The all-silo mobile marketplace

In the beginning was the browser, and the browser was yours. You drove it on the Information Superhighway of the World Wide Web: As a driver, you experienced the same kind of independence that you did with a car. You had a private space inside a private vehicle that you alone operated. You thought and [Read More →]

Posted in crm, Vertical ideas, VRM, VRM+CRM. Comments Off »

Where VRM stands in the advertising debate

It’s easy to see why the behavioral advertising business feels threatened lately. Already some of the most popular browser add-ons are for blocking ads and tracking. (Here’s one list.) As of last May, according to ClarityRay, 9.26% of all ads were being blocked by browsers. For tech content, the rate was 17.79% and in one [Read More →]

Posted in Demand chain, Horizontal ideas, Transparency, VRM. Comments Off »

The right frame for relationship is personal, not social

The short answer to Brian Solis‘s headline question — Are Businesses Becoming the New Big Brother in Social Media? — is no, because they’re not that smart. In the body copy and graphics of his excellent post, Brian explains why. Here’s one sample: There are several other images like that, each of which says something we — [Read More →]

Wanted: a handshake across the paywall

For five years I was a loyal subscriber to the Boston Globe. When I was out of town, which was a lot, I’d read it online, because the print subscription covered that too. This academic year I’m out of town more, so I canceled the subscription, because I didn’t want to pay $3.99 per week [Read More →]

VRM development work

I’ll be having a brown bag lunch today with a group of developers, talking about VRM and personal clouds, among other stuff that’s sure to come up. To make that easier, I’ve copied and pasted the current list from the VRM developers page of the ProjectVRM wiki. If you’d like to improve it in any [Read More →]

When consumers become media for themselves

I was talking recently with Edi Immonen of Glome about the idea behind it: turning users into publishers. He used the word “media,” but I’m going with “publishers” for now, because that’s the word used in this graphic (one of many like it — all amazing and excellent) from LUMA partners: That’s the marketer’s view. But how [Read More →]

VRM taking root in France

I love this tweet from @CaroCondamin Le concept du Vendor Relationship Management par ProjectVRM http://www.caroline-condamin.com/vrm/  #VRM Following the links, I see she works for OneCub, a VRM company in France. Here she also includes this simple and handy graphic, which nicely illustrates the reciprocity between CRM and VRM: Thanks to the good work done by Fing and others in [Read More →]

Posted in Companies, Startups, VRM, VRM+CRM. Comments Off »

VRM in 2013

Two positive pats on the VRM back greeted the new year and got me thinking. The first is Jim Harris’ Small Data and VRM — his prediction for 2013 in the @DataRoundtable blog. He writes, One of the reasons that vendors are getting geeky over Big Data is because they claim that they want to use it to become more [Read More →]

Posted in Demand chain, Problems, user-driven, VRM, VRM+CRM. Comments Off »

What if qualified leads were free?

In terms of economic signaling, think about which is worth more: A ready-to-sell-something message from an advertiser A ready-to-buy-something message from a customer Of course it depends. A company can use an ad to signal many people at once, and to signal far more than a readiness to sell something. And now, with advanced analytics and [Read More →]

Toward a matrix of APIs

At  the 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, Cal Henderson, then of Flickr, gave a long session called “Launching and scaling new Web services.” As I recall, among the many things he explained well were some principles behind the Flickr API. One of those principles was user access to data. The API should be one that [Read More →]