Joe Andrieu does some deep VRM diving with More on Level 4 Platforms. On what it means to be open, he writes, “If a single entity or group owns the platform, it isn’t open. If there are barriers preventing users from accessing or developing on the platform, it isn’t open. If you can’t, with reasonable effort, improve the platform itself, it isn’t open.”

In Predictions: What Technology will Replace, Jeremiah Owyang includes this:

“Outside” Sales teams could be replaced by Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) s where customers define what they want, companies respond.

Bart Stevens points to this excellent piece by John Hagel on the advertising bubble.

Eve Maler says relationships are complicated, and includes good links to follow in the midst.

Ben Laurie says “the next generation of identity management systems and will only flourish if people can freely experiment with it”. VRM needs that.

In e-sourcing place, Alan Buxton posts Have you heard about Vendor Relationship Management? Among other things he says,

The concept is intriguing, but it looks like the project/movement is made up purely of marketers and internet mavens. And looks like the people involved in the project are trying to reinvent from scratch something that corporations have been struggling with for years. There don’t seem to be any people with real experience of being professional vendor managers. If anything the opposite is the case.

I appreciate Alan’s interest, but I also thought that was an erroneous claim, and said so (among other things) in my comment below the post. (It’s #3. Can’t find a direct link.)

In How Do Customers Communicate?, Jay Deragon begins, “The voice of the customer is getting louder, more effective and targeted”, and cites a white paper (that’s behind a highly annoying and bad-CRMmy registration wall, so I won’t link to it) that says, “Customers now have the resources to communicate and interact how they want, when they want, from wherever they want—creating a cultural shift to an always-on, always-connected society.”

Stephen Lewis says “in the end, keeping your business under your hat gets you nowhere”. Unless you’re a criminal like Meyer Lansky, one subject of Steve’s post, and a criminal whose business was by necessity hat-contained. One of my own favorite lines, however, comes from Hyman Roth, the character based on Lansky who was one of Michael Corleone’s unfortunate victims in The Godfather, Part 2. “Hyman Roth always makes money for his partners”, Roth said. He was played by the great actor and teacher Lee Strassberg, nailing an accent that is so perfect for its time and place that it still gives me chills to think about it. (My father had that accent, as did Frank Sinatra and many of the older characters (pronounced “carac-tas”) in The Wizard of Oz.

Anyway, VRM is about customers making partners of companies, and making money for those partners. Among other things.

First, a great line (in this case a tweet) from David Wienberger: “As I’m standing outside the Pearly Gates, I hope that G-d doesn’t tell me, ‘Your soul is very important to me.’”

Next, Craig Leonard’s Vendor Relationship Management and it’s Impact on What We Do.

Then, Netweaver’s It’s all about the relationship.

Then, Chris Heuer’s It’s about conversation, not marketing.

Then, David Tebbut asks Who controls your information?

And, spurred by my health issues, John Cass writes Doc is sick, let’s talk about VRM while Mark Scrimshire writes The Doc is right.

Also, Graham Saad’s Organisations should embrace VRM with open arms.

There are more, but I need to run. Wanted to get these up while they were in front of me.

It’s not a VRM post, but I like Kevin Marks’ How to be viral.

In Traditional CRM, CRM 2.0, VRM — Who Gives a !*@#?, Paul Greenberg actually has positive and important things to say about VRM, its inevitable dialog with CRM, and the challenge of something he calls The Scenario.

My6Sense is a start-up that I’m gathering from mumblings may be in the greater VRM space.

Echovar sees us entering a decade it embarrasses me to name. Insightful stuff.

Chris Heuer’s Toward a More Social Organization touches on VRM

Diane Mermigas urges marketers to revisit Cluetrain, and mentions VRM. Good take on the ‘train, too.

In The Shaping of Things to Come, JP Rangaswami sees some VRM stuff going on with Amazon.

John Cass adds to Francine Hardaway’s report on the talk I gave yesterday at There’s a New Conversation. Note my comment in response to Francine’s post as well.

In My Request to Give, Bart Stevens asks about a relbutton scenario:

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.

There is a (hopefully) productive back-and-forth between Simon Edhouse, myself and others in response to this post here. For context read Simon’s The Media is the Mess, where he locates a central problem of silos (such as Facebook) in the legacy client-server architecture of the Web, and commercial modeling that has become so deeply associated with The Web that its polycentral model has become normative, and at odds with the Net’s peer-to-peer roots and nature. I believe Simon mischaracterizes VRM as something operating within that model (or typical of it), but I like many of his thoughts about the model itself. As Adriana points out in her analysis of  ‘user-driven’ vs. ‘user-centric’, there are risky mentalities and framings at play, often when we don’t know it.

In If I Ruled the Internet, Molly Metzger correctly calls for poetry as well as code, if we are to make clear what VRM is all about. I have a comment below her post.

The very short version: “VODO’s aim is to provide a revenue stream for creators of media content”.

The strategy section of the long version says this:

VODO connects would-be donors to creators in order that they can make donations through existing payment mechanisms. In the current environment it is often hard for consumers to make this connection for themselves. While some producers do request and offer infrastructure for voluntary payments, these almost always have to be made at a specific website, in a manner that may be inconvenient for the consumer. VODO’s benefits lie in distributing payments out to players and downloading software, making it as trivial as possible for donors to initiate voluntary donations when they feel most ‘connected’ to the artist: at the point of enjoyment of the media.

Seems to me that VRM is a superset of this. But I’m brand new to VODO. Anybody else have some thoughts about it?

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

I was blown away. Not because it’s a great analogy, but because I … just didn’t know. I’ve never played any of these games. But the people I was talking to had (or still did) play these games. And they were getting something about VRM that I wasn’t saying.

So, rather than show a blank face again, I’d like to probe the possibility that There Might Be Something Here.

Dungeons & Dragons, Wikipedia tells me, has characters that can be equipped with “Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma.” Hmm… What would be the equivalent for a VRM-enabled customer? Respectability? Able? How do you have those in a selectively-disclosed way? Are you cloaked or something?

So I’m looking for some help here. I’m giving a Big Talk tomorrow morning about VRM (among other things… but VRM is the big topic). While I’m not starved for analogies, I think we need more than we’ve had so far, and that my elderly ass can come up with. And I suspect this role-playing thing has legs.

Especially if there’s a RPG in which relationship matters more, or at least as much, as killing bad guys (or dragons, or ennui, or whatever).

I’ll betcha there is one. Or more.

What are they? Need answers today. Or by 6am Eastern Time tomorrow.

For this gig, anyway.

Good analogies are forever. Or long enough. Post your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks.

It opens with a reference to Cluetrain, then explains how the Subject to Change’s authors advise companies to focus on empathy with the user, “deep customer understanding” and stuff like that. Looks good.

I like the closing pull-quote, which points in a VRM direction:

As markets, people’s lives, and the world are becoming more complex, many of the old, easy answers to business problems are insufficient. Developing creative, agile, and experience-focused approaches will be a key business practice for small and large companies alike.

The problem is, you can perfect all approaches and practices on the sell side; but if all the responsibility for the relationship with the customer is on the seller’s side, we still have a one-sided system. The customer needs to be equipped too. That’s what VRM is about.

I like it.

It begins,

This paper sets out to describe a version of infrastructure or foundation for VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) based on an alternative view on sharing information online between individuals and of online identity. It sets out to explain the strategy and tactics for design, development and adoption of tools - the Mine! and FeedMe (see glossary) - and creation of an infrastructure for other solutions - VRM (relationships with individuals and vendors, transactions), self-defined identity, authentication, data portability and hopefully many more. The aim is to equip individuals with tools to take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge), arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) them according to their needs and preferences and share them on their own terms whilst connected and networked on the web.

With regard to technical aspects, the goals of this paper are, again, to:

1. invent as little as possible
2. reuse only popular technologies, techniques and user-interface metaphors in order to enable VRM, and…
3. provide maximal inclusiveness and extensibility to the Mine! implementation, to permit the greatest potential for growth.

This is very consistent with what Andre Durand started saying back around the turn of the millennium, and what I said in my closing keynote at Digital ID World (DIDW) in 2003.

We are finally there.

• Everyday identity and human-centered design
• Imperatives driving human-centered identity
• Practical human-centering and VRM
• The care and feeding of online relationships

… which appeared in that order. I love the graphics too. One sample:

Another:

Great fodder for discussion at IIW this week.