will often start delivering better customer service over social than they do through other channels. The fully public nature of the issues and resolutions forces them to deliver the best service they can. I believe this will drive a virtuous circle – as companies deliver better service through social, more and more customers will begin to use it as a service channel.

First, I want to make clear that when we talk about “social media” today we mostly mean Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other commercial services. Not telephony, email, texting, instant messaging and other social activities that have been around for a long time but tend not to get included in the “social media” category.

Three things make social media less than fully personal:

  1. As CRM Software said in another commment, “your conversations are personal yet public.”
  2. We don’t own social media. Yes, we use them, but they are not ours. They belong to Twitter, Facebook, Google or whomever. For what it’s worth (and it’s a lot), we can own domains on the Web and elsewhere. We can own email systems. We can own IM systems. We can be our own publishers, syndicate our own postings. Standards and protocols such as TCP/IP, HTTP, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, RSS and XMPP make that possible. Those standards and protocols give us independence, which is a founding virtue of the Net, of the Web, of blogging, of instant messaging. Those standards and protocols are used by social media, but we remain dependent rather than independent within social media environments. So it is critically important to remember and preserve the distinction between independence and dependence on the Net.
  3. Social media are designed to be personal, but in a social context. Facebook is for sharing with friends. Twitter is for following others and being followed. Linkedin is for sharing personal profiles. Google+ is for “real life sharing,” they say. Sure, we can get personal benefits out of social media, but as a collateral benefit more than as a core purpose.

The thing is, when all you’ve got are social hammers, even personal problems look like social nails. And this is what we are doing when we use social media to fix the problems of CRM and customer service, on either the vendor’s side or the customer’s. Yes, lots of progress has been made on the sCRM front, Conversocial is a leader in that movement, is clearly doing a good job, and should continue doing that. Yet, as individual customers we still lack a box of tools that are ours alone, and that help us relate personally with the companies whose goods and services we buy and use.

This is why a community of developers has been working on building out the tools called VRM, for Vendor Relationship Management, to work as customer-side counterparts of vendors CRM — Customer Relationship Management — systems.

About identity: yes, it’s critical. The quesitons around it are huge. For example, are we — as sovereign, independent and self-actualized human beings — who we say we are? Or are we reducible to our @-handles and “social identities” on the likes of Facebook? When Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook Connect in 2008, he said it would make it easy “for you to take your online identity with you all over the Web.” Note the presumption: that your handle with Facebook is “your online identity.” Sorry, but it isn’t. It’s handy as a shortcut, but it’s not who you are.

But in fact I was talking about something other than identity in that last post. I was talking about working on what’s personal in more than just social ways.

Louis Columbus writes,

1. The depth and breadth of personal information being shared on social media is creating advertised-based business models that will surpass Google AdWords’ revenue within five years or less. That’s coming thanks to the torrent of data that streams into social networks daily.

2. Improving customer service systems is indeed not enough because it still doesn’t strike to the center of what really needs to happen. Companies need to translate process efficiencies into more relevant, timely and focused customer experiences. The dividend of process efficiency needs to be spent on greater empathy for the customer. Profits will follow if a company can get its head around the concept of delivering an exceptional experience.

3. VRM shows potential to make each interaction more relevant, focused and over time, trusted.

Bottom line: the companies who will emerge stronger for all this turbulent change will stay focused on customer experience, empathy and intimacy as their compass and not waiver from that course.

Louis’ predictions about the future of advertising may be true. But remember: even highly personalized advertising is still guesswork. And no amount of personal data can empower any company, no matter how smart, to guess what I want or need next. Nor do I want that. First, most of the time I’m not buying anything. Second, when I am ready to buy something, I need instruments that help me express my intentions more than I need ones that are guessing what I might want and pushing something at me through a medium that’s paid to do the pushing.

This is why I believe what will emerge over the next five years is not a more personal attention economy (led by social media) but an intention economy, based on what customers actually want. This is why I wrote The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, for Harvard Business Review Press, which is due to hit the shelves on May 1.

I agree with Louis’ second point about what companies need to do; and will add that the customer experience should be one for which the customer is at least partly responsible. Also that the experience of relationship should extend across many vendors in the same way, rather than working in isolation with each vendor. For example, I would like as a customer to experience changing my address with many vendors at once. No vendor working alone with one CRM system can deliver this experience. VRM is required for that, along with CRM systems that welcome simple and standard address-changing methods that work the same way across many different vendors.

I also agree with Louis’ bottom line: that vendors will have to be “focused on customer experience, empathy and intimacy.” And I believe this will require that customers welcome VRM tools when customers carry their own weight on their own sides of relationships.

Don Peppers writes,

One additional thought about the future of social media: Today, social media is funded by advertisers (the real “customers”), and provides a mechanism for giving them access to consumers. But this will almost certainly change as more and more social media services and platforms become open source. An open-source, community-developed platform for social interaction will unify consumers and customers, no?

When Twitter first appeared on the scene, for example, it took many months before the first commercial money began funding it. The consumers it served all worried that without some kind of external funding, the service might disappear. Sooner or later, we’ll find that IT and communications costs have become so low that very little, if any, commercial sponsorship will be required to sustain a genuinely consumer-oriented social media platform.

I believe we won’t get fully-developed one-to-one relationships (that link goes to the seminal work on the topic, buy Don Peppers and Martha Rogers) without significant contributions of code and standards from free and open source developers. You’ll find many in the roster of VRM developers and developments, but we need many more.

I also think we need to free ourselves from the knee-jerk belief that commercial sponsorship is the first-option business model for popular services on the Net. The successes of the Net, the Web, email, RSS and much else have long since disproven that belief.

In the long run far more economic activity will be supported by free and open standards, protocols and other building materials, than by commercial services paid for by advertising.

As for the promise of both social media “big data” for better customer relations, I like what Alan Mitchell said in his comment:

…there is a vast difference between the sharing of unstructured information on a one-to-many basis (social media), and the sharing of structured information on a one-to-one basis (VRM). As you point out, only the latter allows for real personalisation.

Alan has been a leading figure in VRM development, by the way.

Hanan Cohen writes,

Many people say that “Social media users are not customers of them, they are the product being sold.”

I think that we are the suppliers and try to prove it here;

http://info.org.il/english/The-Users-are-the-Suppliers.html

Can you please get in touch with an economics scholar you trust and ask her to sort out the difference in definitions?

It is quite true that we are upstream suppliers of valuable content to social media, and not just consumers of services, and Hanan makes many good points at that link.

As for distinctions between consumers and customers, I like what Doug Rauch — the former President of Trader Joe’s — told to me when I was working on my book: that consumers are “a statistical category.” “We believe in honesty and directness between human beings,” Doug said. “We do this by engaging with the whole person, rather than just with the part that ‘consumes.'”

Hope that helps.

Consumers are social, Customers are personal

January 14, 2012 / / 11 Comments

Social media are a partial and temporary solution at best to a pair of linked problems that are essentially personal:

  1. dysfunctional customer relationship management on the vendor’s side; and
  2. minimal vendor relationship management on the customer’s side.

In the absence of solutions to both problems, vendors still see customers as consumers, and that too is a problem that hasn’t yet come to a head, because we still don’t fully grok the difference between consumers and customers. As a result, we think social media looks like a the good answer rather than a better question. That question is, How can we get companies and media to stop treating us as consumers and start treating us as real customers?

To see what needs to be done, check out Consumers Punish Companies that Ignore Them, by Eric Sass in MediaPost. In that piece Eric sources a pair of Conversocial studies that contain plenty of grist for social media and marketing mills. Here they are, from the Conversocial blog:

Here are some samplings from Eric’s gleanings:

  • “…more than 60% of complaints and question about retailers posted online on social media are ignored, in part because of the sheer volume of content created on sites like Twitter and Facebook.”
  • “30% of the retail chains surveyed don’t respond to any questions or complaints posted on social media, effectively choosing to ignore issues mentioned in these forums.”
  • “…78% believe that social media platforms will soon replace other means of customer service altogether or at least become one of the top ways to communicate with corporations.”
  • “…among the group which has communicated with companies via social media, 32.5% said they were either neglected or totally ignored; that works out to 16.5% of the total…This included ‘inadequate response times, unanswered queries, and overall unmet expectations.’
  • “What’s more, ‘respondents were also adamant that such corporate behaviors would have some or much effect on their future decision to do business with offending corporations.’
  • “27.3% of respondents said being ignored by companies on social media makes them ‘very angry,’ and 27.1% said they’d stop doing business with the offending company altogether.”
  • “88.3% of respondents said they’d be somewhat or far less likely to do business with a company that has visibly ignored other customers’ questions or complaints on social media. That includes 49.5% who said they would be ‘far less likely, and 38.8% who said they’d be ‘somewhat less likely.'”

Note that the blame here is on offending companies; not on social media, or on the absence of something better.

This is understandable because social media offer radically new and helpful avenues both for customer feedback one one side and customer support on the other. Also, social media is where Conversocial is coming from, and what MediaPost reports on. The problem for both — and for all of us thinking and talking about this stuff inside the social media framework — is that consumers are a statistical category while customers are individual human beings.

Individual human beings are all different. They are not categories, and they cannot be treated with full respect only by templates, which is what vendors — especially those serving mass markets — tend to use.

And, while social media do provide ways to get personal (say, though one’s @-handle on Twitter), they don’t have personal relationships with their users. That’s because social media users are not customers of them, because they don’t pay for them. And if you don’t pay, you’re the product being sold.

The actual customers of Facebook and Twitter are advertisers, not users. Because of this, social media has exactly the same un-visited problem that commercial broadcasting has had for the duration: its consumers and its customers are different populations. Financial accountability is to those that pay, which are advertisers, not users. Yes, there are moral and operational obligations to users, but economically speaking those obligations are lesser ones. They are those of a farmer to crops, not of a store to actual customers.

For now social media are a useful and popular way for customers to send messages to companies — and to route around inadequate customer service systems (or, in the vernacular of the trade, using sCRM routing around or to improve CRM) — the failures listed by Conversocial are not just those of companies ignoring social media, but of social media itself.

There is a structural problem as well, because social media are still only semi-personal. They are a weak substitute for direct contact — meaning that, in a person-to-person sense, even email and telephony are better.

Improving each company’s customer service systems and policies (which the Conversocial studies call for) also isn’t enough, because each company’s system is different, and all of them are silo’d. Thus the way you deal as a customer with Nordsrom, Safeway, Amazon and Apple are all different, and incompatible. If you want, say, to change your address or your phone number with all of them at once, you don’t have a single way to do that. You also don’t have a standard way to publish your own terms and conditions of engagement, to say for example “don’t track me outside of your own store or site” or “any data you collect is mine as well as yours, and should be available to me in the standard way I describe.”

Tools for doing that would have to live on your side of the relationship. Not the vendor’s, not the CRM cloud’s, and not Facebook’s. If you are a real customer, and not just a consumer or a user, you need your own tools. You need VRM — Vendor Relationship Management — tools, to work together with vendors CRM tools, not to replace them. The demand chain and the supply chain will work together.

The only case against VRM is that companies serving mass markets can’t afford to be personal, and just won’t go there. This was also the argument against PCs and the Internet. History and enterprising developers proved both cases wrong.

In fact enterprising developers in the VRM community have been working on personal tools for the last five years or more — tools that make customers both independent of vendors and better able to engage with vendors. It helps that the CRM community is aware of VRM developments, and has been awaiting them for some time. This is the year that wait will pay off. We’ll finally see VRM developments mature and start to become useful, both for customers and for vendors. So, watch the space.

Bonus link: Alan Mitchell’s comment below. I love how he says social media marketing is among “the grandest imperialist invasions of them all. The attempt to occupy day-to-day human interaction and turn it into a profit centre.” Indeed.

Also, to answer questions raised below, I have posted Customers are personal, cont’d.

A visit to the advertising echo chamber

September 11, 2011 / / 4 Comments

Two days ago, eMarketer Digital Intelligence ran a post titled Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad. Here are the first few paragraphs:

Older consumers are more likely to click on a Facebook ad, while younger consumers, who are more comfortable with interacting with brands on Facebook, are more likely to click “like.” This information can help marketers target specific audiences with their Facebook ads, a tactic that can be leveraged by using Facebook’s self-serve ad platform.

Over the 10 months leading up to August 2011, Facebook agencySocialCode analyzed Facebook ads for 50 clients and focused on those that included an image, text and a “like” button. The study analyzed how many consumers clicked on the ads, and from there, how many went on to “like” the company’s page.

Women are more likely to click on an ad on Facebook, though both men and women are about equally likely to then click “like” once they’ve done so, the study found. The average clickthrough rate for women of all ages was 0.029%, compared to 0.026% for men of all ages. The “like” rate among those who clicked an ad was 39% for women and 38% for men.

Clickthrough and "Like" Rate* of Facebook Display Ads Among US Internet Users, by Age and Gender, 2011

Older consumers are more likely to click on a Facebook ad, as clickthrough rates increased from 0.026% for the 18-to-29 age range, up to 0.033% for the over-50 group.

However, consumers under the age of 50 were more likely to then “like” a brand, with 18- to 29-year-olds and 40- to 49-year-olds doing so 40% of the time. Those ages 30 to 39 had a 38% “like” rate, while only 36% of those over 50 hit the “like” button.

Clickthrough and "Like" Rate of Facebook Display Ads Among US Internet Users, by Age, 2011

This data supports the fact that younger consumers, having been on Facebook longer, are more familiar with showing support for a brand through a “like” and do so more often. Meanwhile, older consumers click through on an ad to learn more and investigate a brand.

Note the use of “more likely,” several times in those paragraphs. The difference is between fine degrees of “very, very, very, very few.” That’s because highest click-through rate for any demographic is about one third of one percent. Most click-through rates are about one quarter of one percent. That up to 40% of those clicking will also click “like” is interesting only to marketers who ignore the 99.76% to 99.66% who don’t click through at all, and who might regard the ads as noise or worse. Since Facebook allows users to express only one sentiment, it’s impossible to tell what other feelings an ad elicits, if any at all.

Here’s what I tweeted about the piece yesterday…

Doc Searls dsearls Which matters more in this data: bit.ly/putQMr — that only 0.025% click on an ad, or that X% of clickers “like” the ad? #VRM 11 hours ago

… and here’s Bitly’s list of all tweets with links to the piece, which they call —

Conversations

RTs are not conversations. They are echos.

Here are more, from “Related Articles” that a service called Zemanta shows me, in one of my WordPress panels:

Some of these are “promoted.” Note that Zemanta assumes that everything related will be in the same echo chamber.

Here is my favorite view of that echo chamber, as it now stands:

It’s from , by , CEO of the investment bank . He has many other similar (and equally fascinating) graphics at Slideshare.

The least colorful part of the graphic is the word AUDIENCE, over on the right. That’s you, me, and the other 99.xx% out there who don’t click on an ad, as well as the 00.xx% who do.

What we see here is how supply tries to drive demand — and fails most of the time.

The much bigger market opportunity is in demand driving supply. That’s what we’ve been working on with , at Harvard’s , for (as of this month) the last five years.

In that time the list of VRM development projects has grown from none to dozens. They are in Santiago, Johannesburg, Vienna, New York, London, Boston, D.C., Dubuque, Santa Barbara, Salt Lake City, Montreal, San Francisco and elsewhere. In their own ways they all help Demand signal Supply, rather than the reverse. They serve the actual intentions of individual buyers, rather than the machinations of advertisers and their legion of assistants, all scheming to grab the attention of an “audience” — a delusional term that suggests a patient group, all facing a stage, ready to applaud a performance.

It’s early in the new game here. That game is Customer Intentions vs. Advertiser Guesswork. As I said in The Data Bubble, back when The Wall Street Journal launched their terrific What They Know series (about tracking users without consent),

Here’s what’s delusional about all this: There is no demand for tracking by individual customers. All the demand comes from advertisers — or from companies selling to advertisers. For now.

Here is the difference between an advertiser and an ordinary company just trying to sell stuff to customers: nothing. If a better way to sell stuff comes along — especially if customers like it better than this crap the Journal is reporting on — advertising is in trouble.

Here is the difference between an active customer who wants to buy stuff and a consumer targeted by secretive tracking bullshit: everything.

Two things are going to happen here. One is that we’ll stop putting up with it. The other is that we’ll find better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.

Improving a pain in the ass doesn’t make it a kiss. The frontier here is on the demand side, not the supply side.

Advertising may pay for lots of great stuff (such as search) that we take for granted, but advertising even at its best is guesswork. It flourishes in the absence of more efficient and direct demand-supply interactions.

The idea of making advertising perfectly personal has been a holy grail of the business since Day Alpha. Now that Day Omega is approaching, thanks to creepy shit like this, the advertsing business is going to crash up against a harsh fact: “consumers” are real people, and most real people are creeped out by this stuff.

Rough impersonal guesswork is tolerable. Totally personalized guesswork is not.

While the advertising mills keep talking to themselves, VRM development continues. As it starts to go mainstream, we’ll need a new organization, primarily for customers, rather than just for developers. We’re working on that, and expect to have it going in the next six months. So stay tuned. Meanwhile, join me in thanking the Berkman Center for giving us the runway we needed to get VRM development off the ground.

A loyalty card survey

August 8, 2011 / / 1 Comment

I’m on record saying (at least some) surveys suck. I’ve softened a bit on that, in part because I now have two relatives working at . So today, when I found myself wondering how many loyalty cards people carry around, I thought, Hey, why not run a little survey on that? So I put one together, through SurveyMonkey. And, while I was at it, I added a couple of VRM questions.

You can take the survey here.

Thoughts, of course, are welcome.

Link roundup

July 25, 2011 / / Comments Off on Link roundup

The hot edge of VRM right now is in South Africa, where TrustFabric (@TrustFabric, also mention ed in the prior post) is answering that country’s approach to personal privacy concerns with TrustFabric Connect. Let’s help them out. Note also that they’re helping the rest of us by making their code free (GPL v2) and therefore also open source.

Also on the move is getable, based here in Boston, which has a personal RFP approach. Evan Pritchard points to it here. Commenters to that post correctly point out that Buyosphere and Zaarly are also in the space, though coming at it from different angles. Let’s help all them out too.

Jeremiah Owyang puts VRM squarely in the center of his radar with VRM Systems Put Power in Hands of Buyers –Disrupting Sellers.

Just ran across Sparksheet‘s Freeing the Customer with VRM Part I and Making Business More Human, a pair of interviews from last Fall. Haven’t changed my mind about anything since. (I also get a few seconds at the 3:09 point in the Future of Facebook trailer. Venessa Meimis and friends also give me the final word there, starting at 4:06.)

The older B2B meaning of VRM may start blurring with the newer C2B one, if we follow the thrust of Laura Cecere’s Spice it up? post at Supply Chain Shaman.

Are you in charge of what you buy, or is it vice versa?

June 22, 2011 / / 1 Comment

That’s the question of the day, at least for me.

Toward being in charge of what you buy, we have Buyosphere, which is a VRM company. I know that, because Tara Hunt runs it and has been working from the start to imbue it with VRM ideals.

Toward what you buy being in charge of you, we have OwnerIQ, which is about each of us being reducible to the “brands” we own, and which I just wrote about over here.

OwnerIQ’s pitch is to advertisers, basically. Also pitching advertisers are all the third parties current;y tracking you on the Web. Here’s SelectOut.org‘s list of companies currently following me in one of my browsers (with a table of html copied and pasted):

Company

 Cookie Set? Opt-Out
24 7 Real Media Opt-Out of this Network
33 Across Opt-Out of this Network
Accuen Media Opt-Out of this Network
Acxiom Opt-Out of this Network
Adap.tv Opt-Out of this Network
Adara Media Opt-Out of this Network
AdBrite Opt-Out of this Network
AdBuyer Opt-Out of this Network
AdCentric (Cossette) Opt-Out of this Network
AdChemy Opt-Out of this Network
adConductor Opt-Out of this Network
Adconion Opt-Out of this Network
AdGear Opt-Out of this Network
AdInterax Opt-Out of this Network
Adition Technologies AG Opt-Out of this Network
AdJug Opt-Out of this Network
AdJuggler Opt-Out of this Network
AdMeld Opt-Out of this Network
AdMotion Opt-Out of this Network
adnetik Opt-Out of this Network
Adnologies Opt-Out of this Network
Adotube Opt-Out of this Network
Adperium Opt-Out of this Network
Adroit Interactive Opt-Out of this Network
AdShuffle Opt-Out of this Network
AdSpeed Opt-Out of this Network
AdTech Opt-Out of this Network
Advertising Opt-Out of this Network
AggregateKnowledge Opt-Out of this Network
Akamai Opt-Out of this Network
AlmondNet Opt-Out of this Network
Anonymous Media Opt-Out of this Network
AOL Behavioral Advertising Opt-Out of this Network
AOL Sponsored Listings Opt-Out of this Network
AppNexus Opt-Out of this Network
Atlas Technology Opt-Out of this Network
AudienceScience Opt-Out of this Network
BeenCounter Opt-Out of this Network
BidPlace Opt-Out of this Network
Bizo Opt-Out of this Network
BlueKai Opt-Out of this Network
brand net Opt-Out of this Network
BrightRoll Opt-Out of this Network
Brilig Opt-Out of this Network
BTBuckets Opt-Out of this Network
BuySight Opt-Out of this Network
BuzzLogic Opt-Out of this Network
BV! Media Opt-Out of this Network
Casale Media Opt-Out of this Network
Chango Opt-Out of this Network
Channel Intelligence Opt-Out of this Network
Choice Stream Opt-Out of this Network
Clearspring Opt-Out of this Network
ClickDistrict Opt-Out of this Network
Cobalt Group Opt-Out of this Network
Cognitive Match Opt-Out of this Network
CONTEXTin Opt-Out of this Network
Convertro Opt-Out of this Network
Cox Digital Solutions Opt-Out of this Network
CPMStar Opt-Out of this Network
CPX Interactive Opt-Out of this Network
Crimson Tangerine Opt-Out of this Network
Criteo Opt-Out of this Network
Cross Pixel Media Opt-Out of this Network
Dapper Opt-Out of this Network
DataLogix Opt-Out of this Network
DataXu Opt-Out of this Network
Datran Media Opt-Out of this Network
Demand Media Opt-Out of this Network
Demdex Opt-Out of this Network
Dotomi Opt-Out of this Network
Double Verify Opt-Out of this Network
e-planning Opt-Out of this Network
Think Realtime Opt-Out of this Network
Effective Measure Opt-Out of this Network
Efficient Frontier Opt-Out of this Network
Eloqua Opt-Out of this Network
EMC Opt-Out of this Network
Engage:BDR Opt-Out of this Network
eXelate Media Opt-Out of this Network
Experian Marketing Services Opt-Out of this Network
Exponential Interactive Opt-Out of this Network
EyeWonder Opt-Out of this Network
Facilitate Digital Opt-Out of this Network
FetchBack Opt-Out of this Network
Fireclick Opt-Out of this Network
Flashtalking Opt-Out of this Network
Forbes Media Extension Opt-Out of this Network
FOX Audience Network Opt-Out of this Network
Freewheel Opt-Out of this Network
Full Circle Studies Opt-Out of this Network
Glam Media Opt-Out of this Network
Google Opt-Out of this Network
Groupon Opt-Out of this Network
Hurra Communications Opt-Out of this Network
i-Behavior Opt-Out of this Network
Infectious Media Opt-Out of this Network
Inflection Point Media Opt-Out of this Network
Insight Express Opt-Out of this Network
Intent Media Opt-Out of this Network
interCLICK Opt-Out of this Network
Invite Media Opt-Out of this Network
Jumptap Opt-Out of this Network
Keyade Opt-Out of this Network
Lijit Opt-Out of this Network
LiveRail Opt-Out of this Network
Lotame Opt-Out of this Network
Lucid Media Opt-Out of this Network
Magnetic Opt-Out of this Network
Maxpoint Interactive Opt-Out of this Network
Media Innovation Group Opt-Out of this Network
Media6degrees Opt-Out of this Network
mediaFORGE Opt-Out of this Network
MediaMath Opt-Out of this Network
MediaMind Opt-Out of this Network
Mediaplex Opt-Out of this Network
Meebo Opt-Out of this Network
Microsoft Advertising Opt-Out of this Network
Millennial Media Opt-Out of this Network
Mindset Media Opt-Out of this Network
MindShare Opt-Out of this Network
Mixpo Opt-Out of this Network
Monster.com Opt-Out of this Network
MyBuys Opt-Out of this Network
MyThings Media Opt-Out of this Network
Navegg Opt-Out of this Network
Netmining Opt-Out of this Network
Newtention Opt-Out of this Network
Next Performance Opt-Out of this Network
Nextag Opt-Out of this Network
Nielsen Opt-Out of this Network
Nugg.ad Opt-Out of this Network
Omniture Opt-Out of this Network
OpenX Opt-Out of this Network
Optimax Media Delivery Opt-Out of this Network
Outbrain Opt-Out of this Network
OwnerIQ Opt-Out of this Network
OxaMedia Opt-Out of this Network
PeerSet Opt-Out of this Network
PointRoll Opt-Out of this Network
PrecisionClick Opt-Out of this Network
PredictAd Opt-Out of this Network
Proximic Opt-Out of this Network
Publishers Clearing House Opt-Out of this Network
Pubmatic Opt-Out of this Network
Pulse360 Opt-Out of this Network
Quantcast Opt-Out of this Network
QuinStreet Opt-Out of this Network
Quisma Opt-Out of this Network
RadiumOne Opt-Out of this Network
RapLeaf Opt-Out of this Network
Red Aril Opt-Out of this Network
Reedge Opt-Out of this Network
RewardTV Opt-Out of this Network
richrelevance Opt-Out of this Network
Ringleader Digital Opt-Out of this Network
Rocket Fuel Opt-Out of this Network
Rovion Opt-Out of this Network
Safecount Opt-Out of this Network
SageMetrics Opt-Out of this Network
ScanScout Opt-Out of this Network
Smart AdServer Opt-Out of this Network
Snoobi Opt-Out of this Network
Specific Media Opt-Out of this Network
SpongeCell Opt-Out of this Network
Struq Opt-Out of this Network
Switch Concepts Opt-Out of this Network
Tapad Opt-Out of this Network
Target Opt-Out of this Network
TargusInfo Opt-Out of this Network
Tatto Media Opt-Out of this Network
TellApart Opt-Out of this Network
Teracent Opt-Out of this Network
TidalTV Opt-Out of this Network
Epic Marketplace Opt-Out of this Network
Traffiliate Opt-Out of this Network
Travel Ad Network Opt-Out of this Network
Triggit Opt-Out of this Network
Tumri Opt-Out of this Network
Turn Opt-Out of this Network
Underdog Media Opt-Out of this Network
Undertone Networks Opt-Out of this Network
ValueClick Media Opt-Out of this Network
Veruta Opt-Out of this Network
Vibrant Media Opt-Out of this Network
Vindico Opt-Out of this Network
Visible Measures Opt-Out of this Network
VoiceFive Networks Opt-Out of this Network
Wall Street on Demand Opt-Out of this Network
Walmart Opt-Out of this Network
Weborama Opt-Out of this Network
Webtrekk Opt-Out of this Network
[x+1] Opt-Out of this Network
XA.Net Opt-Out of this Network
XGraph Opt-Out of this Network
Xtend Media Opt-Out of this Network
YuMe Opt-Out of this Network
Ziff Davis Opt-Out of this Network

I’ll find a better way to paste that pile in later. Meanwhile, it says enough.

We are at a choice point, right now. Either we’re in charge of our lives, and of what we do in the marketplace, or the guesswork mills are.

Free customers are more valuable than captive ones. That’s why VRM will succeed, sooner or later.

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