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Posts Tagged ‘Project VRM’

iiw12: VRM and R-Button

May 4th, 2011
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R-Button - graphic icons that represent the status of a relationship with the site you're visiting.Again testing with chachanga, here’s part one (1 min 43 secs) and part two (the rest of the session) of the IIW session on the R-Button. This is a fascinating (and somewhat technical) session about putting a new button in your browser to indicate whether there is or could be a relationship (the R in R-Button) between you and the site you’re visiting. The ProjectVRM site has more on how this button might work.

Coaching moment: Have you ever visited a website and didn’t remember if you bought something there before? Now you’re looking for another one, or support, or whatever. This will help you recognize those sites. What if you want to donate money to, say, your local radio station without all the overhead of adding you to their mailing list and sending subsequent funds requests? This might alert the station to the fact that there’s money (even a small amount) available. The link above has more examples. What’s interesting is that this icon is a visual indicator of stuff I want to know or remember but don’t have the tool to do now.

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Putting Customers in Charge

May 8th, 2009
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I first met Doc Searls when he was advising a panel of speakers at a conference that the long-used metaphors of using war tactics by advertisers against customers was wrong. The advertising industry speaks in terms of slaughtering the competition, capturing and owning customers, and launching new campaigns to gain ground. Searls suggested that instead of fighting, we should be encouraging conversations with our customers, and that the marketplace was one large conversation. For example, if we (customers) loved something, it would sell well. Conversely, if we didn’t, that good or service would not meet with such success.

Ten years ago, Doc and others wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usuallink to Cluetrain (the book) at Amazon. This book has ignited a conversation among certain people on all sides of the market (stores, advertisers, software and applications developers, and customers) that are now open to exploring how this might work. There’s a lot to discover!

Recently Searls has been energizing a conversation which was dubbed VRM. There’s more about it at ProjectVRM. At its heart, this is about putting customers and users in charge of everything that affects them. Watch this video for a better idea of what he means.

Coaching moment: What would it mean to you if a company that you cared about asked for your opinion? If you asked them to remove all of the data that they stored about you–and they said OK–what would you think of that? There are proposals currently being discussed, and tools being created, to allow you to control (store, allow selective access to) all of your own data. Are you interested in exploring and controlling information about yourself? Not all can be controlled, but much can!

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Working toward Personalized Commerce

December 13th, 2008
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The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada made this outstanding video called Privacy and Social Networks. It’s important to understand, as this video shows, that this harvesting of personal data is going on all the time.

Coaching moment: There are two sides to this problem. On one side are the account holders of these social networking sites. They are busy disclosing their interests, connections, and lives. These account holders may not realize that they are being mapped and sold out to the extent that they are. Perhaps they think it’s ok.

On the other side are the businesses that run these sites. They have Terms of Service (TOS) contracts that account holders agree to, whether they read the terms or not. The businesses engage in harvesting and selling practices that benefit their bottom line. (Would you expect anything less? They are businesses, and this is one way that it’s done.) The problem is that the buying and selling of account holder data is not transparent to the account holders.

If this makes you feel uneasy (and I think it should), think about how you’d change this model. An underlying assumption of the whole user data exchange is that companies want to sell you their stuff. The harvesting and data collection is about making sure you’re more likely to be interested in what they want to sell you. Marketers don’t like guessing, and they often get it wrong. (When you don’t buy, it’s a wasted catalog).

But what would it look like if you had a platform for requesting marketing material for something you’re interested in buying, instead of getting angry that you have so much spam and bulk mail (catalogs and the like)?

This is a much longer post about some work being done in this area. Read more…

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