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Time to write our own rules

November 25, 2007 in Blogging, Business, Future, Ideas, News, Past, Places, problems, VRM | 85 comments

So I’ve been reading Dave Winer, Ethan Zuckerman, Jeff Jarvis, David Wienberger and Wendy Seltzer, all of whom have problems with what Facebook is doing with its members’ data.

Dave in particular is looking for action:

There are thorny issues here, but we want these companies to give up control of our information, and we don’t want them to be overly scared of public opinion as they do it.

And this is hardly the most important giving up of control. Most important, I want them to give me control of my data.

 MoveOn.org, in a move far afield from their original mission, has created a petition for us to sign. It reads, “Facebook must respect my privacy. They should not tell my friends what I buy on other sites–or let companies use my name to endorse their products–without my explicit permission.”

At this point the voice of Jim Morrison rises from my subconscious, announcing the opening stanza from Soft Parade in the homiletic voice of a preacher from a pulpit:

When I was back there in seminary school
There was a person there
Who put forth the proposition
That you can petition the Lord with prayer
Petition the lord with prayer
Petition the lord with prayer
You cannot petition the lord with prayer!

Morrison screams that last line, in manner later perfected by the also-late Sam Kinison. My own version: Stop petitioning Facebook and Google to solve our problems for us. They’re not creating those problems alone. We’re been allowing them to create those problems in the first place, and we’ve been doing that for too long. Time to come up with some new rules of engagement — ones that work for us as well as them.

Dave, Scott Rafer and others rightly call on MoveOn.org to get back to its original mission and stay out of tech territory. But MoveOn has something right in its last four words: without my explicit permission. Question: How do we exercise that permission? By what protocols? What tools? What policies? What agreements?

Dave provides the answer:

So before we overly politicize the leading edge of technology, let’s get together on what actually does and doesn’t serve the user’s interest.

I want Netflix and Yahoo to give me an XML version of my movie ratings, for me to decide what to do with. I’ve been asking for this for a couple of years, I still don’t have it. This is information I created. I want to keep a copy. I want to make sure that Netflix knows about all my Yahoo ratings and vice versa. I’d like to give a copy to Facebook (assuming they agree to not disclose it) and maybe to Amazon, so they can recommend products I might want to purchase (again keeping it to themselves). I want to begin a negotiation with various vendors, where I give them something of value, and they give me back something of value. Permalink to this paragraph

The leaders of Silicon Valley begrudgingly gave up their view of us as couch potatoes, now they think of us as generators of content they can put ads on (and pay us nothing). We still need to work on that respect thing.

The boldface in the first paragraph is mine. Because that’s what we need to do. It’s not enough to petition the likes of Facebook to give us our data. We need to create the rules by which our data can be used. When we sign on as “members” of some company’s “social network”, they need to sign our terms as well. From the start.

For too long we’ve lived with “relationship management” that’s asymmetrical and one-way. Creating the grounds for symmetrical relationships cannot be the job of Facebook, Google, Microsoft or any big company. They can’t do it, and they won’t. We can’t petition those lords with prayer, blogs, or anything else. (Well, we can, but it won’t be enough.)

We need to create our own new rules — ones that protect our privacy while making us better members of the social and business systems we create together. I say “better” because that’s what we’re bound to be when we cease being eyeballs and start acting like whole human beings.

This very topic, by the way, is at the heart of VRM.

By the way, a great place to start doing the work Dave calls for here is the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, the week after next. These workshops are among the most constructive (un)conferences I’ve ever been to, and I’m not just saying that because I’m one of the organizers. Good work always happens there, in three days of serious barn-raising.

Look forward to seeing some of ya’ll there.

A challenge to carriers

November 24, 2007 in Business, Future, Ideas, Photography, VRM | 2 comments

In response to my piece in Linux Journal yesterday, Antonio Rodriguez, proprietor of Tabblo, has come up with an excellent workaround for photographers dealing with the asymmetry of today’s Net and the problem of uploading over and over again to multiple photo sites:

I’d like to see a white-label services that could be wrapped by webapp builders for core pieces of functionality. To continue the upload example: why doesn’t Amazon, or some enterprising entrepreneur looking to build on the cloud computing infrastructure at Amazon, build out a full suite of well-supported file uploaders, along with an associated S3-backed storage infrastructure for everything from photos to videos. By focusing on just the upload experience, this effort could just nail it for all the rest of us— building plug-ins for our favorite apps, clients for our favorite platforms, and even specialized hardware for events and community activities. In Doc’s VRM world, such a company might even be able to charge the enduser a nominal fee for pipe and storage, so long as its service integrated easily with enough of the interesting webapps.

You listening lazy web?

Better yet, are you listening, carriers?

All the last-mile companies — Comcast, Cox, AT&T, RCN, Time-Warner, Verizon and the rest — are continuing to make all their money on “triple play” and other monopoly rents. They can do better than that. The Net may be a World of Ends in an ideal sense, but in reality there are physical-world issues that put proximal services at a real advantage. Same goes for proximal real estate.

The carriers have already let Akamai school them once. I suppose you could throw in Amazon’s Web Services (notably EC2 and S3, which provide big back-end compute and storage, cheap) as well. Companies such as Digisense leverage Amazon’s S3 back end to provide workarounds of carrier last-mile slow-upstream asymmetries. (Disclosure: I’ve consulted Digisense.) Rather than being a problem to be worked around, the carriers could become the solution. Or at least support solutions provided by more agile companies that could serve as partners or customers.

There are enormous benefits to carrier incumbency that go beyond extending decades-old cable TV and century-old telephone company business models. There are countless potential service businesses that can be either created or supported by the carriers, and their suppliers as well. (That’s you, Cisco.) Antonio just described one of them.

Here at my apartment near Boston I’m lucky to have a choice of three different carriers: Comcast, RCN and Verizon. I use Verizon because it provides 20Mb downstream and 5Mb upstream — much higher speeds, especially on upstream, than either of its rivals — and comes pretty damn close to delivering exactly that:

The HDTV we get is also pretty good, though the user interface and choice of set-top boxes fall far short of what we’ve experienced for years in Santa Barbara with Dish Network. (Still, they’re new at this. I’m willing to cut them some slack.)

Anyway, we pay a little over $100/month for TV, phone and Net as a “triple play”. Of that, the Net is about half the total. But what if we want more, such as an IP address or two, so se can set up our own Web servers? Well, we need to get Verizon FiOS for business for that. There the lowest price is about $100, for a two-year commitment for “Up to 15 Mbps/2 Mbps”. That’s twice the cost for much lower speeds, both ways, than I get now. The closest business offer to what I have now is “Up to 30 Mbps/5 Mbps”, and that’s $389.99/month for one year and $404.99/month for two years.

This kind of pricing prevents far more business than it supports. It’s the old telco mentality at work: the one that says, “Businesses can afford to pay more, so we’ll charge more”.

Verizon and its competitors need to start seeing their primary advantages in three places: 1) existing customer relationships; 2) proximity to customers of buildable and rentable service-platform real estate; and 3) providing the connectivity that allows business to grow around #1 and #2.

So consider this a friendly and construcive shout-out to CZ and others at Verizon, from the other side of the carrier/customer fence. You guys are making some good moves, technically. Now let’s see you make a few that support the Web’s and the Net’s business and social ecosystems, and not just those of Hollywood and Ma Bell’s ghost.

Another angle on service

November 23, 2007 in Future, Ideas, Photography, problems, Science, Travel, VRM | Permalink

Over in Linux Journal: Let’s keep photography and mapping mashable. A sample:

Now, in an ideal world — that is, one where the Net is truly symmetrical, peer-to-peer and end-to-end — I would rather do the federating myself, from my own photo archive, with my own APIs. That way I could federate selected photos to Flickr, Tabblo, Panoramio and whomever else I please. In fact, that would probably make things easier for everybody. But that’s a VRM (vendor relationship management) grace we don’t enjoy yet. In the absence of that, we need more open APIs between services such as these, so customers’ photos can be shared at the vendor-to-vendor level.

To get the context, ya need to read the whole thing. But you get the idea.

Thankslinking

November 22, 2007 in Blogging, Business, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, Past, Places, problems, VRM | 1 comment

In no particular order…

Not quite an error.

The pitch is dead.

Jumping on the three-wheeled bandwagon.

“That Company” for how long?

On negative capability.

“If you wouldn’t buy your product/service, there’s really no point trying to get others to do so”.

Paying and Believing

November 21, 2007 in Business, Future, Ideas, Journalism, VRM | 1 comment

The piece is titled,

NUTRITION IS A FORCE MULTIPLIER
A MONTHLY GASTRONOMIC CHRONICLE OF WAR
by Roland Thompson, stationed in Iraq

And it begins,

In my midst are soldiers who have been shot, blown up, burned, and rehabilitated. Whether they chose to return to Iraq or not, I don’t know. In any case they’re here at Camp Anaconda, and unless I see them in the shower I can’t tell them apart from the nonwounded. Likewise, it’s not until I walk a mile with a guy named Eric that I notice the merry-go-round action of his hip.

Eric and I enter the dining tent together. Traffic is one-way through the crowded tent, where food is arranged buffet-style. Our mainline choices are horse cock or triangle fish. Side dish options include raw onion, mayonnaise, grits, and fresh cantaloupe.

I get my cantaloupe and sit next to Eric, such that our arms touch from shoulder to elbow. Eric’s arm feels shrunken and insular. Later Eric tells me that his arm was shot off and reattached, but for the time being we don’t talk. We just eat, wounded or not, like everybody else.

Several paragraphs later, it says,

To read the rest of this piece, please purchase this issue
of the Believer online or at your local bookseller.

Hmmm…

Anyway, I found the Believer though this post by JP, who says,

You see, I’m with Doc. I believe in VRM. I believe that in the 21st century, product-driven advertising is fundamentally flawed. Personal recommendations, whether direct or via collaborative filtering, count for a lot more. Recommendations from people I know and trust, recommendations that scale now that I have the tools and the technology to discover the recommendations and act on them.

So I enjoy reading magazines that have no ads in them. Magazines printed on good paper, with loving care taken on format and layout. Magazines that cover a range of subjects, enticing me into finding out more about things I know little about. Magazines that have copyright-free content. Magazines like the Believer.

So the Believer may have copyright-free content (is there such a thing? I dunno…), but it’s still mostly locked behind a subscription wall.

Which is my excuse to say that I’d like to see VRM make it possible for the Believer to expose their content and get paid for it anyway, because it wants to be in relationship with its readers — one that involves readers paying for the goods as part of that relationship.

Because I also believe that writers (and publishers, broadcasters, and artists of every sort) who give their goods away yet need to be paid for their work, are more likely to be paid by those with whom they enjoy a degree of relationship.

In short, I believe that relationship pays — or can, once we put together the protocols, tools and other stuff to make it happen.

Knowing the answer is good. Building it is better.

November 16, 2007 in Ideas, News, VRM | 1 comment

The Economist asks, Will Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites transform advertising? Third paragraph in, there is this:

  Messrs Lazarsfeld and Katz, of course, assumed that most of these conversations and their implicit marketing messages would remain inaudible. That firms might be able to eavesdrop on this chatter first became conceivable in the 1990s, with the rise of the internet. Thus the main thesis of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, written in 1999, was that “markets are conversations” which the web can make transparent.

That misses the original point. I get back to it in What could be better than advertising?, over in .

Sailing the relation ship

November 16, 2007 in Ideas, VRM | Permalink

Over in the ProjectVRM blog, CRM gets personal. Before reading The Ajatus Manifesto, and visiting the Ajatus project site (thanks to pointage by Zak Greant) I hadn’t thought that was possible, or even worth considering, because CRM seems to be such a corporate thing. But why should it be?

Bonus linkage: manifestos back manifestos.

Customers arise! Throw off your chain stores!

November 11, 2007 in VRM | 5 comments

Heard Malcolm Matson of Oplan speak the other day. While his whole speech was memorable, two one-liners were so memorable I didn’t even need to write them down. (Which I did anyway.) One was Dare to to the right thing first. The other was The customer owns the customer.

The latter comment called to mind a conversation I had a few months ago with a high-ranking executive at a large retail company that prides itself in caring about its customers. By my own estimation, this is a company with an enviable reputation for being both good at what they do and morally good (relatively speaking) as well. At one point he talked about “owning the customer”. I asked, “What’s a word for ‘owning’ a human being?” “Oh my God”, he replied. “It’s slavery!” Then he said he was amazed, in respect to wht had just become obvious, at how much people at his company talked about customers as if literal ownership were both desirable as well as a fact.

Such legacies die hard. And it’s the customers themselves who will have to kill this one.

Markets are relationships. Or should be.

November 10, 2007 in VRM | Permalink

Tara Hunt:

  Now, I know what you are thinking: “Customers in charge? What about ME? I’m trained to get the word out there! Haven’t you ever heard of branding?” Yep. I’ve heard of it and I also see it declining in relevance. Truly long lasting brands are those who build RELATIONSHIPS with their customers, who then go off and recommend them to others they have RELATIONSHIPS with. Those pop up ads? Billboards? Television commercials? They are just interrupting people, which ends up annoying them. Do you stay in a RELATIONSHIP with someone you are annoyed with? Nope.
  Believe me, this VRM stuff is not only good for customers, but it is good for YOU as well. It puts you firmly in the position of being exactly where you need to be (available) when the customer has money in hand, poised to purchase. It puts you in the role of helpful sidekick. It makes you indispensably useful.

Joe Andrieu:

  The opportunity, then, for service providers and software vendors is to provide tools for individuals to manage their Intention. Solve that while facilitating vendors’ goals-because many, but not all, Intention activities are directly monetizable in a transaction-and you have a service or product that can generate serious value for everyone involved.
  That’s the promise of .

Bonus gripe from Gordon Cook.

Quotes du jour

November 8, 2007 in News, problems, VRM | 10 comments

just because ads are socially targeted, it doesn’t make me want more ads. — Fred Stutzman. Also, Spamminess is the death of a network, socially targeted or no.

And Nick Carr:

  Yes, today is the first day of the rest of advertising’s life.
  I like the way that Zuckerberg considers “media” and “advertising” to be synonymous. It cuts through the bullshit. It simplifies. Get over your MSM hangups, granddads. Editorial is advertorial. The medium is the message from our sponsor.
  Marketing is conversational, says Zuckerberg, and advertising is social. There is no intimacy that is not a branding opportunity, no friendship that can’t be monetized, no kiss that doesn’t carry an exchange of value. The cluetrain has reached its last stop, its terminus, the end of the line. From the Facebook press release: “Facebook’s ad system serves Social Ads that combine social actions from your friends – such as a purchase of a product or review of a restaurant – with an advertiser’s message.” The social graph, it turns out, is a platform for social graft.
  The Fortune 500 is, natch, lining up…]

Paul Boutin:

  Your Facebook profile is your public persona: The music, books, TV shows, political candidates, and celebrities you love or hate. The site’s ad model is based on personal endorsements–cool stuff, important stuff, and things that make you look good when they show up in everyone else’s news feed. I’m sure there are people who’ll blog about their socks. But there aren’t 50 million of them, and they won’t keep their friends long.
  The secret of Google’s success? They let you market anything, no matter how uncool, to anyone who can figure out a PC. We can Google for anything and buy it without anyone knowing. Google for “dandruff,” “hemorrhoids,” or “erictile disfunction” [sic]. Boom, boom, and boom–$4 billion adds up fast. Do you think I’m going to let Facebook use me to hawk Preparation H to fellow writers? Not a chance.

Dave Winer:

  Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that’s good!

Ian Wilker

  my impression is that SocialAds makes a systemic feature out of the fake profile, which “fan-sumers” can friend and flack to their friends — clutter up their friends’ News Feed with info about a brand.
  Blech. The whole thing gives me a pretty visceral flashback to being AmWay’d by a guy I’d seen as a friend — soon as I realized he’d gotten back in touch with me not to catch up on old times but to attempt to siphon money out of me I very nearly slugged him.

Brian Oberkirch:

  Here we are now, monetize us…
  To recast it: conversations are markets.

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