Over the past five years Forrester Research has observed an increase in the number of companies with a single executive leading customer experience efforts across a business unit or an entire company. These individuals often serve as top executives, with the mandate and power to design, orchestrate and improve customer experiences across every customer interaction. And whether firms call them Chief Customer Officers (CCOs) or give them some other label, these leaders sit at high levels of power at companies as diverse as Allstate, Dunkin’ Brands, Oracle and USAA.

Other titles meaning roughly the same thing are Chief Client Officer and Chief Experience Officer. All, Paul writes, “are charged with improving the customer experience.”

From the VRM perspective, that’s all we need to know. We’re the customers, and we’re charged with improving our experience too.

So I dug around a bit, and came up with a few leads and links that I’ll post here as a shout-out to the folks and disciplines involved.

First is the Chief Customer Officer Council, founded and led by Curtis Bingham (whom I see by LinkedIn is, like me, in the Boston area). Next are (via the CCOC),

• Jasmine Green, VP and Chief Customer Advocate for Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, who won CCO of the Year.
• Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace. I’ve been tight with Rackspace ever since Dirk Elmendorf and Richard Yoo started the company when they were college students in San Antonio. I met both when Linux Journal was one of their first customers. (Both are now married to women who worked at the magazine, and Searls.com is still hosted there.)
• Dennison DeGregor, Worldwide CRM Executive at Hewlett-Packard.
• Patty VanLammeren, Senior Vice President Agency Sales and Regional Marketing at Allstate Insurance. Before that she was Chief Customer Experience Officer at the company.
• Jay Topper, Senior Vice President, Customer Success, at Rosetta Stone.
• Victoria Stennes, VP In-flight experience, JetBlue Airways

These are people VRM-equipped customers are going to meet in the new middle. This small post is toward making the acquaintance.

1. VRM tools are personal. As with hammers, wallets, cars and mobile phones, people use them as individuals,. They are social only in secondary ways.
2. VRM tools help customers express intent. These include preferences, policies, terms and means of engagement, authorizations, requests and anything else that’s possible in a free market, outside any one vendor’s silo or ranch.
3. VRM tools help customers engage. This can be with each other, or with any organization, including (and especially) its CRM system.
4. VRM tools help customers manage. This includes both their own data and systems and their relationships with other entities, and their systems.
5. VRM tools are substitutable. This means no source of VRM tools can lock users in

Note “mobile phones” in #1. Like a car or a wallet, a mobile phone is personal. Ir also supports our independence, helps us express intent, and is substitutable. Bearing all these things (and more) in mind, Ting.com has come to market with the clear intent of doing the best it can to support customers’ VRM intentions.

Go down Joe Andrieu’s list of user driven services…

1. Impulse from the User
2. Control
3. Transparency
4. Data Portability
5. Service Endpoint Portability
6. Self Hosting
7. User Generativity
8. Improvability
9. Self-managed Identity
10. Duty of Care

… and you’ll find that Ting comes about as close as any mobile phone company can come to respecting all those things.

Ting is an MVNO — a Mobile Virtual Network Operator. That means it operates as a phone company, but does not own facilities. Instead it re-sells the raw base offerings (minutes, texts, quantities of data) that it buys from a carrier with facilities. In this case, Sprint. It works everywhere in the U.S. that Sprint does, but it has a much more friendly and sensible set of offerings and pricings than any of the major mobile phone companies. It’s about as gimmick-free as you can get. That is, Ting is the very opposite of what Scott Adams in The Dilbert Future calls a “confusopoly.” Sez Scott,

A confusopoly is a situation in which companies pretend to compete on price, service, and features but in fact they are just trying to confuse customers so no one can do comparison shopping.

Cell [mobile] phone companies are the best example of confusopolies. The average consumer finds it impossible to decipher which carrier has the best deal, so carriers don’t have normal market pressure to lower prices. It’s a virtual cartel without the illegal part.

Ting is a VRM company. Its management and other personnel have been involved in many VRM discussions and events, and a number of VRM folk have been involved in Ting’s beta as well. Our family, for example. So far we’re loving it. The data service especially is surprisingly good. At our kid’s high school in rural New Hampshire, both voice and data service is pretty much perfect.

Here are some of the stories about the Ting launch that have hit so far:

• Can This Company Take On Verizon? by Andrew Dillard in The Motley Fool
• Tucows Launches Contract-Free Mobile Provider Ting, by Alex Colon in PC Magazine
• New Mobile Carrier Ting Offers Truly-Customizable Smartphone Plans, by Erik Berte in Fox Business
• Look out big telcos, Ting shares data across devices, by Kevin C. Tofel at Gigaom
• New Ting cell service turns contracts on their head, by Jessica Dolcourt at CNet
• Tucows launches Ting, a contract-free mobile service on Sprint’s Network, by Zachary Lutz at Engadget
• Tucows officially launches Ting, a more thoughtful wireless carrier, by Chris Velazco at TechCrunch

Plus these from Zemanta:

• Ting: The First Carrier That Won’t Screw You [Carriers]  gizmodo.com)
• Ting is the new mobile phone service we’ve all been waiting for  intomobile.com)
• Ting Now Launched with Contract-Free Mobile Services  geeky-gadgets.com)

A: “One complains, the other buys.”

Just had to write that down. The Q and the A came in the midst of a VRM conference call that also touched on CRM, VRM+CRM, sCRM, trust frameworks, identity and other stuff.

Not saying that’s a fair characterization, by the way. Just that it’s an interesting one.

Customer Commons is about us.

1. We are a com­mu­nity of customers.
2. We are funded only by customers.
3. We serve the inter­ests and aspi­ra­tions of customers.

We are the 100%

Customer Commons is the successor organization to ProjectVRM. Think of ProjectVRM as the launch pad and rocket for getting VRM development and research into orbit — and of Customer Commons as the rest of the universe.

So the future is wide open.

SOPA, however, is about enclosing some of the Universe’s commons, which is essentially NEA:

1. Nobody owns it
2. Everybody can use it
3. Anybody can improve it

What would we — the 100% who are customers — be doing about SOPA?

Customer Commons is just in the planning stages now. We want it up and running by the time The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge comes out in May. What should it be and how would it work?

All thoughts welcome.

P.S. ProjectVRM is a Berkman Center project, and therefore does not take an advocacy position on matters of public debate, such as SOPA — which is why this blog is not offline or blacked out today.

FWIW, my own (naturally optimistic) point of view is well expressed by Harold Feld in SOPABlackout And the “Internet Spring”.

Joshua Marsh, the CEO of Conversocial, writes,

I’m interested in your comment that social media is only semi-personal – could you expand on that point?

I think what you could be getting at is the current lack of tie up between social identity and customer records, which is a challenge (but one that can be overcome), and one we are working on. Or do you mean something else?

There can be additional benefits to customers for taking their customer service issues into social media over other channels. Once companies wake up to the fact that there are public complaints and issues on their Facebook pages, in tweets when people search for their company names etc, they will often start delivering better customer service over social than they do through other channels. The fully public nature of the issues and resolutions forces them to deliver the best service they can. I believe this will drive a virtuous circle – as companies deliver better service through social, more and more customers will begin to use it as a service channel.

First, I want to make clear that when we talk about “social media” today we mostly mean Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other commercial services. Not telephony, email, texting, instant messaging and other social activities that have been around for a long time but tend not to get included in the “social media” category.

Three things make social media less than fully personal:

1. As CRM Software said in another commment, “your conversations are personal yet public.”
2. We don’t own social media. Yes, we use them, but they are not ours. They belong to Twitter, Facebook, Google or whomever. For what it’s worth (and it’s a lot), we can own domains on the Web and elsewhere. We can own email systems. We can own IM systems. We can be our own publishers, syndicate our own postings. Standards and protocols such as TCP/IP, HTTP, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, RSS and XMPP make that possible. Those standards and protocols give us independence, which is a founding virtue of the Net, of the Web, of blogging, of instant messaging. Those standards and protocols are used by social media, but we remain dependent rather than independent within social media environments. So it is critically important to remember and preserve the distinction between independence and dependence on the Net.
3. Social media are designed to be personal, but in a social context. Facebook is for sharing with friends. Twitter is for following others and being followed. Linkedin is for sharing personal profiles. Google+ is for “real life sharing,” they say. Sure, we can get personal benefits out of social media, but as a collateral benefit more than as a core purpose.

The thing is, when all you’ve got are social hammers, even personal problems look like social nails. And this is what we are doing when we use social media to fix the problems of CRM and customer service, on either the vendor’s side or the customer’s. Yes, lots of progress has been made on the sCRM front, Conversocial is a leader in that movement, is clearly doing a good job, and should continue doing that. Yet, as individual customers we still lack a box of tools that are ours alone, and that help us relate personally with the companies whose goods and services we buy and use.

This is why a community of developers has been working on building out the tools called VRM, for Vendor Relationship Management, to work as customer-side counterparts of vendors CRM — Customer Relationship Management — systems.

About identity: yes, it’s critical. The quesitons around it are huge. For example, are we — as sovereign, independent and self-actualized human beings — who we say we are? Or are we reducible to our @-handles and “social identities” on the likes of Facebook? When Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook Connect in 2008, he said it would make it easy “for you to take your online identity with you all over the Web.” Note the presumption: that your handle with Facebook is “your online identity.” Sorry, but it isn’t. It’s handy as a shortcut, but it’s not who you are.

But in fact I was talking about something other than identity in that last post. I was talking about working on what’s personal in more than just social ways.

Louis Columbus writes,

1. The depth and breadth of personal information being shared on social media is creating advertised-based business models that will surpass Google AdWords’ revenue within five years or less. That’s coming thanks to the torrent of data that streams into social networks daily.

2. Improving customer service systems is indeed not enough because it still doesn’t strike to the center of what really needs to happen. Companies need to translate process efficiencies into more relevant, timely and focused customer experiences. The dividend of process efficiency needs to be spent on greater empathy for the customer. Profits will follow if a company can get its head around the concept of delivering an exceptional experience.

3. VRM shows potential to make each interaction more relevant, focused and over time, trusted.

Bottom line: the companies who will emerge stronger for all this turbulent change will stay focused on customer experience, empathy and intimacy as their compass and not waiver from that course.

Louis’ predictions about the future of advertising may be true. But remember: even highly personalized advertising is still guesswork. And no amount of personal data can empower any company, no matter how smart, to guess what I want or need next. Nor do I want that. First, most of the time I’m not buying anything. Second, when I am ready to buy something, I need instruments that help me express my intentions more than I need ones that are guessing what I might want and pushing something at me through a medium that’s paid to do the pushing.

This is why I believe what will emerge over the next five years is not a more personal attention economy (led by social media) but an intention economy, based on what customers actually want. This is why I wrote The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, for Harvard Business Review Press, which is due to hit the shelves on May 1.

I agree with Louis’ second point about what companies need to do; and will add that the customer experience should be one for which the customer is at least partly responsible. Also that the experience of relationship should extend across many vendors in the same way, rather than working in isolation with each vendor. For example, I would like as a customer to experience changing my address with many vendors at once. No vendor working alone with one CRM system can deliver this experience. VRM is required for that, along with CRM systems that welcome simple and standard address-changing methods that work the same way across many different vendors.

I also agree with Louis’ bottom line: that vendors will have to be “focused on customer experience, empathy and intimacy.” And I believe this will require that customers welcome VRM tools when customers carry their own weight on their own sides of relationships.

Don Peppers writes,

One additional thought about the future of social media: Today, social media is funded by advertisers (the real “customers”), and provides a mechanism for giving them access to consumers. But this will almost certainly change as more and more social media services and platforms become open source. An open-source, community-developed platform for social interaction will unify consumers and customers, no?

When Twitter first appeared on the scene, for example, it took many months before the first commercial money began funding it. The consumers it served all worried that without some kind of external funding, the service might disappear. Sooner or later, we’ll find that IT and communications costs have become so low that very little, if any, commercial sponsorship will be required to sustain a genuinely consumer-oriented social media platform.

I believe we won’t get fully-developed one-to-one relationships (that link goes to the seminal work on the topic, buy Don Peppers and Martha Rogers) without significant contributions of code and standards from free and open source developers. You’ll find many in the roster of VRM developers and developments, but we need many more.

I also think we need to free ourselves from the knee-jerk belief that commercial sponsorship is the first-option business model for popular services on the Net. The successes of the Net, the Web, email, RSS and much else have long since disproven that belief.

In the long run far more economic activity will be supported by free and open standards, protocols and other building materials, than by commercial services paid for by advertising.

As for the promise of both social media “big data” for better customer relations, I like what Alan Mitchell said in his comment:

…there is a vast difference between the sharing of unstructured information on a one-to-many basis (social media), and the sharing of structured information on a one-to-one basis (VRM). As you point out, only the latter allows for real personalisation.

Alan has been a leading figure in VRM development, by the way.

Hanan Cohen writes,

Many people say that “Social media users are not customers of them, they are the product being sold.”

I think that we are the suppliers and try to prove it here;

http://info.org.il/english/The-Users-are-the-Suppliers.html

Can you please get in touch with an economics scholar you trust and ask her to sort out the difference in definitions?

It is quite true that we are upstream suppliers of valuable content to social media, and not just consumers of services, and Hanan makes many good points at that link.

As for distinctions between consumers and customers, I like what Doug Rauch — the former President of Trader Joe’s — told to me when I was working on my book: that consumers are “a statistical category.” “We believe in honesty and directness between human beings,” Doug said. “We do this by engaging with the whole person, rather than just with the part that ‘consumes.’”

Hope that helps.

Social media are a partial and temporary solution at best to a pair of linked problems that are essentially personal:

1. dysfunctional customer relationship management on the vendor’s side; and
2. minimal vendor relationship management on the customer’s side.

In the absence of solutions to both problems, vendors still see customers as consumers, and that too is a problem that hasn’t yet come to a head, because we still don’t fully grok the difference between consumers and customers. As a result, we think social media looks like a the good answer rather than a better question. That question is, How can we get companies and media to stop treating us as consumers and start treating us as real customers?

To see what needs to be done, check out Consumers Punish Companies that Ignore Them, by Eric Sass in MediaPost. In that piece Eric sources a pair of Conversocial studies that contain plenty of grist for social media and marketing mills. Here they are, from the Conversocial blog:

• Who’s Ignoring Their Customers?: A Survey Of The Largest US Retailers and Their Use of Social Media
• Consumer Study: 88% less likely to buy from companies who ignore complaints in social media.
• (A third study, A Survey of the Largest US Retailers and Their Use of Social Media, can be downloaded at that link. So can the other two.)

Here are some samplings from Eric’s gleanings:

• “…more than 60% of complaints and question about retailers posted online on social media are ignored, in part because of the sheer volume of content created on sites like Twitter and Facebook.”
• “30% of the retail chains surveyed don’t respond to any questions or complaints posted on social media, effectively choosing to ignore issues mentioned in these forums.”
• “…78% believe that social media platforms will soon replace other means of customer service altogether or at least become one of the top ways to communicate with corporations.”
• “…among the group which has communicated with companies via social media, 32.5% said they were either neglected or totally ignored; that works out to 16.5% of the total…This included ‘inadequate response times, unanswered queries, and overall unmet expectations.’
• “What’s more, ‘respondents were also adamant that such corporate behaviors would have some or much effect on their future decision to do business with offending corporations.’
• “27.3% of respondents said being ignored by companies on social media makes them ‘very angry,’ and 27.1% said they’d stop doing business with the offending company altogether.”
• “88.3% of respondents said they’d be somewhat or far less likely to do business with a company that has visibly ignored other customers’ questions or complaints on social media. That includes 49.5% who said they would be ‘far less likely, and 38.8% who said they’d be ‘somewhat less likely.’”

Note that the blame here is on offending companies; not on social media, or on the absence of something better.

This is understandable because social media offer radically new and helpful avenues both for customer feedback one one side and customer support on the other. Also, social media is where Conversocial is coming from, and what MediaPost reports on. The problem for both — and for all of us thinking and talking about this stuff inside the social media framework — is that consumers are a statistical category while customers are individual human beings.

Individual human beings are all different. They are not categories, and they cannot be treated with full respect only by templates, which is what vendors — especially those serving mass markets — tend to use.

And, while social media do provide ways to get personal (say, though one’s @-handle on Twitter), they don’t have personal relationships with their users. That’s because social media users are not customers of them, because they don’t pay for them. And if you don’t pay, you’re the product being sold.

The actual customers of Facebook and Twitter are advertisers, not users. Because of this, social media has exactly the same un-visited problem that commercial broadcasting has had for the duration: its consumers and its customers are different populations. Financial accountability is to those that pay, which are advertisers, not users. Yes, there are moral and operational obligations to users, but economically speaking those obligations are lesser ones. They are those of a farmer to crops, not of a store to actual customers.

For now social media are a useful and popular way for customers to send messages to companies — and to route around inadequate customer service systems (or, in the vernacular of the trade, using sCRM routing around or to improve CRM) — the failures listed by Conversocial are not just those of companies ignoring social media, but of social media itself.

There is a structural problem as well, because social media are still only semi-personal. They are a weak substitute for direct contact — meaning that, in a person-to-person sense, even email and telephony are better.

Improving each company’s customer service systems and policies (which the Conversocial studies call for) also isn’t enough, because each company’s system is different, and all of them are silo’d. Thus the way you deal as a customer with Nordsrom, Safeway, Amazon and Apple are all different, and incompatible. If you want, say, to change your address or your phone number with all of them at once, you don’t have a single way to do that. You also don’t have a standard way to publish your own terms and conditions of engagement, to say for example “don’t track me outside of your own store or site” or “any data you collect is mine as well as yours, and should be available to me in the standard way I describe.”

Tools for doing that would have to live on your side of the relationship. Not the vendor’s, not the CRM cloud’s, and not Facebook’s. If you are a real customer, and not just a consumer or a user, you need your own tools. You need VRM — Vendor Relationship Management — tools, to work together with vendors CRM tools, not to replace them. The demand chain and the supply chain will work together.

The only case against VRM is that companies serving mass markets can’t afford to be personal, and just won’t go there. This was also the argument against PCs and the Internet. History and enterprising developers proved both cases wrong.

In fact enterprising developers in the VRM community have been working on personal tools for the last five years or more — tools that make customers both independent of vendors and better able to engage with vendors. It helps that the CRM community is aware of VRM developments, and has been awaiting them for some time. This is the year that wait will pay off. We’ll finally see VRM developments mature and start to become useful, both for customers and for vendors. So, watch the space.

Bonus link: Alan Mitchell’s comment below. I love how he says social media marketing is among “the grandest imperialist invasions of them all. The attempt to occupy day-to-day human interaction and turn it into a profit centre.” Indeed.

Also, to answer questions raised below, I have posted Customers are personal, cont’d.

At issue is this: Control.

For whatever reason, the people who run the tech companies want it. But eventually the users take it.

Either the companies learn how to take the lead from their users, or they will be sidelined. Unless the laws of technology are repealed, and I don’t think laws like that can be repealed.

It’s the Internet vs the Un-Internet. And the Internet, it seems, always prevails.

The Internet is each and all of us. It is no more reducible to the companies that try to control us than time is reducible to clocks.

I believe 2012 will be the year that Net-based companies (which are most of them at this point) will discover that free customers are more valuable than captive ones.

Here’s the deal: the Internet is already occupied: by all of us. This is why the Internet will beat the Un-Internet.

We occupy the Un-Internet as well, which is why we’re going to take charge of that too, and bring it in alignment with the free marketplace that the Internet provides in a remarkably pure form.

But we won’t be a crazy herd. We’ll be sources of help as well as money. And we’ll have our own ways of providing that help. The demand chain and the supply chain will start working together. Just watch.

Lauren Weinstein says that’s not the same as opposing SOPA: “they’re the same ethically vacuous firm as always, with their public facade changing like a chameleon, blowing in the wind of Internet public opinion.”

I still see it as a good sign when a company in a direct personal service business changes its mind because its customers made clear that change was required.

What I’d like to know now is what GoDaddy customers said to the company personally. (Not just that customers pulled their accounts in protest.) When I know that Warren Adelman and the company turned around because of direct personal pressure, in real conversation with paying customers who wished to remain so — and not just because of negative PR or customers bailing — then I’ll be glad to call it a full VRM move by customers.

Some links:

• GoDaddy No Longer Supports SOPA [Sopa]  gizmodo.com)
• Good work, Internet: GoDaddy has rescinded their support of…  shortformblog.tumblr.com)
• Brave GoDaddy CEO Says He’s Neither For Nor Against SOPA [Sopa]  gizmodo.com)
• Follow Up of the Day: GoDaddy Reverses Support for SOPA (geeks.thedailywh.at)
• GoDaddy Backs Down From SOPA Support After Customers Flee  inquisitr.com)
• Boycott GoDaddy  techrights.org)
• GoDaddy CEO: “There Has To Be Consensus About The Leadership Of The Internet Community”  techcrunch.com)
• GoDaddy backs away from SOPA after mass exodus  electronista.com)
• Victory! Boycott forces GoDaddy to drop its support for SOPA  arstechnica.com)
• GoDaddy Drops Support for SOPA, Avoids Backlash, Boycott  pcworld.com)

We still need financial institutions to weigh in and take up a new business model for themselves, and it would be cool if some of them showed up at IIW next week for that, but in any case we’re taking one small step in the direction of a major sea change in the way markets for media work.

I’ve been making test contributions to different public radio stations, using the EmanciPay prototype. Craig has hacked a way for this to show up in my Twitter stream. You can see those here.

Some additional links to related topics:

• Declining Resources For Journalism  eschatonblog.com)
• Breaking out your core assumptions  giffconstable.com)
• ListenLog (ProjectVRM blog)
• NPR prepares for a new reality  politico.com)
• A simple lesson learned from Steve Jobs  chron.com)
• R-Buttons and the Open Marketplace  blogs.law.harvard.edu)
• EmanciPay (ProjectVRM blog)

Older consumers are more likely to click on a Facebook ad, while younger consumers, who are more comfortable with interacting with brands on Facebook, are more likely to click “like.” This information can help marketers target specific audiences with their Facebook ads, a tactic that can be leveraged by using Facebook’s self-serve ad platform.

Over the 10 months leading up to August 2011, Facebook agencySocialCode analyzed Facebook ads for 50 clients and focused on those that included an image, text and a “like” button. The study analyzed how many consumers clicked on the ads, and from there, how many went on to “like” the company’s page.

Women are more likely to click on an ad on Facebook, though both men and women are about equally likely to then click “like” once they’ve done so, the study found. The average clickthrough rate for women of all ages was 0.029%, compared to 0.026% for men of all ages. The “like” rate among those who clicked an ad was 39% for women and 38% for men.

Older consumers are more likely to click on a Facebook ad, as clickthrough rates increased from 0.026% for the 18-to-29 age range, up to 0.033% for the over-50 group.

However, consumers under the age of 50 were more likely to then “like” a brand, with 18- to 29-year-olds and 40- to 49-year-olds doing so 40% of the time. Those ages 30 to 39 had a 38% “like” rate, while only 36% of those over 50 hit the “like” button.

This data supports the fact that younger consumers, having been on Facebook longer, are more familiar with showing support for a brand through a “like” and do so more often. Meanwhile, older consumers click through on an ad to learn more and investigate a brand.

Note the use of “more likely,” several times in those paragraphs. The difference is between fine degrees of “very, very, very, very few.” That’s because highest click-through rate for any demographic is about one third of one percent. Most click-through rates are about one quarter of one percent. That up to 40% of those clicking will also click “like” is interesting only to marketers who ignore the 99.76% to 99.66% who don’t click through at all, and who might regard the ads as noise or worse. Since Facebook allows users to express only one sentiment, it’s impossible to tell what other feelings an ad elicits, if any at all.

Here’s what I tweeted about the piece yesterday…

 dsearls Which matters more in this data: bit.ly/putQMr — that only 0.025% click on an ad, or that X% of clickers “like” the ad? #VRM 11 hours ago

… and here’s Bitly’s list of all tweets with links to the piece, which they call —

Conversations

• FoxyLoxy Total surveillance by some of the finest minds on the planet = 0.026% CTR. Pathetic result from a broken model. http://t.co/Yt8UhIi @dsearls about 1 hour ago
• BSitko Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://j.mp/o6dzuF about 2 hours ago
• Kate_DonahueRT @Britopian: Good info here! Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad from eMarketer http://t.co/PD0G5d1about 5 hours ago
• sbwhite1RT @Britopian: Good info here! Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad from eMarketer http://t.co/PD0G5d1about 6 hours ago
• socialmediafltrRT @Britopian Good info here! Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad from eMarketer http://t.co/39vcPW5about 7 hours ago
• BritopianGood info here! Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad from eMarketer http://t.co/PD0G5d1about 7 hours ago
• jemiwebRT @dsearls: Which matters more in this data: http://t.co/szArq3c — that only 0.025% click on an ad, or that X% of clickers “like” the ad? #VRMabout 7 hours ago
• TedCRT @dsearls: Which matters more in this data: http://t.co/szArq3c — that only 0.025% click on an ad, or that X% of clickers “like” the ad? #VRMabout 9 hours ago
• dsearlsWhich matters more in this data: http://t.co/szArq3c — that only 0.025% click on an ad, or that X% of clickers “like” the ad? #VRMabout 9 hours ago
• JessicalowensOlder consumers will click on an ad, while younger ones go for the “like” http://t.co/lojMwGUabout 15 hours ago
• marccustersAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad - http://ow.ly/6q67e – @eMarketer RT @ClemLelardouxabout 17 hours ago
• SMCBrusselsAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://ow.ly/6qDE7about 20 hours ago
• SocialWendyLooking for Like Conversion Stats for your Facebook Marketing Plans- here you go http://t.co/6uvQ0nrabout 20 hours ago
• JudithSotoAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://j.mp/o6dzuFabout 21 hours ago
• JessicalowensAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/lojMwGUabout 21 hours ago
• morantreAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/x27OSWS – isn’t that kinda obvious ?!about 21 hours ago
• spl900Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/cwegPnp via @AddToAnyabout 21 hours ago
• LocalAdExecAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/jppQvBcabout 21 hours ago
• Vanessa_BrightOlder consumers are more likely to click on a Facebook ad, while younger consumers are more likely to click “like.” http://ow.ly/6qHJkabout 21 hours ago
• philpostroAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://ow.ly/6pSDp #ad #facebook #marketing #stat #philpostroabout 22 hours ago
• Ben_KaplanFor “Like” ads, older users will click on the ad while younger consumers will go for the “like” http://t.co/lAEVaSR via @emarketerabout 22 hours ago
• ChristinePilchGood insight for marketers: How Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/t5hmUjsabout 23 hours ago
• harumotteいいね、とアドのクリックは、年齢や性別によって異なる。いいねはブランド支持を示し、アドはブランドを学んだり、調査するため。Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/dx0C83cabout 23 hours ago
• qermsaAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/KcjlX72 via @AddToAny1 day ago
• WSIThamesAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad r http://t.co/BE32nzM1 day ago
• ntshas@covertony Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/og6HjTj via @AddToAny1 day ago
• 10thstepsAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/x9Z8UIv via @AddToAny1 day ago
• hisomAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/25llLAd1 day ago
• jantoniotormoAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/jWQanZz http://t.co/2V6RGCA1 day ago
• alina_popescuAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://ow.ly/6qyRn eMarketer.com1 day ago
• meenricoAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – via @eMarketer http://t.co/kyfG6BR1 day ago
• EatStrategyRT @eMarketer: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad - http://t.co/LizJHCw1 day ago
• TheFunKenRT @rachaelcpowell: Old consumers are more likely to click on a Facebook ad; younger consumers are more likely to ‘like’ directly from it http://t.co/iwaDRKR1 day ago
• V12studioslikes vs ads… Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/WTF09Nt via @AddToAny1 day ago
• arjunsethiRT @isocket: Did you know that women are more likely to click a Facebook ad? http://ow.ly/6qic91 day ago
• isocketDid you know that women are more likely to click a Facebook ad? http://ow.ly/6qic91 day ago
• KellyMcNicolAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/Ho71mFJ1 day ago
• mrwebmarketingAge affects ‘Like’ rate http://t.co/lTCoJvK http://t.co/W7XoV9J 1 day ago
• MattLBrennan RT @JamieCrager: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will “Like” an Ad http://t.co/Y1m6XN8 1 day ago
• JamieCrager Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will “Like” an Ad http://t.co/Y1m6XN8 1 day ago
• SocialNet_Fun RT @DonnaAntoniadis: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer - http://ow.ly/6pPwk 1 day ago
• imagecomm Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad. http://t.co/ZVixZbw 1 day ago
• i_Lyndon Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/r3wJk3b via @zite 1 day ago
• WordsBySusan #SMstudy: Age & gender differences re Facebook “Likes” http://ow.ly/6qkn1 1 day ago
• holly_berkleyOlder consumers will click on an ad, while younger ones go for the “like” – eMarketer http://t.co/0WXv3cS1 day ago
• holly_berkleyAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/0WXv3cS via @AddToAny1 day ago
• WoodyWittersAge & gender determine whether consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – via @eMarketer http://t.co/8ZF1oFa #socialmedia1 day ago
• socialradarage/gender affect #socialmedia actions. older people click. younger ones “like,” via @eMarketer: http://t.co/IKqEa7m1 day ago
• HopeRun_TechAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://ow.ly/6pTiv1 day ago
• adgrlSuAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/vYvSHQn via @AddToAny1 day ago
• flipelevenAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/gHNXRq91 day ago
• RMM_OnlineAge, gender affect Clickthrough and “Like” rate of Facebook display ads. http://t.co/k03QGC1 #socialmedia1 day ago
• ADWMarketingOlder FB consumers tend to click on ads, but younger Facebookers go for “like”. Interesting stats. http://t.co/N7Y6lcf http://t.co/92ohbTM1 day ago
• lizzagAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/cLaI6RE1 day ago
• ThereseMatthysAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/muLTxOb1 day ago
• JBGonzalezAge 50 and older are more likely to click on a Facebook ad while those under 50 are more likely to “Like” a brand. More..http://ht.ly/6qdeg1 day ago
• SEOSKYE1Do you know your demographic? Contact SeoSkye to find out. http://t.co/DK5EKLe1 day ago
• Worldcom_PRAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/rJo5ftC1 day ago
• TravelMediaGuruNEw Study: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://ht.ly/6pSY11 day ago
• UXfeederDelicious: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer: http://t.co/Y5dHn78 [marketing]1 day ago
• csinkusRT @Foolproof_UX: ‘Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad according to emarketer http://t.co/gosJj3p #Facebook1 day ago
• byeagercarterWomen more likely to click on Facebook ad - http://t.co/JNmtbm51 day ago
• allenmirelesRT @AdrenalineJoe: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad… http://t.co/443Blvo1 day ago
• LisaOstrikoffNew Media Marketing Insight … RT @emarketer: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad - http://t.co/3iaaohP1 day ago
• BizBOXTVRT @emarketer: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad - http://t.co/iKkqJQo1 day ago
• yeuseungAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/RenDc2i via @AddToAny1 day ago
• GenerationsGuruRT @JanisG: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/cYJYMzZ via @AddToAny1 day ago
• MAInteractiveOlder consumers will click on an ad, while younger ones go for the “like” – @eMarketer http://t.co/hiZvUeY #socialmedia #MKTdigital1 day ago
• JasonKaplerBrands need 2 evolve engagement beyond Likes >> RT @LAdvertising Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/0i03LsE1 day ago
• wsipremierSome info for social media marketers on the influence of age and gender on customer behavior. http://ow.ly/6q4ce1 day ago
• DigitalMNAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://j.mp/o6dzuF1 day ago
• NetSpeakDesignThis study indicates that if you want “likes” for younger FB users, don’t try advertising for them! http://t.co/lHgM9yt1 day ago
• YotpoOfficialOlder will click-thru, younger will engage. Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad - http://t.co/hniOfTB via @eMarketer1 day ago
• philaestateAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/35kzQZG1 day ago
• ClemLelardouxAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://ow.ly/6q67e #in1 day ago
• CaptiCorrieRT @adrenalinejoe: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad… http://t.co/ly4MMCf1 day ago
• jer979RT @robbirgfeld: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/psTubyU1 day ago
• AdrenalineJoeAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad… http://t.co/443Blvo1 day ago
• JanisGAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/cYJYMzZ via @AddToAny1 day ago
• jconeAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/XSgbdZF via @AddToAny1 day ago
• pcdnetworkRT @nutshellmail: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://ow.ly/6pYgX via @eMarketer1 day ago
• targetmarket1RT @DonnaAntoniadis: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer - http://ow.ly/6pPwk1 day ago
• nutshellmailAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://ow.ly/6pYgX via @eMarketer1 day ago
• resultsjhowaldAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/0vMVqII via @eMarketer1 day ago
• sagonphiorWant to know who is “liking” and who clicks on Facebook ads? http://t.co/2udUwbJ1 day ago
• lipup_kattyAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad - http://t.co/qel4x5j RT: @eMarketer1 day ago
• jerilynbizznessThings to consider when placing an ad – Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/Pk1o4d2 via @AddToAny1 day ago
• frankcdaleFacebook Ads get a .003% or less click-through rate – eMarketer http://t.co/5l5LuTp1 day ago
• rocketfuelincOlder Consumers More likely to click on an ad, while Younger One’s go for the “Like” @emarketer http://t.co/qhsqgm2 #online #advertising1 day ago
• Erika_Vanessa_VRT @eMarketer: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad - http://t.co/LizJHCw1 day ago
• crushdirectAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/QdmpCoB via @AddToAny1 day ago
• BTeichenAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad – eMarketer http://t.co/62hvr9y via @AddToAny1 day ago
• DennisPangAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://t.co/2f2YRq4 #Facebook1 day ago
• ironhorseinter Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad: Older consumers are more likely to click on a Facebook ad,… http://t.co/fV7C8k6 1 day ago
• bendonaldson News flash: Younger generations use social media http://ow.ly/6q1QN 1 day ago
• eCommerceFAQs Older consumers will click on an ad, while younger ones go for the “like” http://t.co/i3fuI0i 1 day ago
• mentionmappAge, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad http://ow.ly/6q1PU via @eMarketer1 day ago
• mottacaioRT @eMarketer: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad - http://t.co/LizJHCw 1 day ago
• targetmarket1RT @eMarketer: Age, Gender Affect Whether Consumers Will ‘Like’ an Ad - http://t.co/LizJHCw 1 day ago
• GuyMansueto 18- to 29-year-olds both click ads and like brands 40% of the time @emarketer http://t.co/7HudEFs 1 day ago

RTs are not conversations. They are echos.

Here are more, from “Related Articles” that a service called Zemanta shows me, in one of my WordPress panels:

• Women Click Facebook Ads More Than Men [Data]  hubspot.com)
• Minimizing Your Facebook Ad CPC Bid Prices by Avoiding Bid Competition socialtimes.com)
• Women more likely than men to click on Facebook ads  zdnet.com)
• Minimizing Your Facebook Ad CPC Bid Prices by Avoiding Bid Competition insidefacebook.com)
• How to better engage your audience with targeted advertising on Facebook thenextweb.com)
• STUDY: Women Click More Facebook Ads Than Men  allfacebook.com)
• Day-Parted Facebook Ads Work on Males, Consumers Over 50  clickz.com)
• Acquisio Helps Agencies Accurately Calculate Facebook Ad ROI  prweb.com)
• Older Facebook Users Click On Ads, Younger Ones Only ‘Like’  paidcontent.org)
• Facebook Advertising Advantages  ronmedlin.com)

Some of these are “promoted.” Note that Zemanta assumes that everything related will be in the same echo chamber.

Here is my favorite view of that echo chamber, as it now stands:

It’s from The SCIENCE-ification of Media, by Terrence Kawaja, CEO of the investment bank LUMA partners. He has many other similar (and equally fascinating) graphics at Slideshare.

The least colorful part of the graphic is the word AUDIENCE, over on the right. That’s you, me, and the other 99.xx% out there who don’t click on an ad, as well as the 00.xx% who do.

What we see here is how supply tries to drive demand — and fails most of the time.

The much bigger market opportunity is in demand driving supply. That’s what we’ve been working on with ProjectVRM, at Harvard’s Berkman Center, for (as of this month) the last five years.

In that time the list of VRM development projects has grown from none to dozens. They are in Santiago, Johannesburg, Vienna, New York, London, Boston, D.C., Dubuque, Santa Barbara, Salt Lake City, Montreal, San Francisco and elsewhere. In their own ways they all help Demand signal Supply, rather than the reverse. They serve the actual intentions of individual buyers, rather than the machinations of advertisers and their legion of assistants, all scheming to grab the attention of an “audience” — a delusional term that suggests a patient group, all facing a stage, ready to applaud a performance.

It’s early in the new game here. That game is Customer Intentions vs. Advertiser Guesswork. As I said in The Data Bubble, back when The Wall Street Journal launched their terrific What They Know series (about tracking users without consent),

Here’s what’s delusional about all this: There is no demand for tracking by individual customers. All the demand comes from advertisers — or from companies selling to advertisers. For now.

Here is the difference between an advertiser and an ordinary company just trying to sell stuff to customers: nothing. If a better way to sell stuff comes along — especially if customers like it better than this crap the Journal is reporting on — advertising is in trouble.

Here is the difference between an active customer who wants to buy stuff and a consumer targeted by secretive tracking bullshit: everything.

Two things are going to happen here. One is that we’ll stop putting up with it. The other is that we’ll find better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.

Improving a pain in the ass doesn’t make it a kiss. The frontier here is on the demand side, not the supply side.

Advertising may pay for lots of great stuff (such as search) that we take for granted, but advertising even at its best is guesswork. It flourishes in the absence of more efficient and direct demand-supply interactions.

The idea of making advertising perfectly personal has been a holy grail of the business since Day Alpha. Now that Day Omega is approaching, thanks to creepy shit like this, the advertsing business is going to crash up against a harsh fact: “consumers” are real people, and most real people are creeped out by this stuff.

Rough impersonal guesswork is tolerable. Totally personalized guesswork is not.

While the advertising mills keep talking to themselves, VRM development continues. As it starts to go mainstream, we’ll need a new organization, primarily for customers, rather than just for developers. We’re working on that, and expect to have it going in the next six months. So stay tuned. Meanwhile, join me in thanking the Berkman Center for giving us the runway we needed to get VRM development off the ground.