Category: user-driven (Page 4 of 8)

Big Data will remain a Big Dud until individuals have their own

August 18, 2013 / / 8 Comments

The impact of computing on the worldwide economy, and even on business, was subject to debate until it got personal around the turn of the ’80s. Same with networking before the Internet came along in the mid ’90s.

Big computing and worldwide communications — two capabilities that for decades were entirely the province of large organizations — exploded with boundless new value once they became personal. You and I can do far more with computing and communications today than companies and governments ever could with either when they ran those shows, and when both were just B2B businesses.

From the B2B perspective in 1980, personal computing was an oxymoron. If you wanted to do serious computing, you needed big machines on raised floors tended “data processing” professionals. There was no way individuals with desktop machines could do the same grade of work. That notion ended when human creativity was massively unleashed by tens of thousands of new apps that could do things for individuals — and organizations — that big machines and staffs never could.

Likewise, personal networking in 1993 was also an oxymoron — again from the B2B perspective.  Networks were things companies built, were a grace provided by giant telecom operators. Then the Internet came along, and subordinated those telecom operators (and cable operators as well) to the boundless new capacities of anybody with a computer and a connection to the vast new “cyber” spaces the Internet’s simple protocols opened.

What happened in both cases was individuals acquiring and exploiting capacities that were once exclusively corporate — and doing far more with those capacities than those corporations (and governments) ever could.

We forget those lessons when we look at “Big Data” today. In Is Big Data an Economic Big Dud? for example,  of The New York Times writes, “There is no disputing that a wide spectrum of businesses, from e-marketers to pharmaceutical companies, are now using huge amounts of data as part of their everyday business.” The whole piece is contained in the B2B frame: Big Data is something only big companies (and hot start-ups) have, care about, and put to use.

Yet to each of us nothing is bigger (or at least more important) than our own data. And nothing shifts attention farther away from what we can do with that data than assuming that others (especially marketers) know more about what we want and need than we do ourselves. Or that Big Data is something that only companies do and care about. This is exactly the mentality that held back computing in the mainframe age, and communications in the telecom age. (And we are being held back today to the very degree that those two old industries, and mentalities, continue to hold sway in our minds and our marketplaces.)

But we’ve seen this movie before and we know how it starts: with assumptions that it can’t be done. It can, and it will.

We are going to be able to do far more with our own data — and data, period — than big organizations ever could.

Bonus links:

For real customer engagement, “social” is inadequate

August 8, 2013 / / 6 Comments

In Social’s Value Measured in Engagement Over Sales, eMarketer provided this revealing graphic:

There are trends here too:

…consumer engagement and brand lift were the No. 1 goals of social media marketing, each cited by 67% of respondents. This was up significantly from 2011, when those goals were cited by about 50% each.

Last year, using social media marketing to garner positive sentiment was the leading goal, whereas this year it dropped to No. 4.

They add,

Marketers may be finding that it is less important that their posts get a warm reception from social users and more important that they keep consumers posting, “liking” and sharing social content.

That’s what marketers may think; but what about the parts of the company that make, sell and service the company’s goods? Let’s return again to an Oracle graphic of the “customer journey” that has been helping us focus lately:

Oracle Twist

Here’s what this illustrates about engagement:

  1. We’re not always buying stuff. We’re using it. When we have good ideas to feed back to companies, or when we want help with a company’s products or services, we shouldn’t have to go through “social” marketing. There, are, and should, be better means for that.
  2. Substantive engagement is not “posting, ‘liking’ and sharing social content”. It’s making direct connections with the parts of companies that want to help and learn from customers directly.
  3. Owning is what we do with the stuff we buy. Think about it. You’re owning 100% of the time, and buying far less, even if you’re a shopaholic. Yet the respect this fact gets from social marketing — and from marketing in general — is sub-minimal, even in our networked age.

Meanwhile spending on marketing budgets is going up, while other budgets are going down. Most of the increase is going to digital strategies, Gartner says (more here), and approximately none of that, outside “social”, is for direct engagement with the human beings who buy goods and services.

There is a reason for this, which I visit in The Intention Economy:

Back in the early ‘90s, when I was making a good living as a marketing consultant, I asked my wife—a successful businesswoman and a retailing veteran—why it was that heads of corporate Sales & Marketing departments were always from Sales people and not from Marketing people. Her answer: “Simple: Sales is real. Marketing is bullshit.”

When I asked her to explain that, she said this wasn’t marketing’s fault. The problem was the role marketing was forced to play. “See, sales touches the customer; but marketing can’t, because that’s sales’ job. So marketing has to be ‘strategic.’” She put air-quotes around “strategic.” She acknowledged that this was an over-simplification, and not fair to all the good people in marketing (such as myself) who really were trying to do right by customers. But her remark spoke to the need to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not, and to dig deeper into why the latter has become such an enormous part of the way we do business.

And now we have CMOs, Chief Marketing Officers, a title that barely existed two decades ago, graced with bigger budgets and increased political power within companies. And yet they still don’t touch the customer. Instead they want to follow the customer around with tracking beacons and to better personalize the “shopping experience” or whatever, and troll for “likes” on Facebook. In less delicate terms, the bullshit is out of control, with bigger budgets and fancier rationalizations than ever.

Want to see how far this goes? Check out the IBM/Aberdeeen “Big Datastillery”:

Look closely at this thing to see where you fit in. You’ll need to scroll down to the conveyor belt at the bottom. See those colored beakers, being filled with “customer interaction optimization” and “marketing optimization,” and then rolling off to oblivion after farting out “campaign metrics”? That’s you.

Your campaign metrics gas gets fed into the big hopper at the top from one pipe among many others. In rough order of decreasing size those are:

  • CRM
  • Social media
  • Clickstream data
  • Transactional data
  • Marketing history
  • SEO data
  • PPC (pay per click)
  • Email metrics
  • Campaign metrics
  • Ad impressions
  • Customer sentiment

None of this involves actual interactions with human beings except perhaps through social media. And even there, one CRM executive recently told me, marketing zealotry is “poisoning the well.”

We can’t fix this and shouldn’t try. It’s marketing’s house. Let them work on it. (Credit where due: according to the top graphic above, 56% of them want to use social media to “improve customer support/service”.)

What we can do is expand the owning experience to include helpful and productive interactions with companies that make, sell and service what we own, and what we use. Here’s one example.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear stories from non-marketing people inside companies about what it’s like to try engaging, in durable and substantive ways, with customers who are at the same time getting treated like the beakers in the graphic above.

Bonus link from @bobosphere.

Freedom vs. Tracking

July 29, 2013 / / 10 Comments

In The Mobile Customer as Data vs. Customer Data, Chuck Martin in MediaPost‘s Mobile Shop Talk says this:

The world of data tracking for mobile commerce is getting much more precise.

The phone knows where the phone goes, as we all know. And that knowledge can be used to help provide better services to those carrying them.

Any driver using Google Navigation, for example, gets the benefit of other phones being tracked to identify bottlenecks on roads ahead. The next step was for Navigation to automatically re-route your trip to avoid the traffic jam, so the benefit became seamless.

The tracking of phones at retail also is being used in efforts to provide a better shopping experience.

In these cases, the value comes from the data about the phone being tracked, not information about the person.

This is about the use of customers as data rather than data about the customer.

This data about phone movements already is being used at hundreds of stores ranging from small mom-and-pop shops to national chains and shopping centers.

He goes on to talk about Euclid, “a three-year-old California company that likens what it does to Google analytics but for the physical world.” And he explains what they do:

Rather than tracking phones by apps, sign-ins, GPS or cell tower, Euclid installs sensors at stores to capture MAC addresses, which are part of every smartphone.

The company doesn’t capture any information about the person, just the identification of smartphones that are on with Wi-Fi enabled.

The idea is to map shopper traffic and analyze how stores can become more effective. The large volume of aggregated data of phone traffic patterns is what provides the value.

Here is what I put in the comments below (with paragraph breaks and links added):

I am a customer. I am not data. I do not wish to yield personal data, even if anonymized, to anybody other than those with whom I have a fully consenting, non-coercive and respectful relationship.

I do not wish to receive offers as a matter of course, even if machines following me guess those offers might might be relevant — especially since what I am doing most of the time is not shopping.

I also don’t wish to have a “better experience” with advertising inundation, especially if the “experience” is “delivered” to me rather than something I have for myself.

Familiar with Trader Joes? People love them. Know why? They do none of this tracking jive. They just talk, as human beings, to customers. There’s no way to automate that, and they save the overhead of marketing automation as well.

Now think of the “mobile experience” we call driving a car, or riding a bike. Our phones need to be the same: fully ours. Not tracking devices.

I know mine is a voice in the wilderness here, but I’m not alone. It’s not for no reason that the most popular browser add-ons are ad and tracking blockers. That’s the market talking. Marketers need to listen.

In a commencement speech this past May, former presidential speechwriter @JonLovett says this (around 14:30): I believe we may have reached peak bullshit.

He continues: I believe those who push back against the noise and the nonsense, those who refuse to accept the untruths of politics and commerce and entertainment and government, will be rewarded. And that we are at the beginning of something important. He also pushes back on what he calls “a process that is inauthentic.” (Here’s a transcript.)

Here’s what’s real: For whatever reasons, we blew it by not building browsers to be cars and bikes in the first place. Same with smartphones and tablets. We gave wonderful powers to users, but greater powers to companies that would rather track us than respect us, who would rather “deliver”us the “experience” they want us to have than equip us to operate as fully human beings in the world — beings with independence and agency, able to engage in our own ways, and on our own terms.

So, what we’ve got now, nice as it is in many ways, is a feudal system. Not real freedom.

It’s a feudal system run by advertising money, and it is worse than broken: it looks to its masters like it isn’t working well enough. Those masters include lots of good people trying to do the Right Things. But they aren’t listening, because they are too busy talking to each other. The whole marketing ecosystem is an echo chamber now. And we, the users and customers of the world, are not in it, except as magnets for tracking beacons and MAC addresses sold to marketing mills.

There is now a line in the sand. On one side is industrial control of human beings, and systems that “allow” degrees of freedom. On the other side is freedom itself. On that side also lies the truly free marketplace.

Here’s a bet. A lot more money will be made equipping individual human beings with means for enjoying full agency than there is today in “delivering” better sales “experiences” to them through browsers and phones that aren’t really theirs at all.

And here’s betting we’ll get better social effects too: ones that arise from freedom of association in an open world, rather than inside giant mills built for selling us to advertisers.

Turning the customer journey into a virtuous cycle

July 13, 2013 / / 3 Comments

Traditional CRM typically looks at customers this way:CRM cycleIt’s a cycle. One of the reasons we started ProjectVRM is that actual customers are hard to find in the CRM business. We are “leads” for Sales and Marketing, and  “cases” for Support. At the Orders stage we are destinations to which products and invoices are delivered. That’s it.

Oracle CRM, however, has a nice twist on this (and thanks to @nitinbadjatia of Oracle for sharing it*):

Oracle Twist

Here we see the “customer journey” as a path that loops between buying and owning. The blue part — OWN, on the right — is literally the customer’s own space. As the text on the OWN loop shows, the company’s job in that space is to support and serve. As we see here…

… the place where that happens is typically the call center.

Now let’s look at how this journey looks in our lives, in terms of how much of the time we own stuff and how much of the time we shop for it. The real ratio is closer to this:

kolskycyce1

And that’s not an exaggeration, since we own everything 100% of the time and shop only a small % of the time.

Now let’s pause to consider the curb weight of “solutions” in the world of interactivity between company and customer today. In the BUY loop of the customer journey, we have:

  1. All of advertising, which Magna Global expects to pass $.5 trillion this year
  2. All of CRM, which Gartner pegs at $18b)
  3. All the rest of marketing, which has too many segments for me to bother looking up

So, in the OWN loop we have a $0 trillion greenfield. This is where VRM started, with personal data lockers, stores, vaults, services and (just in the last few months) clouds.

Now look around your home. What you see is mostly stuff you own. Meaning you’ve bought it already. How about basing your relationships with companies on those things, rather than over on the BUY side of the loop, where you are forced to stand under a Niagara of advertising and sales-pitching, by companies and agencies trying to “target” and “acquire” you. From marketing’s traditional point of view (the headwaters of that Niagara), the OWN loop is where they can “manage” you, “control” you, “own” you and “lock” you in. To see one way this works, check your wallets, purses, glove compartments and kitchen junk drawers for “loyalty” cards that have little if anything to do with genuine loyalty.

But what if the OWN loop actually belonged to the customer, and not to the CRM system? What if you had VRM going there, working together with CRM, at any number of touch points, including the call center?

This is more than a simple dream. One of the coolest things to happen in the VRM development world is this insight, based on actual technology: everything you own can have its own cloud, and each can live inside your personal cloud. Your stuff doesn’t need to have embedded smarts. You can put your things’ smarts inside clouds of their own. Manufacturers can also include clouds along with everything they sell. Inside that cloud can go all the touchpoint contact data required for a genuine relationship, plus useful extras such as service manuals and shortcuts to product updates.

This means the product itself becomes the platform for relationship between the customer and everybody on the sell side, from manufacturer to distributor to retailer to service company. As I explained in this HBR post, that platform — the product’s cloud — is the level table where all those parties sit, at the grace of the customer. Because it’s the customer’s space.

One tablecloth for that platform is the TalkTag. It’s a simple QR code, like the one on the right. The pioneering company here is Kynetx, through its SquareTag service. It’s a simple way to give anything you have a cloud of its own. Scanning a TalkTag is one way to visit a thing’s cloud, which is also a programmable space. If your thing is lost, you can program it to provide contact information through somebody’s smartphone when they scan it. (Which I have done, and it works.)

You can also program it to, say, notify the call center when you scan it. For example, I want the TalkTag I just put on my cable modem to notify Time Warner Cable when I scan it. If Time Warner Cable’s CRM system is listening (which should be easy enough to make happen), it can send back a message to my phone, telling me there is an outage in my neighborhood. Or, in the event that there isn’t an outage, the “I’ve been scanned” message from me to Time Warner Cable can jump past stages in the company’s IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system and get me straight to the right person or automated response. That might be, “You need to download new firmware,” or “We have three new service tiers you might want to know about,” or “We see you haven’t paid your bill.”

I have shared this kind of scenario with two call center companies recently, and they liked it a lot. In fact they like the whole idea of VRM systems on the customers’ side that can lighten the burdens of relationship (and open opportunities) for both sides.

The customer journey — his or her experiences of owning and buying — will include more than just interacting with call centers. We use the things we own in countless ways that might be useful to share with others, including the companies that make and sell stuff — and not just through “social” systems like Facebook and Twitter, over which we have little or no control.

We should also be able to integrate data from products that don’t relate but should. In the Quantified Self world, for example, there is a standing need to synthesize data from many devices and databases. This need  cannot be solved by asking Nike, Fitbit, Withings, RunKeeper and the rest of them to all make their data un-silo’d and combine-able. And doing it in “social media,” whose only business is advertising at us, won’t work either. We need means of our own.

In the VRM world we’ve been saying the user needs to be the point of integration for his or her own data since Joe Andrieu first expressed that insight in 2007. Now, with personal clouds, in 2013, it’s starting to look possible. In fact the personal cloud, and the whole OWN loop, can also be a platform for intentcasting toward the BUY side.

The OWN side is also where all the privacy technology also sits, chiefly because it is distributed. It is here also that we hold the terms, preferences and policies we express when dealing with companies sitting across the tables set between us.

An interesting case that lies between buying and owning is relationships with service organizations, such as utilities. What we own here is own side of an ongoing relationship. Equipment of our own may be in there, or may not be. Either way, the use of a service — in our homes, cars and pockets — is what we at least control, even if we don’t own it.

So clearly we need a common platform for personal clouds, and for the things we put in them. That platform needs to be small, lightweight, distributed and open source. Right now I see one candidate for that: CloudOS, which is the brainbaby of Phil Windley. (Here’s a search for CloudOS and Windley. Lots of stuff there.) If you’ve got some other hacks, point them out in the comments below.

If we look at the customer experience from the company’s side again, this graphic from Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore does a nice job of framing the possibilities:

Across the table set in a personal cloud, customers can feed back good intelligence to every one of the loops in that graphic. And, because that data arrives directly and voluntarily, it has far higher quality than inferential data gathered by marketing’s many surveillance methods.

It also re-frames relationship and loyalty, as real things rather than as words marketing recites inside its own echo chambers. It will reduce marketing’s urge to manipulate, and advertising’s urge to personalize in the absence of conscious and voluntary signals welcoming it. The customer journey will thus turn into a virtuous cycle rather than the arduous one it is today.

It can also create a demand chain that can work in tandem with the supply chain, providing far better feedback at every stage. I could go on, but I want to get this up before the latest in the series of Important Calls that punctuate my life. (And they are all Good Things, trust me.)

Bonus link.

* In the comments below the post that follows this one, Ray Wang points to Esteban Kolsky as the original author of this graphic. As I say in my comment below Ray’s, I did hear that from Nitin Badjatia (of Oracle and formerly of Right Now), but I didn’t remember it when I wrote both posts in a hurry. Again, it is the verbs — BUY and OWN — that make the image especially useful for VRM, because they are the customer’s. I don’t yet know if those verbs are Esteban’s or Right Now/Oracle’s. Let me know and I’ll give credit where due.

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VRM videos

July 1, 2013 / / 0 Comments

First Retail

Here is a collection of videos about VRM and related subjects, in roughly reverse chronological order.

First, a series of well-edited excerpts from Disrupting Retail 2013, which was hosted by First Retail in New York City. Here’s an outline:

  1. What is Disrupting Retail?
  2. Amazon’s Product Recommender Systems
  3. Big Data Enabled Intention Management and the Customer Experience
  4. Moving from Personal Data to Individual Intention

The sessions were led by Gam Dias (@gammydodger) of First Retail, with Andreas Weigend (@weigend) and myself serving as sounding boards for the collection of forward-looking retailers gathered around the table. (That’s the two of us in the shot above.) Lots of excellent grist for retailers, VRooMers and everybody else who cares about the future of business (which, let’s face it, wouldn’t be business without retail). Bonus link.

Second, Phil Windley on building trillion-node networks. Within those might be your network, with your own Internet of Things in your own cloud. Bonus video: The cloud needs an operating system.

Third, from the State of the Net (#SOTN) conference in Trieste last month, four videos:

There were a number of others as well, which I’ll put up when I find them (or they find me).

Fourth, some others from the last year and more:

VRM help is where you find it

May 27, 2013 / / 0 Comments

As Dean Landsman tweets here, a lot of suff out there is VRM without saying so. (Which is cool; it doesn’t have to.) The example toward which he points is How can we provide better customer service? Create software that lets customers serve each other, by Ashley Verrill in Gigaom. The summary:

As consumers increasingly turn to social media to both praise and criticize brands, those brands can’t possibliy respond to all the feedback. The solution is to empower customers to speak on their behalf.

Her piece begins,

Recently I was asked a question following a presentation that suddenly made me realize social application developers are missing a big opportunity in customer service. I had just finished speaking at the global HP Social Support Summit, when an audience member took the microphone and asked, “Do you know of any software that lets community members respond on behalf of companies on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms?”

I do, and more on that below. Meanwhile, Ashley unpacks the problem requiring this kind of question:

The current customer service model is moribund

One of the biggest reasons this idea struck me is that the current model just isn’t working. In one study I conducted, major brands such as Coca-Cola and Wells Fargo responded just 14 percent of the time when they were asked questions via Twitter. This is a big problem when you consider more than half of Twitter users expect a personal response within two hours of sending a question or complaint, according to a report by Oracle last year.

This is a scaling problem that can be partially answered by equipping more employees to respond to requests from customers. Ashley sees customers themselves — “community members” — taking up the rest of the slack:

Existing, active community members can be the perfect candidates to respond for companies on social media for two reasons: For one, they’re already enthusiastic about your products and so can be good brand ambassadors; and two, they’ve proven their zeal for answering questions from other customers already.

Take this HP community member, for example. He spends upwards of 30 unpaid  hours a week responding to queries in their discussion forums. The software I’m suggesting would essentially empower “wb2001″ and thousands of other similar customers like him to respond to questions on social media (in addition to the community that exists already).

This hypothetical technology could still leverage all of the tools that make communities so effective – things like gamification and automated alerts. Also, social listening tools could filter out messages that would be better suited for an employee response. This could include messages from customers that are particularly angry, or questions that would require a technical expert.

This would lead, she concludes, to “empowering your brand advocates to create a sea of new discussions that never would have existed in the first place.”

What would do the empowering, exactly?

Among VRM developers, I see one company that does exactly what the HP audience member asked for. The company is Directly. Here is its mission:

A Better Way To Get Help.

Directly makes it easy to get fast, personal attention from experts who know different companies inside and out. Our community of experts work independently in their own free time. They earn rewards and reputation, and can cash out their rewards or donate them to one of the non-profit causes we support.

  • Our support site helps customers get better customer support — so customers can spend less time dealing with support and more time enjoying their life.
  • Our mortgage site helps homebuyers and homeowners — so more families can buy new homes or stay in the ones they love.

Directly launched publicly in December 2012 with a network that reaches 3.2 million customers monthly and has already helped 35,000 airline, bank, cable and wireless customers with a 97% response rate and an average response time of less than 10 minutes.

So whether you need to evaluate the best options, resolve an issue or just get things done, Directly is a better way to get help straight from the experts who can help.

As for software for making her scenario work, I think it would have to be independent of the world’s HPs, but would work with any or all of them.

For example, let’s say I wish to leverage my expertise with these things:

  • Canon 5D camera
  • 2000 Volkswagen Passat station wagon
  • Sangean ATS-909/Radio Shack DX-398 radio
  • Garmin eTrex Legend HCx GPS
  • Starbucks’ Saeco and Barista espresso machines

Rather than be empowered by each of those companies to speak for them, I might like one standard and non-proprietary way I could provide help for users of all of them. Or that would give customers a way of notifying the marketplace (including the corporate CRM systems, plus help systems such as Directly, plus anybody interested in helping without an intermediator) of a need for help.

Is that way out there yet? There are a zillion fora for a zillion products and services already. Some are hosted by the companies themselves, and some are out in the wild. But all I can name are to some degree centralized. What I’d like to see is something decentralized, but capable of working both with customers and with any of the CRM systems already in place from providers like Salesforce, IBM, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and the rest of them.

Maybe something like that is out there already. If so, let us know.

Prepping for #VRM Day and #IIW

April 20, 2013 / / 0 Comments

The 16th IIW (Internet Identity Workshop) is coming up, Tuesday to Thursday, 7-9 May, will be tat the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. As usual, VRM will be a main topic, with lots of developers and other interested folk participating. Also as usual, we will have a VRM planning day on the Monday preceding: 6 May, also at the CHM. So that’s four straight days during which we’ll get to present, whiteboard, discuss and move forward the many projects we’re working on. From the top of my head at the moment:

  • Personal Clouds, including —
    • The Internet of Me and My Things
    • QS (Quantified Self) and Self-Hacking
  • Fully personal wallets, rather than branded ones that work only with payment silos and their partners
  • Intentcasting — where customers advertise their purchase intentions in a secure, private and trusted way, outside of any vendor’s silo
  • Browser add-ons, extensions, related developments
  • Licensing issues
  • Sovereign and administrative identity approaches, including Persona, formerly BrowserID, from Mozilla
  • Legal issues, such as creating terms and policies that individuals assert
  • Tracking and ad blocking, and harmonizing methods and experiences
  • Health Care VRM
  • Devices, such as the freedom box
  • VRM inSovereign vs./+ Administrative identities
    • Real estate
    • Banking (including credit cards, payments, transactions)
    • Retail
  • Personal data pain points, e.g. filling out forms
  • Trust networks
  • Harnessing adtech science and methods for customers, rather than only for vendors

The morning will be devoted to VRM issues, while the afternoon will concentrate on personal clouds.

We still have eight tickets left here. There is no charge to attend.

In the next few days here on the blog we’ll be going over some of the topics above. Input welcome.

 

The right frame for relationship is personal, not social

February 13, 2013 / / 1 Comment

The short answer to Brian Solis‘s headline question — Are Businesses Becoming the New Big Brother in Social Media? — is no, because they’re not that smart. In the body copy and graphics of his excellent post, Brian explains why. Here’s one sample:

There are several other images like that, each of which says something we — as users and customers — have known all along, but companies spying on us (even for our own good) don’t. Or do, but have rationalized spying anyway, because that’s all they know how to do. So far.

Brian:

Considering that 58% want you to engage in times of need, 42% wish to hear from you in good times, 64% only want you listening to be at their beck and call, and half of all consumers don’t want you listening at all, what are you to do?

Obviously social media, and specifically social listening, isn’t going away. But it does take tactfulness, genuine intentions and diplomacy to listen, learn, and engage (directly or indirectly) in ways that consumers feel recognized and important. It’s hard to imagine that anyone who says something negative or positive only to have it appreciated and considered by an organization will feel anything other than thankful.

Agreed. Especially if the frame is still a social one, and the interplay happens on social media (meaning Facebook and Twitter, mostly).

But relationships of human beings are personal, not just social.

The problem I have with my car or my airline is not a social one. It’s personal. Obviously, I can make it social, and that’s how Social CRM works today: I complain on Twitter or Facebook. But why should I have to go through Facebook or Twitter to get a dialog going with a human being at a company providing me a product or service?

What we need is VRM. There is lots of VRM development going on, but we’re still missing VRM tools that match up with CRM tools. It’s as simple as that. Many are in progress, but they aren’t here yet, in the sense that any one of us knows we can use them, on our phones or computers, to get through to somebody on the other side, and to deal at a machine level with the stuff that machines handle best.

CRM can’t do it alone, and it’s wrong to expect it to do what it can’t. It takes two hands to clap. The missing hand for CRM, all along, has been VRM one.

What we need, I believe, at this point, is a few CRM-facing VRM companies and developers to get together with CRM developers who are ready to build out their side of VRM+CRM relationships. D2D: Developer to Developer.

Some of the VRM developers we need are on this list. Others will need to step up. And to do it soon, because it’s becoming clear at last that both SCRM and CRM can’t get it done alone.

VRM development work

February 5, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I’ll be having a brown bag lunch today with a group of developers, talking about VRM and personal clouds, among other stuff that’s sure to come up. To make that easier, I’ve copied and pasted the current list from the VRM developers page of the ProjectVRM wiki. If you’d like to improve it in any way, please do — either on the wiki itself, or by letting us know what to change.

While there are entire categories that fit in the larger VRM circle — quantified self (QS) and personal health records (PHRs) are two that often come up — we’ve tried to confine this list to projects and companies that directly address the goals (as well as the principles) listed on the main page of the wiki.

Here is a partial list of VRM development efforts. (See About VRM). Some are organizations, some are commercial entities, some are standing open source code development efforts.

SOFTWARE and SERVICES
Intentcasting
AskForIt † – individual demand aggregation and advocacy
Body Shop Bids † – intentcasting for auto body work bids based on uploaded photos
Have to Have † – “A single destination to store and share everything you want online”
Intently † – Intentcasting “shouts” for services, in the U.K.
Innotribe Funding the Digital Asset Grid prototype, for secure and accountable Intentcasting infrastructure
OffersByMe † – intentcasting for local offers
Prizzm †- social CRM platform rewarding customers for telling businesses what they want, what they like, and what they have problems with
RedBeacon † – intentcasting locally for home services
Thumbtack † – service for finding trustworthy local service providers
Trovi intentcasting; matching searchers and vendors in Portland, OR and Chandler, AZ†
Übokia intentcasting†
Zaarly † intentcasting to community – local so far in SF and NYC
Browser Extensions
Abine † DNT+, deleteme, PrivacyWatch: privacy-protecting browser extentions
Collusion Firefox add-on for viewing third parties tracking your movements
Disconnect.me † browser extentions to stop unwanted tracking, control data sharing
Ghostery † browser extension for tracking the trackers
PrivacyScore † browser extensions and services to users and site builders for keeping track of trackers
Databases
InfoGrid – graph database for personal networking applications
ProjectDanube – open source software for identity and personal data services
Messaging Services and Brokers
Gliph †- private, secure identity management and messaging for smartphones
Insidr † – customer service Q&A site connecting to people who have worked in big companies and are willing to help when the company can’t or won’t
PingUp (was Getabl) †- chat utility for customers to engage with merchants the instant customers are looking for something
TrustFabric † – service for managing relationships with sellers
Personal Data and Relationship Management
Azigo.com † – personal data, personal agent
ComplainApp † – An iOS/Android app to “submit complaints to businesses instantly – and find people with similar complaints”
Connect.Me † – peer-to-peer reputation, personal agent
Geddup.com † – personal data and relationship management
Higgins – open source, personal data
The Locker Project – open source, personal data
Mydex †- personal data stores and other services
OneCub †- Le compte unique pour vos inscriptions en ligne (single account for online registration)
Paoga † – personal data, personal agent
Personal.com † – personal data storage, personal agent
Personal Clouds – personal cloud wiki
Privowny † – privacy company for protecting personal identities and for tracking use and abuse of those identities, building relationships
QIY † – independent infrastructure for managing personal data and relationships
Singly † – personal data storage and platform for development, with an API
Transaction Management
Dashlane † – simplified login and checkout
Trust-Based or -Providing Systems and Services
id3 – trust frameworks
Respect Network † – VRM personal cloud network based on OAuth, XDI, KRL, unhosted, and other open standards, open source, and open data initiatives. Respect Network is the parent of Connect.Me.
Trust.cc Personal social graph based fraud prevention, affiliated with Social Islands
SERVICE PROVIDERS OR PROJECTS BUILT ON VRM PRINCIPLES
First Retail Inc. † commodity infrastructure for bi-directional marketplaces to enable the Personal RFP
dotui.com † intelligent media solutions for retail and hospitality customers
Edentiti Customer driven verification of idenity
Real Estate Cafe † money-saving services for DIY homebuyers & FSBOs
Hover.com Customer-driven domain management†
Hypothes.is – open source, peer review
MyInfo.cl (Transitioning from VRM.cl) †
Neustar “Cooperation through trusted connections” †
NewGov.us – GRM
[1] † – Service for controlling one’s reputation online
Spotflux † malware, tracking, unwanted ad filtration through an encrypted tunnel
SwitchBook † – personal search
Tangled Web † – mobile, P2P & PDS
The Banyan Project– community news co-ops owned by reader/members
TiddlyWiki – a reusable non-linear personal Web notebook
Ting † – customer-driven mobile virtual network operator (MVNO – a cell phone company)
Tucows †
VirtualZero – Open food platform, supply chain transparency
INFRASTRUCTURE
Concepts
EmanciPay – dev project for customer-driven payment choices
GRM: Government Relationship Management – subcategory of VRM
ListenLog – personal data logging
Personal RFP – crowdsourcing, standards
R-button – UI elements for relationship members
Hardware
Freedom Box – personal server on free software and hardware
Precipitat, WebBox – new architecture for decentralizing the Web, little server
Standards, Frameworks, Code bases and Protocols
Datownia † – builds APIs from Excel spreadsheets held in Dropbox
Evented APIs – new standard for live web interactivity
KRL (Kinetic Rules Language) – personal event networks, personal rulesets, programming Live Web interactions
Kynetx † – personal event networks, personal rulesets
https://github.com/CSEMike/OneSwarm Oneswarm] – privacy protecting peer-to-peer data sharing
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/persona/ Mozila Persona] – a privacy-protecting one-click email-based way to do single sign on at websites
TAS3.eu — Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services – R&D toward a trusted architecture and set of adaptive security services for individuals
Telehash – standards, personal data protocols
Tent – open decentralized protocol for personal autonomy and social networking
The Mine! Project – personal data, personal agent
UMA – standards
webfinger – personal Web discovery, finger over HTTP
XDI – OASIS semantic data interchange standard
PEOPLE
Analysts and Consultants
Ctrl-SHIFT † – analysts
Synergetics † – VRM for job markets
VRM Labs – Research
HealthURL – Medical
Consortia, Workgroups
Fing.org – VRM fostering organization
Information Sharing Workgroup at Kantara – legal agreements, trust frameworks
Pegasus – eID smart cards
Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium (PDEC) – industry collaborative
Meetups, Conferences, and Events
IIW: Internet Identity Workshop – yearly unconference in Mountain View
VRM Hub – meeting in LondonNOTES:
† Indicates companies. Others are organizations, development projects or both. Some development projects are affiliated with companies. (e.g. Telehash and The Locker Project with Singly, and KRL with Kynetx.)
A – creating standard
B – Using other standards
1 – EventedAPI

VRM in 2013

January 2, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Two positive pats on the VRM back greeted the new year and got me thinking.

The first is Jim Harris’ Small Data and VRM — his prediction for 2013 in the @DataRoundtable blog. He writes,

One of the reasons that vendors are getting geeky over Big Data is because they claim that they want to use it to become more customer-centric and better understand customer behavior when, in reality, what vendors really want is to become more customer-captive and better control customer behavior.

However, the alternative to each individual vendor using Big Data to collect and manage HoardaBytesof information about multiple customers is to invert the one-vendor-to-many-customers paradigm by embracing a one-customer-to-many-vendors paradigm. Individual customers would own and manage the Small Data needed to accurately describe themselves, protect the privacy of their data and decide for themselves how their data – and how much of their data – is shared with vendors.

My lament over vendors historically not allowing us to own our own data, which I have been referring to as the Fundamental Flaw of Customer MDM since 2010, is a topic I return to on a regular basis, including my recent blog series about social MDM that received some thought-provoking commentary, among which was an excellent book recommendation made by Jean-Michel Franco.

… and then quotes The Intention Economy for several paragraphs before concluding,

The status quo will always fight the future, but change is the only universal constant. I hope 2013 will see the beginning of the changes – almost none of which are technological in nature – needed to bring about this long overdue paradigm shift in data and customer relationship management.

Keith Teare in Techcrunch sees the same changes coming, and visits them at length in Unnatural Acts and the Rise of Mobile. Here’s a compressed version of his post:

There is a new law emerging in cyberspace. As desktop traffic growth declines, and mobile adoption explodes, predatory marketers need to monetize mobile traffic or die trying.

As this law takes hold, bad behavior is replacing smart long-term product thinking. The result is an explosion of unnatural acts of engagement. Facebook allows users to escape its filters (designed to give a good experience) by paying to force their Facebook posts in front of their friends — $7 a time and you’re golden. Twitter sends constant reminders about “what you missed” on its service. Google Plus has notification defaults set to a level that results in constant stream of inane emails.

Users are the net losers in this festival of lowering the bar when it comes to how badly behaved a marketer is permitted to be in order to drive use…

The possibility exists in 2013 that the absolute revenues of the major players will decline as desktop revenues suffer and mobile revenues fail to make up the difference, even as they grow dramatically. This nightmare scenario is key to understanding what is driving bad behavior by marketers and product leaders. Bradley Horowitz recently made some pretty good jokes about Facebook’s bad behavior, but Google is not immune from this disease…

The need to monetize mobile traffic will dominate Google, Facebook, Twitter and others in 2013. And the pressure is to do it quickly due to the collapse in the growth of desktop-based traffic. Successful CMOs will avoid the pitfalls of driving unnatural acts of engagement and focus on user-benefits derived from monetization strategies…

I have lost count of how many ads offering me products that I have already purchased have flown past me on various sites and devices recently. Even the ad stream is becoming polluted. Targeting efforts are at the bottom of this trend. But from a user point of view targeting is poor and therefore irritating. The recent attempt by Facebook to alter the Instagram terms and conditions, and privacy policy, was a mistake, and acknowledged, but nonetheless it was driven by these desperate efforts…

currently all roads point to several varied attempts to re-portalize; that is to say, to own your own traffic and seek to monetize it. This is the old Yahoo view of the world and it clearly represents a limited mindset that will not scale to the huge mobile opportunity. For Twitter in particular, which has a large global opportunity as a platform, this trend represents a shrinking of its real opportunity…

Advertising is so far disappointing both in terms of its scale and its growth trajectory, as well as the value of a CPM. This disappointment forces mobile marketers to either innovate in the meaning of advertising on mobile or to systematically force feed both a large volume of ads, as well as attempt to target those ads in such a way that higher CPMs can be achieved. Everybody becoming an advertiser and paying for one’s attention is one way we see this. Limiting the distribution of a post, and then incenting payment for the post to be seen, is the ultimate in bad behavior. It won’t work out well…

Intimacy and long-term relationships are a forgotten goal.

The essence of good behavior is to start by helping the user achieve a goal. The essence of a mobile device is that it is intimate… The short-term revenue win from displaying an ad is offset by the long-term relationship damage done between the user and the publisher showing the ad. The sense of being a “target” rather than a person is a growing experience, as our sensibilities are increasingly offended…

The net impact of desperation-driven bad behavior is that users become cynical of publishers they formerly embraced. Privacy invasions, behavior changes by apps, and other experiences lead to the assumption that we, the users, are nothing more than ad fodder. The sad thing here is that users want their favorite publishers to make money, so that they can fund the app or service in question. But the crude methods of monetization are leading to alienation, not love…

The real nightmare for the industry here is that advertisers also become cynical. Upsetting users is not high on the list of advertisers’ goals. As users react, advertisers will run in the opposite direction. The already slow growth of mobile advertising will slow even further and the already large gap between the hours spent on mobile and the advertising dollars focused on it will grow further. Nobody wants this, but everybody is fuelling it. It is time to take a deep breath and collectively think about how to have the opposite impact…

New apps and services can grow quickly by offering intimacy and control to users.

Intimacy is the currency on mobile. Intimacy is a great thing, of course. Users love the ability to engage with those they like, love, and admire, and even those they hate and detest, in a personal mobile space. Apps that feed or empower this intimacy have prospered. Apps that trample over it have suffered… Mobile is 100 percent intimate, and bad behavior – and I include targeting here – will fail to produce scalable revenues. Doc Searls, in his Vendor Realtionship Management thoughts, has captured much of this thinking. His book “The Intention Economy, When Customers Take Charge” is a must-read book for the class of 2013 CMOs…

I definitely long for an unpolluted stream that is 100 percent capable of telling me things I want to be told. I also would love a way to tell the advertisers which brands I love, whether it be my favorite airline, movie theater, restaurant, camera vendor or whatever. I would love a way to regulate or control how my favorite vendors interact with me. Throttling them when they send too much or the wrong stuff, killing their ability to reach me when they behave badly, embracing them when they serve me well. Mobile, as an intimate device, is a great area to place the controls needed to realize much of this. And it scales too. Every human being on the planet has intimate tastes and relationships they love. This is true for their relationships to people, brands, products, organizations, and other entities. Two billion smartphones by the end of 2013 and every entity on the planet makes for a very large opportunity to allow users to become the boss, and for brands to enter into adult relationships with the customers who love them. Mobile is the perfect platform for the dream of one-to-one marketing to finally exist.

Markets are dance floors. If marketers want to dance one-to-one with customers, they need to let customers take the lead at least half the time. Here’s what I say about that in a chapter of The Intention Economy titled “The Dance”:

Right now, most retail market categories are dance floors where every customer hears dozens, hundreds, or thousands of companies, each with a megaphone, calling out dance moves. What those companies need to do instead is put down the megaphone, and—in the manner of Trader Joe’s and Zappos—shop along with customers. Dance. Sure, lead sometimes, but follow, too.

Not easy. Throughout the industrial age, business on the whole has always taken the lead—or thought it had to. But for customers to take charge—which they will, at least half the time—they have to take the lead, too.

It helps that vendors and customers both bring qualities to the dance floor that the other does not, and that both need each other for the economy to work and for civilization to thrive. They don’t always need to love each other or even to know each other. But they do need to respect, understand, and learn from each other. They can’t do that to full effect if one side tries constantly to dominate the other.

One thing companies are free to do is please and delight customers with products and services that are truly worthwhile. The chances of doing that only go up if customers are both heard and engaged as equals, and not as slaves or suckling calves.

So if you, Mr. or Ms. CMO, want to dance with customers, start by taking a look at the VRM developments that are already underway, because they’re supplying the dance shoes customers are starting to wear. (In some cases, such as browser extensions for blocking ads and tracking, the shoes have cleats, and customers are putting them on to run away from you.)

If you, big data masters, want to truly understand customers, do two things: 1) Look in the mirror. There you’ll find a human being who will never be fully described by data of any size — least of all by data gained by unwelcome surveillance; and 2) Give people, especially customers, the data you have about them. Remember what happened to computing with PCs and communications with the Net: individuals could do far more with both than could any big companies — least of all ones that thought they could do it all with big centralized systems.

If you, investors (and investment-focused media such as Techcrunch), want to ride a true sea change rather than surf the next buzz wave, consider this: VRM is about equipping the entire buy side of the market with its own tools of engagement — tools that can signal true intention, good will and countless other forms of economic signaling. This was a promise from the start of personal computing, of the Net, and of mobile devices. Rather than looking at those things as ways to target, capture, drive, trap, own or lock in customers, look at them as ways for customers to reach out and engage you, in their own ways and on their own terms. Remember that customers are where the money that matters comes from. They’re also the ones in the best position to keep it mattering, by exercising genuine loyalty, rather than the kind coerced or enticed with gimmicks like loyalty cards, rewards and discounts.

And happy new year.

 

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