If you’re in the Bay Area and care about VRM, please try to make the Conversational Commerce Conference (aka C3) in San Francisco today and/or tomorrow. It’s put on by Dan Miller and other friends at Opus Research. They describe the conference thusly:
Marketing and customer service are on a collision course. Social media now shine a bright light on customer service interactions, which increasingly have brand implications. Customer care can also offer valuable insights for marketing and product development. How many companies are adapting and turning this to their advantage? Still too few as old modes of thinking remain entrenched in organizations.
One VRM session goes this way:
This session features a debate between advocates of opposing views of data, personal information and marketing. Who will control commercial conversation, the consumer or the marketer? Is there any common ground? And does vendor relationship management (VRM) hold realistic promise for the future of consumer-marketer conversations?
If I coulda been there I woulda. But maybe you can, and I highly encourage it.