Inspired by a round of twitter tennis between two customer-focused personalities, Graham Hill (at the time in Hong Kong) and Doc Searls, about CRM and VRM, I sensed a certain hardening of viewpoints that may have existed for a while. It seems I was not alone with that in the part of the twitter community that pays attention to such matters. See a story unfold.
VenessaMiemis . @dsearls @GrahamHill calling it #VRM #CRM still exclusionary & maintaining silos, imho. we're all people trying to solve problems, period.
Believing that live energetic discourse helps contrarian viewpoints to mingle and given a chance evolve to a next level, I invited to an on-line Junto on the current alpha platform
CoCreatr Want to #Junto about #VRM? Sat May 08 00:00 UTC, Fri 9am ET http://junto.cc @GrahamHill @dsearls @jobsworth @goonth @VenessaMiemis
... where I confused the U.S. timezone - so sorry. Aiming for 9 am in Japan meant 8pm ET, I tweeted 9 am ET.
Only a small group converged, 2 ¾ participants (three, but one had no video).
If time presses you, skip down to take-away.
Why this virtual meeting?
Prior thread reconstructed from twitter (reverse chron order)
dsearls @GrahamHill Why the slam? Need we go back to http://bit.ly/ajRuXP ? @jobsworth @CoCreatr @VenessaMiemis #VRM
CoCreatr @GrahamHill thank you, that was my first impression. #VRM (or #CMR as Frederick Newell put it), is pioneering ground, cc @venessamiemis
grahamhill RT @CoCreatr: @VenessaMiemis Be careful. #VRM still has more intellectual and practical holes in it than a Swiss cheese.
CoCreatr @VenessaMiemis check out #VRM http://j.mp/5sklKF HT Mark Tamis comment on http://socialcrm.posterous.com/social-data-and-social-crm
What this means to me
While CRM is an established discipline in business for more than a decade, in 2003, Frederick Newell wrote Why CRM Does't Work, here his editorial. VRM appears rather new, emergent and untested. Its benefits to business are non-obvious, hence it is unlikely to attract widespread support from industry and trade. Yet, as a consumer, it appeals to me.During the past decade and half, I have registered with a few dozen vendors, shared some of my data, recorded a few dozens of passwords, and done thousands of dollars worth of business with them, banking not included. I expect this business to grow, from me, from my family, and from others. I start disliking the juggling of all the different logins, different interfaces, fractured identities. It becomes work that detracts from getting the business done, or from on-line shopping, all the while physical shopping had already become time-consuming and boring.
During the past year and a half, I have registered with a few social network providers. Actually if you count flickr, it is two years and half. As I just found out, I happened to join when Mashable published on social networking fatigue, early 2008. And when Robert Scoble got locked out of facebook. Little did I know.
In 2010, I notice my own identity fractured across twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, this blog, and with other providers. It is growing difficult to keep track of what I share with which of my social circles. Not much different than real life, again honesty is the best policy. What if there was an easier way? Not for honesty, for sharing of course.
Recently facebook's prying its user's data loose to be shared in the open made me look for alternatives. Maybe I quit like Michael Pucher. The Mine! Project people say it as I feel it. And the Disapora* people set out to do something about it. I added my 2 yen worth, virtually and for real.
From this angle, seeing Graham Hill and Doc Searls hashing it out on twitter about #CRM and #VRM intrigued me to invite them and a few others to talk it over and see if we can lift this to a next level.
Which brings us to Junto, the alpha platform where people can meet to discuss.
I could not get these celebrities to join in, maybe because I botched up the timing, maybe they are busy, just not interested or they have no idea that an alpha virtual talking space (different from top-down videoconferencing or two-person skype, soon to be five) hardly detracts from the results we can achieve by open space style live energetic talk.
Here is the skinny.
Who met, and how
@goonth @cole_tucker@cocreatr (host)
On http://junto.cc occupying virtual room or space #VRM, How to own your virtual presence May 08 00:00 UTC. The room may be removed from the alpha by the time you read this.
Notes drafted on real-time sharing notepad http://piratepad.net/VRM (Powered by EtherPad).
Topic:
#VRM commonly known as Vendor Relationship Management
How to own your
virtual presence
Motto:
@VenessaMiemis walled garden social networks are starting to feel silly. i want to own my presence whereever i exist on the web at any time.
Guidance:
Open space (unconference) http://u.nu/82f99 whoever comes is the right people
Exploration:
Twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and many more, virtual identities fracture across provider platforms, lock-in. How can your data be yours to control, peer-to-peer, state of the art (swiss cheese?), where you want to go?
After some technical issues, we talked excitedly for about an hour, touched on many issues without going really into research for VRM, just our current understanding what it stands for.
What we found
(Summary from my handwritten notes)
Bad Examples: Medical records, sold poorly anoymized. Facebook eroding user control of their personal information.
Interesting: Movement towards data sharing, analytics, awareness. We have social influence mapping, values, dashboard. Technology for data mining is 15 years old. Recently dynamic re-targeting of ads to audience.
Focus: Reduce the whitespace in the process of engagement. Human interaction is key. Cannot automate sentiment, best done through dialog, emotional mapping of narratives (Stanford), markup conversational hotspots by contextual strings or symbology.
Intention: Ideas and marketing message spreads well when customers act as resellers of the information. Companies are aiming to monetize the reselling power, but end up trying to monetize the conversation, as that is all they have access to. #fail. Some try to track the reselling route, but customer sentiment is influenced by more than messages from trust network, PR, ads, which are notoriously hard to grade for effectiveness.
Uncertainties: Cause and effect from affiliate marketing process, the follow(er) spread chain,
Horizon: empower open nets, Cisco's move to open-source telepresence [which I believe may as well be prompted by upcoming technology displacement], Umair Haque's betterness models, redefine what is value, evolve beyond transaction monitoring, likely towards exchange currency (time, attention, and more).
Additional references
The Power of Pull by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison
http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/05/influence-and-twitter.html
http://blog.us.cision.com/2010/05/the-5-new-features-on-twitter-facebook-and-linkedin-pr-pros-need-to-understand/
http://cocreatr.amplify.com/2010/05/07/your-relationships-caring-sharing-are-not-yours-fractured-identity-pwned-by-facebook-twitter-etal-vrm/ /
The main take-away
Walled gardens, in the form of current registration with multitude vendors and provider (yes also social networking platform providers) stand in the way of engaging customers as "resellers" (spreaders) of information that may engage more prospects to become customers. Viral dislikes walls, silos and lock-in. Idea spread fail.
We may manage customer relations all the well we want...
Thick value grows so much better outside walled gardens by the open spreading of ideas within a personal trust network .
This means
In the interest of doing business, (which speeds up once there is trust) the customers shall be free to take their data where they want, and self- determine who to trust, vendors included. Attempts at lock-in self-defeat the purpose of business to acquire and retain customers profitably. The main reason is friends are so effective at spreading business ideas which drives down the cost of acquiring customers. Business as a tribe, as in Zappos PR. Pull wins over push.
Hello, VRM and open-sourcing.
Concluding
This summary is one-sided, from my handwritten notes. Although I used two screens, I could not update the virtual notepad in real-time parallel to the convo. It is just too interesting to participate, which calls for observers and secretary's roles in a Junto.This exchange would benefit from your viewpoints. Feel free to add them below.
Recent Comments