Category: Companies (Page 5 of 11)

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 taking root in France

January 22, 2013 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

I love this tweet from @CaroCondamin

Le concept du Vendor Relationship Management par ProjectVRM http://www.caroline-condamin.com/vrm/ #VRM

Following the links, I see she works for OneCub, a VRM company in France. Here she also includes this simple and handy graphic, which nicely illustrates the reciprocity between CRM and VRM:

Thanks to the good work done by Fing and others in France, when I spoke at an event there last year, all the hands in the room went up when I asked how many were familiar with VRM.

And, even though there is some argument in VRM circles over whether this proposed tax is a good or bad thing, there is no doubt that the spirit behind it is aligned with the one behind VRM development. In fact, this 2oo page report, written in what one source calls “administrative French,” sources The Cluetrain Manifesto and The Intention Economy. Here is Caroline’s post about the proposal. (In Chrome, it translates to English for me.) Anybody interested in the intersection between public interest, policy and market dynamics should read it.

Toward a matrix of APIs

December 16, 2012 / Doc Searls / 5 Comments

At the 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, Cal Henderson, then of Flickr, gave a long session called “Launching and scaling new Web services.” As I recall, among the many things he explained well were some principles behind the Flickr API. One of those principles was user access to data. The API should be one that allowed the user to haul all of her data out of the system, even if it was to federate that data into a competing system. That’s because Flickr believed that user data is the user’s first, and not just the company’s. Another principle was keeping the API stable, so as not to disrupt users and other services that depended on the API.

Cal left Flickr a couple years after that, but Flickr’s API remains a model of stability and utility — so much so that Dave Winer this morning suggested it be declared a national treasure.

Many of us depend in large ways to the APIs of companies great and small — and more get added to that collection every day. For a good picture of what’s going on with APIs, check out ProgrammableWeb.com. Between Dave’s respect for durable APIs like Flickr’s, and ProgrammableWeb’s roster of current and future dependencies, we start to see a matrix of APIs that Craig Burton compares to a city filled with buildings and relationships. Each API provider, like each building, exposes the provider’s core competencies in ways that can be engaged.

But what happens when we each have our own APIs — when our own core competencies become exposed in ways that can be engaged? And when we start managing our lives through relationships between our APIs and those in the rest of the world — especially in ways that are live and full-duplex (two ways at the same time, like a phone call)? And where each of us, or a trusted agent, can do the required IF, THEN, OR and other programming logic, between our own personal clouds and the clouds of others? What will we have then?

There is lots of blogging out loud about this, about both the downsides of dependency (as both Phil Windley and I have, toward Flickr in particular). But I think the upside deserves more than equal consideration, especially as companies begin to realize the importance of direct and engaged relationships with customers and users, which is what we’ll have when VRM and CRM (along with allied functions on both sides) fully engage. The result, I believe, will be a matrix of useful dependencies, based on APIs everywhere, thick with accountability and responsibility. The result will be far more opportunity, and boundless positive economic and social externalities based on the Net’s and the Web’s founding virtues. What will end, or at least be obsoleted, are Matrix-like worlds where users and customers are held captive.

Thus our goal for VRM: to prove that free customers are more valuable than captive ones — both to themselves and to everyone and everything else with which they engage.

Driving VRM with car data and APIs

November 26, 2012 / Doc Searls / 6 Comments

Go read OnStar gives Volt owners what they want: their data, in the cloud, by Sean Gallagher, in Ars Technica. It’s a VRM story. The vendor is Chevrolet, the vended product is the Volt, and the relationship management is a DIY hack by one customer. The story begins,

You probably don’t think of your car as a developer platform, but Mike Rosack did. A few days after buying his Chevy Volt, Rosack started slowly mining his driving data. But he eventually revved up his efforts and created a community platform for drivers to track their own efficiency. Today more than 1,800 Volt owners compare stats with each other, jockeying for position on Rosack’s Volt Stats leader board.

volt dash with r-button The Volt uses OnStar, a GM subsidiary known through its advertising for providing a way for drivers to call for roadside assistance; but which is actually a sophisticated cell-based data system through which cars communicate constantly with the mother ship’s cloud. While OnStar generously shares data back to customers through an app called RemoteLink, much more can be done with it, since it’s data and comes out through an API. Now here is where the story gets VRooMy:

Rosack initially wanted to do more with his own driving data than just view it on his phone. So he built what eventually became Volt Stats to capture this data, then started sharing it with other Volt owners. There was just one small problem: Volt Stats relied on Rosack’s reverse engineering of an interface for OnStar’s RemoteLink mobile application (iOS and Android). When OnStar moved to shut down the Web services interface Rosack had plugged into in mid-October, Volt Stats arrived at a screeching halt.

Rather than leaving Volt Stats stalled on the roadside, GM and OnStar accelerated efforts to give developers a new public Web API to create services on top of OnStar data. The companies even worked with Rosack to get him onboard and get Volt Stats re-launched. Now, Volt Stats is back online and other would-be car data hackers will soon be able to connect their Web applications to GM owners’ vehicle data (provided, of course, that they have privacy policies that meet with the approval of GM and OnStar lawyers).

OnStar had already developed an API for GM partners such as the car-sharing service RelayRides, who need to get access to some of the remote control and telematics elements of the service. But this new interface takes advantage of technologies such as OAuth and JAX-RS and it’s a step toward turning OnStar into a broader platform for the “Internet of things.” It’s also a way to give car enthusiasts a new kind of access to something they’ve always thought of as their own—their cars’ data.

Now come the VRM questions:

Where and how might customers store that data? Are current PDS (personal data stores) compatible and ready for it?
How might customers use that data — especially outside and between multiple vendors’ apps, APIs and relationship silos?
Might we see an ⊂ (r-button) on the dashboards of car? How might that work? And if it does, how do we make it standard?
What usage and new market-driving scenarios might we start to imagine here?
How might customers assert their own privacy policies and terms as demand begins to drive supply?
What other interfaces do cars have that might be brought into the picture?
How can what happens here model what we do with the rest of the “Internet of things?”
What are the meshy wireless things we can do among ourselves and our cars, outside any vendor’s box? (Would love Robin Chase‘s thinking here.)

These are questions especially for VRM developers. Look for answers (and more questions) here and on various blogs.

VRM happenings in the U.K.

November 20, 2012 / Doc Searls / 1 Comment

The tweets have been rolling in…

@Ctrl-Shift

Identity Assurance: Mydex’s unique contribution. An interview with @dejalexander @MydexCIC http://www.ctrl-shift.co.uk/news/2012/11/15/identity-assurance-mydexs-unique-contribution/ …

@williamheath‏

@321CtrlShift interview with my colleague @dejalexander on @MydexCIC and #IDAssurance http://is.gd/7yyiZk #VRM

@Mydex CIC‏

Very thoughtful @SimonTucker blog post about today’s DWP announcement http://is.gd/zRslHa #IDAssurance #VRM

@williamheath‏

For those who wondered how #VRM would first break in the popular press: http://bit.ly/107SqT9 #DailyMirror #Midata #CtrlShift

So let’s unpack those.

First, the DWP (Department for Work and Pensions) announcement. What Mydex and others will provide is online identity assurance. (Note: not “providing” an identity.) To explain, Out-Law.com gives us Online identity scheme providers selected to design new DWP framework for verifying claims by benefits seekers.

This is one step in a march of reform led by the U.K. government, and moving in a generally VRooMy direction through the Midata program. Here are some links, starting in late 2011, and listed roughly chronologically:

The piece in the Mirror focuses on health and retail discounts. VRM is much broader than that, but it’s a good start.

[Later…] More below, from William Heath.

Intentcasting

November 15, 2012 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

I’ve lately been posting under Dave Winer‘s threads, using an OPML editor. One of Dave’s latest posts bowls right up a big VRM alley, as he says in this tweet here. That alley is Intentcasting.

From my reply:

In the VRM development community, we started out calling the latter category “Personal RFPs,” but in the last few months we’ve started calling it Intentcasting. (Scott Adams of Dilbert fame called it “broadcast shopping.”)

A partial list of intentcasting developers is listed here.

An intentcasting scenario ten years hence is described in my Wall Street Journal essay from July. Let’s make it sooner than that. 🙂

Also take a look at this video demo of an intentcasting scenario, produced by @HeatherVescent for Innotribe, the innovation arm of SWIFT, the Belgium-based nonprofit that transfers $trillions per day:

That involves the Digital Asset Grid, which was demo’d two weeks ago in Osaka at SWIFT’s Sibos conference. A number of VRM developers have been involved with that, as well as myself. The main two contributing to the prototype, and there to demo it at Sibos, were Phil Windley of Kynetx and Drummond Reed of Respect Network. Phil has a nice rundown on the session.

A huge thanks to @Petervan for leading the whole project, over the last two years.

Here’s the current list of intentcasting developers at the ProjectVRM wiki:

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”

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

I know there are more, and that the descriptions need updating and de-bugging. That’s why I’m listing these here. Write to me with corrections, or fix the wiki yourself. (If you’re not known to it, you’ll need to go through the registration thing.)

Linklings

November 15, 2012 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

Here’s an overdue compilation of stuff I’ve been saving up to share. Many items have slipped through the cracks, but I want to get at least these up.

The plural of personal is social, by JP Rangaswami. The punchlines (read through — there are many):

Business is personal. It’s about relationships. It has always been so. Until we tried to forget it and concentrated on making money, not shoes. [As Peter Drucker said, people make shoes, not money]. Then, for a short while, business became not-personal.

As the Cluetrain guys signalled way back in 1999, the web was changing all that. Business was becoming personal again.

It comes as no surprise to me that salesforce.com was born during those heady times, as business started becoming personal again. It comes as no surprise to me that Marc Benioff understood that the plural of personal is social, and that it’s in the DNA of the company that he and Parker Harris founded. That’s why I went to work for them.

“Social” is not a layer. “Social” is not a feature. “Social” isn’t a product.

Social is about bringing being human back into business. About how we conduct business. About why we conduct business.

Social is something in people’s hearts, in people’s beings, in their DNA.

Man is born social.

Many companies were not.

And the companies that weren’t, they can’t just become social by buying layers or features or even products. Porcine unguents, nothing more.

You need to be reborn social.

You need to start thinking of the customer as someone to have a relationship with, to get to know, to invest in, to trust, to respect.

And you need to get everyone in the company to think that way, to act that way, in everything they do.

And you need to do this everywhere, not just with your customers. Not just with your supply web or your trading partners. Not just with your staff and your consultants.

Everyone. Everywhere.

The plural of personal is social.

Proof That Loyalty Is For Suckers: Best Customers Get Penalized With Higher Bills, by Brad Tuttle in Time. It begins,

We appreciate your business. And as thanks for being a loyal customer all these years, we’re going to overcharge you.

Auto insurers and other service providers don’t say this explicitly, of course. But that’s the message sent via the rates they charge different customers.

The curious, but obviously profitable business model, in which new customers get wooed with discounts and special deals, while the oldest, most loyal, best customers are “thanked” with bills that escalate over time, is standard practice among pay TV and wireless providers. The companies play up the idea that their products and services come with special introductory rates for new customers, rather than noting that there are penalties for customers who stick with the business for the long haul and don’t complain. But no matter which way the rate changes are spun, the results are the same.

Some VRooM-ish tools and services:

YaCy: “Web search by the people, for the people.” Some copy: “YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world’s users.”
Tails: “The amnesiac incognito live system.” Copy: “It helps you to use the Internet anonymously almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leave no trace using unless you ask it explicitly.”
Silent Circle: “Private encrypted communications tools.” Email, mobile phone, VoIP, text. Scroll down to founders & leadership. One is Phil Zimmerman, father of PGP.
Request Policy is “an extension for Mozilla browsers that increases your browsing privacy, security, and speed by giving you control over cross-site requests.”

Market Research (MR to its denizens) gets an earful about VRM and The Intention Economy in
The 21st Century Battle for the Future of MR has begun: Empowered Consumers Versus “Darth Data”, by Kevin Lonnie in The Greenbook Blog.

I see some hope for getting more digital books out of silos in An RDF for Books, by Brian O’Leary.

For the privacy corner of VRM, dig Privacy, Masks and Religion, by Omer Tene in Concurring Opinions. It begins, “One of the most significant developments for privacy law over the past few years has been the rapid erosion of privacy in public.”

Klint Finley in TechCrunch makes some right-on observations about The Cloud, though he says “there being a few examples of … “vendor relationship management” idea in the wild, it still feels like vaporware to me.” Obviously I think he’s wrong, but we report the negative stuff here too. On the positive side, Scott Merrill wrote Doc Searls Would Like You to Join Him in the The Intention Economy, also in TechCrunch, back in May.

From Selling You: Not Just on Facebook, by Haydn Shaughnessy writes this in Forbes:

The reality is we need a different way of thinking about data, and in an age marked by innovation we shouldn’t find a reframe too difficult. We shouldn’t but we do. Generations of marketers have been brought up on an adversarial view of the customer, the target, the win…

In all the discussions we’ve had here in Forbes about social business we have yet to stray into the use and purpose of social data, as if we too largely accept that the adversarial view is the only one.

A couple of days back I tried to reflect an alternative view in for, example, how we might use LinkedIn data – it’s not only my view of course and I don’t want to claim any originality in it. For five years or more, maybe as far back as The ClueTrain Manifesto, people like Doc Searls have been arguing that the web makes a better commerce engine if we recognize all the power symmetries it brings. And there is an increasing number of projects that are taking up that logic.

CRM type data is old school – Tesco in the UK had signed up more than 15 million people to its ClubCard by 2009, that is over a third of the adult population of the country. It’s what companies did before the web. But it seems to be continuing even now that we have new possibilities.

There is no need to collect inference data on people and their possible choices. There is no adversary called customer. We have scaled up human interaction online where we can get closer to asking people, suggesting to them, and interacting with them.

So the future actually belongs to companies that take a symmetrical view of power…

From Another Bubble; Not Housing, by Francine Hardaway of Stealthmode Blog in Business Insider:

Guys, we ARE in a bubble. I don’t care what you say. As an outsider, I can see it…

Like Facebook, Pinterest and Instgram have valuations that are guesses about the future of advertising.Will they be the next great places to advertise as we shift to mobile?

Pinterest may be worth more “nothing” than Instgram, however, because as Scoble pointed out, women have buying power, which is why brands cozy up to mommy bloggers. But they haven’t bought BlogHer, the platform on which those women express opinions, have they? Lisa, Jory and Elisa were pioneers in bringing women’s voices to the marketplace, and no one has offered them a billion. That’s because BlogHer is not a tool. But it should expose also the fact that simply being favored by women doesn’t confer $7b in value on a company.

More worrisome is the supposition that these apps will someday be good carriers of mobile advertising, even though as yet the advertising industry hasn’t solved the online ad effectiveness problem and even Facebook reported diminished revenues this quarter.

The advertising industry is in upheaval, over the value of online advertising per se, before it even tackles mobile. Publishers are going under right and left because customers don’t want to see ads online, and truly hate them on mobile . Here, especially, the user will control the conversation.

So the valuations of Pinterest and Instgram/FB are merely expensive guesses about the future of advertising, about whether the ad tech industry will figure out mobile in a non-invasive way. Yes, the open graph will be part of it, and the advertising will be targeted. But I am guessing that Doc Searls will be quoted here gain and again: markets are conversations, and customers will control them.

In Vendor Relationship Management: Making the Customer King, Stephen F. DeAngelis visits both The Intention Economy and The Customer As a God (my Wall Street Journal essay from July)

Join the conversation about VRM at The Well

August 21, 2012 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

From the 15th through the rest of this month I’m talking VRM with all comers at Inkwell.vue, the public space at The Well, one of the oldest and best of online fora. A shortcut for visiting and joining the conversation is http://bitly.com/docsearls. Here is an excerpt from my answers to the latest questions from my host at The Well, Jon Lebkowsky:

In your second question… “How well you can scale ‘engaging the customer’? … the “you” is the company. The scale we want with VRM is to be able to relate to many different companies in common and well-understood ways, rather than in as many ways as there are companies.

For example, loyalty cards don’t scale for customers. Having lots of them is mostly a pain in the ass. There are approaches, of course. I have a friend who scales his loyalty cards by punching a hole in the corner of each (careful not to hurt the barcode or the mag-stripe) and putting them on a janitor’s key ring. He organizes them alphabetically and keeps the whole thing in his car. At the drug or grocery store he whips out this big round messy thing and presents it to the self-check-out machine or the baffled person behind the counter. I know a woman who has a fat wallet in her purse devoted to all the loyalty cards she carries. Real scale for both of these people would be eliminating the whole separate-card system (in which each loyalty program is a separate silo) and replacing it with one way of defining a genuine relationship with each company. That way, for example, companies with genuine relationship would get favored treatment when the customer signals an intention to buy. Also, the customer should be able to change their contact information for every company in one move, rather than dozen, fifty or a hundred different moves, each on a separate website.

I don’t see this as a scaling down of marketing interactions, but rather of eliminating waste, increasing efficiency and increasing genuine loyalty, by removing gimmickry and costly self-delusional bullshit.

Last year I noticed that Panera Bread, one of the few chains where I like to shop, started pushing loyalty cards. It pissed me off, because I was already loyal and didn’t want this fashionable friction inserted into an otherwise functional relationship. When I said so to the woman behind the counter, she said, “I know, I know. We hate them too.” Later they stopped putting a stack of cards for customers to take on the counter, and stopped asking if customers carried cards. So I just looked up Panera and loyalty cards in a search, and found this article by Dale Furtwengler (about Panera Bread’s card). Read the post and the comments. It’s a different angle on the same issue for a retailer like Panera. What is says is that this loyalty program has failed to scale for both Panera and its customers. For customers like me, who don’t carry a Panera card, business is the same, and the company knows whatever it knows already by less gimmicky means. Customers who like and carry loyalty cards are now buying for the gimmicky reasons (e.g. discounts, points and the rest) rather than just because they like the store and the products sold there. Panera itself gets a skewed view of their customers, based on what they learn only from the subset using loyalty cards. The whole mess makes Trader Joe’s approach — to avoid the whole mess and make the shopping experience as simple, pleasant, inexpensive and good as the products sold there — look a lot more appealing.

So, to your third question, “In advocating that engagement, are you advocating a scaling down of marketing interactions? Do we get away from ‘mass marketing’?” the answers are yes. But mass marketing won’t go away. As I say about advertising in the book, it will do what only it can do. Coca-Cola will always need mass marketing. But the rest of the business world won’t need to be just like Coca-Cola.

Come on over and join in.

Can we each be our own Amazon?

July 9, 2012 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

The most far-out chapter in The Intention Economy is one set in a future when free customers are known to be more valuable than captive ones. It’s called “The Promised Market,” and describes the imagined activities of a family traveling to a wedding in San Diego. Among the graces their lives enjoy are these (in the order the chapter presents them):

Customer freedom and intentions are not restrained by one-sided “agreements” provided only by sellers and service providers.
Fourth parties — service organizations working as agents for the customer — are a major breed among user driven services.
The competencies of nearly all companies are exposed through interactive APIs that customers and others can engage in real time. These will be fundamental to what Phil Windley calls The Live Web.
Personal RFPs (now also called intentcasts), will be common and widespread means for demand finding and driving supply in the marketplace.
Augmented reality views of the marketplace will be normative, as will mobile payments through virtual wallets on mobile devices.
Loyalty will be defined by customers as well as sellers, in ways that do far more for both than today’s one-sided and coercive loyalty programs.
Relationships between customers and vendors will be genuine, two-way, and defined cooperatively by both sides, which will each possess the technical means to carry appropriate relationship burdens. In other words, VRM and CRM will work together, at many touch-points.
Customers will be able to proffer prices on their own, independently of intermediaries (though those, as fourth parties, can be involved). Something like EmanciPay will facilitate the process.
Supply chains will become “empathic” as well as mechanical. That is, supply chains will be sensitive to the demand chain: signals of demand, in the context of genuine relationships, from customers and fourth parties.
The advertising bubble of today has burst, because the economic benefits of knowing actual customer intention — and relating to customers as independent and powerful economic actors, worthy of genuine relationships rather than coercive — bob will have became obvious and operative. Advertising will continue to do what it does best, but not more.
Search has evolved to become far more user-driven and interactive, involving agents other than search engines.
Bob Frankston‘s ambient connectivity will be taken for granted. There will still be businesses that provide connections, but nobody will be trapped into any one provider’s “plan” that excludes connection through other providers. This will open vast new opportunities for economic activity in the marketplace.

In VRM: The Amazon Example, Sheila Bounford provides the first in-depth volley on that chapter, focusing on #4: personal RFPs. I’ll try to condense her case:

I’ve written recently of a certain frustration with the seemingly endless futurology discussions going on in the publishing world, and it’s probably for this reason that I had to fight my way through the hypothesis in this chapter. However on subsequent reflection I’ve found that thinking about the way in which Amazon currently behaves as a customer through its Advantage programme sheds light on Searls’ suggestions and projections…

What Searls describes as the future for individual consumers is in fact very close to the empowered relationship that Amazon currently enjoys with its many suppliers via Amazon Advantage… Amazon is the customer – and a highly empowered one at that.

Any supplier trading with Amazon via Advantage (and that includes most UK publishing houses and a significant portion of American publishers) has to meet all of the criteria specified by Amazon in order to be accepted into Advantage and must communicate online through formats and channels entirely prescribed and controlled by Amazon…

Alone, an individual customer is never going to be able to exert the same kind of leverage over vendors in the market place as a giant like Amazon. However individual customers online are greater than the sum of their parts: making up a crucial market for retailers and service providers. Online, customers have a much louder voice, and a much greater ability to collect, organise and mobilise than offline. Searls posits that as online customers become more attuned to their lack of privacy and control – in particular of data that they consider personal – in current normative contracts of adhesion, they will require and elect to participate in VRM programmes that empower them as individual customers and not leave them as faceless, impotent consumers.

So? So Amazon provides us with a neat example of what it might look like if we, as individuals, could control our suppliers and set our terms of engagement. That’s going to be a very different online world to the one we trade in now. Although I confess to frustration with the hot air generated by publishing futurology, it seems to me that the potential for the emergence VRM and online customer empowerment is one aspect of the future we’d all do well to work towards and plan for.

From the start of ProjectVRM, Iain Henderson (now of The Customer’s Voice) has been pointing to B2B as the future model for B2C. Not only are B2B relationships rich, complex and rewarding in ways that B2C are not today (with their simplifications through customer captivity and disempowerment), he says, but they also provide helpful modeling for B2C as customers obtain more freedom and empowerment, outside the systems built to capture and milk them.

Amazon Advantage indeed does provide an helpful example of where we should be headed as VRM-enabled customers. Since writing the book (which, except for a few late tweaks, was finished last December) I have become more aware than ever of Amazon’s near-monopoly power in the book marketplace, and possibly in other categories as well. I have heard many retailers complain about “scan and scram” customers who treat brick-and-mortar stores as showrooms for Amazon. But perhaps the modeling isn’t bad in the sense that we ought to have monopoly power over our selves. Today the norm in B2C is to disregard that need by customers. In the future I expect that need to be respected, simply because it produces more for everybody in the marketplace.

It is highly astute of Sheila to look toward Amazon as a model for individual customers. I love it when others think of stuff I haven’t, and add to shared understanding — especially of a subject as protean as this one. So I look forward to the follow-up posts this week on her blog.

Category: Companies (Page 5 of 11)

VRM Roundup

VRM development work

VRM taking root in France

Toward a matrix of APIs

Driving VRM with car data and APIs

VRM happenings in the U.K.

Intentcasting

Join the conversation about VRM at The Well

Can we each be our own Amazon?

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