ProjectVRM Blog

A lot went down at conferences these last two weeks. The main three were IIW, Berkman@10 and iCitizen. Many of the below items were from the iCitizen, where my keynote met with much face-to-face approval and enthusiasm, but the blogging and twittering veered toward the skeptical side (not negative, but more wait-and-see). That’s what you’ll see below.

We also have a ‘con coming up at Harvard for VRM folks on July 9-10.  I’ll have more details about that shortly. Meanwhile, read the items below and follow the links. My own reactions follow those.

In a long and important post titled From misapprehensions to alternatives, Adriana Lukas begins, ” I’d like to put the record straight about where ‘Feeds Based VRM’ comes from and what the Mine! is and what it isn’t.” I can’t find any section short enough to quote further, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

From Is VRM a phenomenon? by Alan Mitchell:

VRM is not just a ‘phenomenon’ generated by placing cool tools in the hands of users. Yes, of course, we need cool tools (it may not happen without them). But we also need new types of service, and new types of business models to make these new types of service possible. It’s about all three, together.

The danger with the ‘VRM is a phenomenon’ argument is that it encourages us to focus on just one of these pillars and to ignore the other two. If we do, we will never create a stable, scalable platform – and VRM risks being still born.

From Data portability, privacy and personal data stores, by Nick Brisbourne:

The personal data store might be an existing service like Facebook (or even LastFM) or a new service created specifically to form this function. And different people might choose to use different applications as their hub.This model of a personal data store where the user allows different service to access the data on a fine grained persmissioned basis has a lot in common with the VRM vision of how advertising might evolve.

Tom O’Brien reporting from iCitizen:

Doc Searls – sure, he’s one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto – the book directly responsible for me having the idea for MotiveQuest – and a true visionary – but did you know he has at least 7 electronic devices running at all times? I was sitting behind him watching and that guy can multitask! Great presentation (we tipped sacred cows in Ohio) and I especially appreciated the part about project VRM – which will change how we consumer stuff – and move us from a marketing based economy to a relationship/intention based economy. Thanks to his simple visual – the Relbutton – I finally understand the concept behind Project VRM!

From iCitizen - OpenSource Communications Channels?, by Andrea Hill:

Doc Searls (co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto) is speaking at iCitizen about Open Source and Vendor Relationship Management. This is one of only a few sessions I’ve actually been able to attend, and it ended up being quite tech-heavy. Great for me! The idea is about how we can change our perspective on how to manage relationships. Doc (do we call him “The” Doc?) focussed on the role of technology in this matter. We extolled the virtues of open source technology to meet user needs.

He spoke of the VRM (vendor relationship management) work he has been doing at Harvard. The icon or symbol is the relbutton, which looks like two magnets attracted towards each other. The two negotiate a contract based on some as-yet-undefined terms. He mentioned Open Social a few times, and the idea that the user should be in charge of his own data. A good example: when we go to a doctor’s office, we are responsible to manually input our history. Each time we have to regurgitate information, we risk inaccuracies. He gave a statistic of how many people died of “misinformation” every year. So what if this was data we could carry with us?

I was interested in the language we would use to define these relationships - it made me think of established interfaces. There are two parties, how do we negotiate the languge we use to communicate? APIs are getting quite popular, but this is obviously on a much larger scale. He spoke frequently of Open Social, which I will admit I don’t know much about. My thoughts were moreso focused on microformats, the idea of describing our relationships with parties.

After the session I was talking to David Griner, and his thoughts on the matter seemed to be more related to the notion of privacy than openness. Indeed, this entire notion is called “Vendor management”, are we forgetting about the needs and expectations of the consumer? Doc mentioned that the individual was in charge of this data (the whole data portability notion that is de rigueur right now), and then there was also mention of the need for a 3rd party.

Doc is approaching this challenge from a tech standpoint, and I fear that this was a bit of a barrier to many of the folks in the room. It was a good presentation with regards to a potential challenge, but I think the need therefore isn’t entirely established as of yet. I think it’s also an interesting topic in the light of all the social networks data portability announcements that have occured in the past week. Who owns our data, do we really have the power to take it with us, and perhaps most importantly, what is that data? Some of us are experiencing social media fatigue, and I think there was some question from the user perspective if this required an additional level of “data management”. Do I need to define a profile to carry with me to specific sites, or do I establish an online persona that comes with me as I negotiate the web generically? How do we protect that information? Certain services like kaboodle offer us a place to aggregate products related to a certain user task (shopping). Perhaps this needs to be not about data, but about tasks.

From Advergirl’s (Leigh Householder’s) iCitizen Wrapup:

Jump back 5 years. If around that time, someone had started talking about carrying all your music, pictures, and movies on a device that both fit in your pocket and worked as a cell phone, limited-use computer and general personal planner…. well, that person would probably have received a similar response to what Doc Searls got at iCitizen today: sounds intriguing, but what, what?

Doc talked about “vendor relationship manangement.” It’s what’s needed when the “attention economy” makes a decision to act or buy and - thus - becomes the “intention economy.” And, has something to do with using your data & personal and logical preferences to define rather than accommodate how you’ll buy / share your information / relate to the companies you do business with. Everything from owning your own healthcare data to setting your own privacy expectations to pre-defining how much you’ll pay for the exact thing that you really want.

I mentioned the response to a theoretical iPhone 5 years ago because what hangs in the balance for Doc’s theory is what “thing” will make his idea concrete and easy vs. wildly theoretical and seeming like a massive-new-responsibility-and-time-investment-this-convenience-girl- wants-nothing-in-the-world-to-do-with.

Check out Andrea’s coverage for more background.

Twittering:

• Doc calls Web “the Net.” Love the anachronisms when digital adopters talk ‘what’s coming’
• Doc talks about approach - “we list all the things we think are true that no one’s talking about” So us.
• Key driver of open source, not just anyone can create and use, but anyone can IMPROVE IT.
• Attention economy has evolved to intention economy on the live Web … what you get when a customers mind is made up.
• Attention economy until point of decision then intention economy. Using car rental as example of industry without intention.
• What could car rental do if it knew customer intention. If it stopped “trap and hold” tactics like “car you want or similar”
• Want to express logical and personal preferences, like no ads when calling tech support or will pay for faster service
• Doc’s point seems to be: smartest people about the right experience are your customers, not your employees or competitiros.
• Doc pokes at a big box retailer for saying they want to “own the customer.” Another term for owning humans? Slavery. Why do we talk that way? Because we’re too busy talking to ourselves and not our customers.
• Doc must be part of RenGen. So far referenced Rousseau, Whitman, Marx … waiting for the test at this point
• Doc unfinished biz of Cluetrain is Vendor Relationship Mgt - control by customers who are in free markets & engaging with vendors
• VRM is not necessarily social because social makes assumption we have power in numbers. We have power as individuals, not from vendors who want to leverage our mass.
• In identity world, cards /prices/ rels not issued to you. You issue your own card / intention / “RFP” http://snurl.com/29×75
• Doc’s VRM sounds way hard. I don’t want to manage my relationship with Target or write a RFP for a blender. I don’t have an acquisition dept.
• In simplest form, Doc’s ideas seem like convenience of Canada’s Airmiles. www.airmiles.ca - all data in one place for one purpose / reward
• Bigger than that Doc’s approach seems so high engagement and limited in audience … but says something will come along to make it simple
• Kind of scares me that I can’t get on board with this. Newest ideas coming from oldest guy in room. 30-somethings snarking.

Echovar on Small Bits of the Distributed Future in Cleveland:

At a Cleveland American Advertising Federation luncheon today, Larry Weber talked to a room full of traditional PR and marketing types about “marketing” and social networks. While the talk was mostly a new coat of paint on the Cluetrain Manifesto, it was interesting that this group of people showed up in good numbers to listen. As the talk went on I could feel that the room, even at this late date, was skeptical of his premise that markets are conversations with communities.

Weber suggests that big brands should be hosting honest conversations containing both positive and negative messages about their products. He recommended building communities from scratch around a brand, and implied that the brand should want to keep the users inside their own walled garden. In fact, he suggested that the network’s future will be filled with social network-based walled gardens existing as a form of client loyalty program. No mentions of VRM or the role OpenID will play in the future of the commecial web. And not even a hint of the way that Google’s Friend Connect might bring existing social networks to a brand’s site, rather than building a new community from the ground up.

Digidave on a video interview I did last year with Amanda Congdon:

“Advertising as we know it today is terminal. Part of this vendor relationship management thing that I want to do is blow-up advertising as we know it. I want to change the game to one where the intentions of the customer are what drive the marketplace rather than effort to get the attention of the customer has been doing for the last 100 years or so.”

Doc is crazy smart. His idea for VRM is WAY out there. Almost too far out. I like to think that Spot.Us is a small step towards what he envisions in his head.

Craig Overend vs. Online Identity: ” Until decentralized data persistence, redundancy, namespace, and relationship management tools are here, it’s all bunk.” He says much more. Read the comments too.

Sean Coon on Marketing, Bill Hicks And A System That’s Bound To Implode:

“Doc Searls is a demand-side advocate, and I completely agree with his position on the false construct of our system that attempts to connect markets to product via the boisterous shouting of offers into the wind. Maybe his VRM work will begin to flip the script on that paradigm, maybe not.”

Mads Kristensen on Trying to get to grips with VRM:

 I’m desperately trying to get my grips around the concept of VRM or Vendor Relationship Management. I think its very important for the way society is heading with the Customer becoming King.

The concept as such is simple enough. Where CRM - Customer Relationship Management - is about staying updated and on track with you customers and clients, VRM is the opposite. It’s about you staying on top of the companies that you have some sort of relationship with.

From here it gets pretty technical. A lot of ideas are floating around, but thankfully there are good people, who try to help one sorting everything out. So I’m still an optimist as to one day finally getting it.

Bart on My Request to Give:

“Would it not be an idea to develop some sort of RelButton and build some sort of VRM standard based on a “Request To Give” (RTG)?”

It could look something like this:

“… I have 2 laptops and 100 USD which I would like to give to a school in Africa …”
Now this is communicated to the smaller NGO’s which now will have “to compete” for these goods.

By doing so, they (the NGO) start to create a new (and hopefully) a more sustainable relationship with the donor.

What do you think, would this idea fly, or is the NGO community to closed, or not ready yet?
And do you know some NGO’s I could contact to discuss the nuts and bolts of such a platform?

Let me know. I want to see such a platform work.

My own bottom line here is that our enthusiasm and our advocacy is outrunning our clarity and our code. We need a lot more of both. I’m more responsible than anybody else for the former, so I have my work cut out there.

Clearly the relbutton helps, a lot. This last week was the first time I’ve surfaced it in public, and it goes a long way toward clarifying what VRM is, and how it will work. But the words of a VC still ring in my ears here: we need some first-rate UI work done here.

VRM has to be simple and non-geeky. It needs to be less work for customers, not more. Same goes for vendors. The trade-off has to be clear and so choice-free that You Just Have To Do This.

We’re not there yet. And we need to move there, quickly.

On Adriana and Alec’s distinction between “feeds-based VRM” and “identity-based VRM”, I see her points and appreciate the distinction.

— Doc

Google and Microsoft Look to Change Health Care is an interesting piece by Steve Lohr in today’s New York Times. (In the print edition the headline reads “Dr. Google and Dr. Microsoft”.) It begins,

In politics, every serious candidate for the White House has a health care plan. So too in business, where the two leading candidates for Web supremacy, Google and Microsoft, are working up their plans to improve the nation’s health care.

By combining better Internet search tools, the vast resources of the Web and online personal health records, both companies are betting they can enable people to make smarter choices about their health habits and medical care.

“What’s behind this is the mass consumerization of health information,” said Dr. David J. Brailer, the former health information technology coordinator in the Bush administration, who now heads a firm that invests in health ventures.

Naturally the piece frames health care as a fight between giants. Even the Larger Context is cast in terms of Big Interests:

It is too soon to know whether either Google or Microsoft will make real headway. Health care, experts note, is a field where policy, regulation and entrenched interests tend to slow the pace of change, and technology companies have a history of losing patience.

I suggest we need to lose patience even faster than the tech companies, and come up with solutions that are not framed in terms of big company (or big entrenched interest) sports, but rather in solving a single problem from a single angle.

That problem is patient records, and that angle is the patient.

The patient needs to be the point of integration for their health care data. That doesn’t mean that doctors and hospitals shouldn’t also have their data. It does mean that the patient should have access to all of it.

The way the system is set up now, important facts about our bodies are not ours. Nor are they easily accessible by us. Yet when we go to a clinic or an emergency room, we are handed a clipboard with a paper form that we are expected to fill out from memory, about our immediate condition and our relevant (and even irrelevant) health care background.

A couple months ago, when I developed a condition called posterior vitreous detachment in my left eyeball, I had to fill out a pile of forms at two different locations. In the course of that experience I found my name spelled three different ways, while I was also challenged to remember how to spell out Type II dyserythropoietic anemia, a rare and relatively minor blood disorder which in emergencies only comes into play when anesthesia is involved — which it might after I fill out forms like this. Who knows, right?

In any case, it would have been handy if I could have auto-filled the forms from my own database, or my own metadata: data about data that lives elsewhere.

While it might be true that the giant sticks in the mud (more like huge pilings holding up a rusty pier) aren’t going to be too cooperative, so what? We — individual patients — need to be able to use our own health care data, for our own good, and for the good of the systems that depend on it, and will be in the line of blame when things go wrong.

I’m not sure patients need to “own”, “control” or even “manage” their health care data. But they clearly need access to it, especially when emergencies come up. Where problems need to be solved, there is business to be made, and I think this is one big one.

The key, as with all VRM projects, is that the solution needs to be anchored on the customer side — in this case the patient side — of the relationship. The answer to the silo problem is not yet another silo. It’s a silo buster, or a silo integrator.

Any ideas? I can think of a few, but would rather see the rest of ya’ll go first.

What makes VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) distinctive is that its perspective is anchored with the individual — the person, the user, the customer. It is not something that vendors do for customers. It’s something customers do for themselves, and for each other, including vendors.

VRM is not opposed to vendors. Quite the opposite: it supports vendors. It is independent of vendors, but also able to engage vendors in ways that work for both parties — far better than any vendor-side-only CRM (customer relationship management) system can today.

All this comes to mind for two reasons. One is that we’re having a meeting on VRM in the morning here at Oxford. The other is that Dave Winer posted some fine VRM stuff right here. Sez Dave,

The next evolution of the web is to deconstruct social networks into their components. I’m tired of building networks of friends, over and over. Next time I do it, it’ll be for keeps. It’ll be the “real” social network, the one all future social networks build on, just as the format and protocol designed by TBL was the one we all built on for basic machine-level networking.

The “arcs” — the lines connecting people — will need to have better labels. And like the Internet, be subject to innovation by anyone, without anyone else’s permission. Small pieces, loosely joined.

And the arcs will connect groups of people too. Big pieces that act just like the small pieces.

And there will be an easy way for an app to authenticate someone, and access data private to the app, and data that the user has let the app have access to. That way when I register to be part of a new community I don’t have to re-enter all my data again.

Note how Dave declares his independence here; and how he offers ideas that can work for everybody — far better than the your-choice-of-silo system works now. He offers constructive ideas that are not just good for individuals, but can serve to improve the offerings coming from the likes of Facebook, from which Dave and I (and many of the rest of you too, I suppose) are getting a torrent of invitations these days.

Right now I have 35 friend requests on Facebook, on top of the 15 I’ve already approved. I’d like to approve many (or hell, all) of these requests at once, but instead I have to go through this silly stage where I have to say how I know each one of these people. Like it matters. There’s a rectangle of checkboxes with choices like,

- Cut in front of me in the dining hall line
- Frenched my sheets
- Got me stoned
- Gave me a hickey
- Screwed on sight
- Brought the wrong appetizer, but it was cool
- Took my parking space

You can “request confirmation” or “skip this step”. I always click the latter, but it’s never quick, and always a pain in the pants. LinkedIn, Pownce, Orkut and all the ’sters (that were big several years ago) have their oddball routines as well. All are a little off in what they assume about me and people I might know.

We don’t have the way to fix this yet. But we have the will, the talent, and a growing set of ideas about how to build something that works for each and all of us out here in the real world.

And every new invitation to join yet another social silo only motivates us more.

These posts show why I nominate Dave Winer for the MacArthur Fellowship he has long deserved. Here’s the first thing it says at that last link:

The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.

Checkbox News is pure VRM at work. Users managing their relationships with vendors. The demand side helping the supply side do a better job. Tools for both independence and engagement.It will change TV news. Just like blogging, RSS and podcasting have already done. Only moreso.

I’m an alumnus of Guilford College, a pretty-good little college in Greensboro, North Carolina. I went there from 1965-1969 and enjoyed it thoroughly. I also learned a lot, made lifelong friends, and started a family there. I still have a few old family ties, but nothing much more than that. I enjoy getting alumni literature that helps keep me up to date with who’s doing what, who has died, who has had kids and grandkids, and stuff like that.

I wouldn’t mind going a little deeper. I’ve given money before. Not much, but some. But if I go deeper with Guilford I don’t want it to just be about money, even though I understand that money will be involved: that I will be “giving”.
I do wonder from time to time about what Guilford is doing, especially since I now have working relationships with two other schools. Having these relationships makes me wonder if it would make sense to pursue one with my alma mater as well.

So I just got a call from a North Carolina number, my cell told me. The caller represented herself as being from Guilford College, and said she was calling to “update your information and talk about our giving program”.

I’ve been through this before, though I had forgotten about it until now. I knew the call is hardly about updating information, but rather about the “giving program”.

Also — and I am willing to bet this — the person calling was not at the college but at some outsourced outfit that specializes in this kind of telemarketing pitchwork.*

All I remember about the last call like this is that it wasn’t pleasant, and that I felt baited and switched in the course of it. So I blew the caller off this time. Now I wish I had kept the caller on the line so I could find out more about how the system works.

What would I like instead?

Simple: a call from somebody who works at the college, who takes an interest in who I’ve become as a graduate, in what I’m doing now, and in how I might contribute in more than just monetary ways. Sure, pitch for money, but go deeper than that.

But that’s not how the system works, is it?

It’s also why we need a new system — one based on the alumnus and not only on a program that pitches for money and offers little else.

[By the way, I’ve gone back and edited this several times, each time by hitting the “Edit” link to start the process; and have lost my links nearly every time. I suppose this is a WordPress, um, “feature”. Drives me nuts. Anybody know a way around that? Thanks.]

* She called back, and actually was at the college (so I would have lost that bet). And she was very nice. Still, the points above are the same.

John Peterson finds VRM relevant to higher learning: Searls explains CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is broken.

(The) idea is to flip the conversation around where the consumers manage vendors. I love this idea.

Spin this educationally and we are very close to the story that is developing. Let the students manage their own learning using the web. 10 years out the business of teachers managing content for students is gone. The consumers have many other options because of the technology.

My only problem with this are the concepts of consumption and content. As I said in Giant Zero Journalism,

Framing is a huge issue here. We have readers and viewers, not just “audiences” and “consumers”. We write articles and essays and posts, not just “generate content”. “User-generated content”, or UGC, is an ugly, insulting and misleading label.

“Content” is inert. It isn’t alive. It doesn’t grow, or catch fire, or go viral. Ideas and insights do that. Interesting facts do that. “Audiences” are passive. They sit still, clap and leave. That might be what happened with newspapers and radio and TV in the old MSM-controlled world, but it’s not what happens on The Giant Zero. It’s not what happens with blogging, or with citizen journalism. Here it’s all about contribution, participation. It involves conversation, but it goes beyond that into relationship — with readers, with viewers, with the larger ecosystem by which we all inform each other.

Education, to paraphrase John Taylor Gatto, is not about filling students with curricula, but about removing those things that keep the student’s inherent genius from gathering itself.

Now, what does that say about the relationship between students and educational insitutions?

I’ve been on hold with my bank: Washington Mutual, which now calls itself by the felicitous nickname “WAMU”, or “wammoo”. I’m calling them because I’ve arrived at this Identity Management Error page…

… (and yes, it actually does look like that, and say that, just like it did last November), after failing (not repeatedly but in just one try) to log in to my business account.

WAMU’s customer deflection system is easily one of the most labyrinthine and aversive I have ever encountered.

At one point the call center maze voice tells me to enter my account number and my “telephone access code”, whatever that is. So I guess it might be the last digits of my social security number. Nope. How about the last four of my company’s federal ID number. No luck. The last five digits? Six? Bzzzt. Then I try just punching zero at every possible choice point. But the system keeps telling me to now enter my account number.
Finally I reach a human being. She says she can’t help, and puts me through to a “business account professional” or something. After giving him my account number, over and over, his system finally accespt it. He tells me that the phone access code is the last four digits of the federal ID number. I ask why that didn’t work when I tried it. He says he doesn’t know. Finally he tells me “the system is down” and to call back later. At least he gave me his own personal number for that.

Oh, that “Your opinion counts” thing? Total bullshit. It goes nowhere, just like it did five months ago.

Anyway, I had to bitch somewhere, and this seems as good a place as any.

What would happen if network speed was driven by usage rather than fixed provisioning?

That’s the question on the floor of the Berkman Center Fellows meeting I’m attending right now. (Or the ceiling, which is where I am, via teleconferencing speakers.) We’re so used to thinking of connectivity, and bandwidth, as something entirely controlled by the supply-side.

But what happens when we actually respect the power of the marketplace? What happens when the supply side listens to, and responds to, and provisions against, individual customer demand? Instead of broadband, call it…um, flexband.
The supply side would get a lot more business, wouldn’t ya think?
Rather than the few uses suppliers can imagine (TV, voip, downloads), there would be an infinite variety of uses (games, offsite storage, business services, whatever).

Obviously, this requires VRM equippage.

What would that be?

Maybe there is an upside to the Copyright Royalty Board’s decision to force all commercial and noncommercial webcasters to pay a per-song/per-listener royalty fee. While many of us are wringing their collective hands (see Internet Radio on Death Row) over the high costs (exceeding the revenue projections even of leading webcasters) this new copyright regime will impose on webcasters, I can see a VRM light that might lead us (stations, artists, users, everybody) through this darkening tunnel.

Let’s create a tool that will tell listeners exactly the costs borne by stations for playing the music they listen to — and for paying a sum in excess of that for listening to those tunes? (The stations could also mark up the royalties on their side first. Works either way.) Stations such as Radio Paradise identify every song and artist they play. They also keep track of how many listeners are tuned in for each of those songs. We could create a simple protocol that would allow a tool on the listening side to store unique identifiers for each song played, on each station listened to. Another tool could look at the data store and either make a payout to the station or escrow the data for use in a variety of other ways, including voluntary payout at the user’s discretion.

In any case, isn’t it time for the usage side to come up solutions to the problems that arise from usage?