Graham Sadd (@grahamsadd) in VRM Trust Matters:
MyCustomer.com publishes the second half of Doc Searls predictions and emerging forms of VRM but I couldn’t resist adding a few to his list.
As a long term advocate of VRM (or SRM as I used to call it back in the last century) I fully agree with Doc and the ProjectVRM core principle of ‘user-driven’. However we at PAOGA prefer ‘user’ to ‘customer’ in this context as we provide secure VRM tools and services extending beyond the ‘Vendor Relationship’ to enhance individuals participation in their relationships as a citizen, patient, employee, client, student, et al. Let’s call it XRM.
Whilst Doc provides a number of examples whereby VRM can provide significant mutual benefits to both buyer and seller, I think there are a few more worthy of mention.
The full text of that MyCustomer.com interview is at How VRM helps CRM.
In Accepting Payments on the Real-Time Web Damon Cortesi (@dacort) visits issues we face from the user/customer’s side with EmanciPay:
Here’s the thing – I build products. Lots of them. And I want to charge for them. I don’t want to have to drive tens of thousands of uniques per month before ads even start to think about paying out. I’m tired of visiting websites and having ads about people’s ugly teeth be the first thing I see. Dave McClure had an interesting, if curse-word-infused, post on the future of subscriptions. The basic gist is that startups have focused on growth and advertising-based revenue models in the past decade and that now we are heading more towards a subscription and transaction-based model.
His spot-on rant is ridiculously close to what I almost ended up posting this morning, and I’m glad I didn’t, as I haven’t quite earned the the respect to swear online like that yet. But here’s how it looks from the ground floor as a developer on a 2-person team that is trying to avoid the CPM/CPC model and instead focus on building useful products that people want to pay for. A crazy concept, I know!
Then he reviews, at length, a number of company offerings, and concludes,
Since the weekend, I’ve been contacted by a number of other subscription billing companies. Of the couple I checked out (Vindicia and Aria Systems), their websites were primarily marketing fluff – white papers, best practice guides and webinars. In order to actually determine their feasibility, I had to fill in a form and have a sales person contact me. This may work for larger corporations, but we’re a startup. Putting up a sales gateway in front of your documentation makes it pretty damn difficult to evaluate the efficacy of your solution. When we’re building products in a matter of hours or days, your 9-5, Monday-Friday attitude is simply not going to be compatible with our workflow. But maybe we’re not your target audience.
All that being said, there’s hope. Spreedly, Recurly, and Chargify are all brand new and all appear to both be listening and care about their current and potential customers. I don’t doubt that they’ll all get to where I want them to be in the near future, but they’re not quite there yet.
Perhaps useful to other folks is this spreadsheet where we tracked different recurring billing solutions against our requirements. I’d love to hear other people’s experiences with these, or other payment solutions.
Nicolas Shriver:
I like the VRM concept. The Vendor Relationship Management is somehow a reverse CRM. A customer exposes his needs for a product, and the brand gets in contact with him to provide the accurate information, via social media or its website. This is the reason why community management is getting so huge.
John Cass:
I’m reading Paul Greenberg’s CRM and the speed of light, just getting into the second chapter where he discusses various CRM related terms. Including VRM, Doc Searls’ baby, the idea of vendor relationship management, customers manage their data and relationships instead of companies managing customer data. Companies provide customers with the tools to manage their data. Google Health would be an example of VRM. Paul and I discussed VRM back in 2008. I think it will be a hot topic in the years to come. Glad Paul included the term in the book, and I picked up some extra points from Paul’s more detailed research. Really enjoying the book.
Paul’s blog is here. And here’s the book at Amazon.
Paul Madsen:
With appropriate #micro-syntax, could #plancast serve as a #VRM RFI/RFP platform, ie ‘plan to buy’?
The Liverpool Chamber of Commerce points to Loyalty Marketing: The Nature and Scope of CRM and VRM Systems. Reading the promo text, I’m not sure the speaker is talking about our kind of VRM or another one, but I’m curious to know.
Dennis Howlett, in Rationalizing the E2.0, SCRM, social business discussion:
A constructive next step?
It’s always easy to throw brickbats but on this occasion I’d prefer to add something I hope is fresh into the conversation while representing a challenge. In doing so, I am asking people to think beyond their silos of expertise in an effort to articulate the strategic intent that seems implied but is never quite said.
Doc Searls has long talked about Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) as a socially constructed way of looking at the vendor-customer relationship. It’s kind of the inverse of CRM but with the same philosophical grounding.
The last time we discussed this, more than a year ago, he acknowledged that making VRM work in anything other than relatively simple supply chain situations was likely to prove tough. Yet real customer service means having some reach into the supply chain. Even now Doc acknowledges that many of the tools don’t exist to make the VRM dream a reality. But maybe there’s a way where E2.0/SCRM thinkers can see where their ideas start to disintegrate and use the conversation Doc has going to make this more relevant to the real world. At the same time, maybe think also about how Sig’s BRP impacts the broad sweep of E2.0/SCRM.
Finally, when thinking about E2.0/SCRM, pay attention to the way in which organizational change occurs in the context of nuanced cultures. Don’t be constrained by one or other theory simply because it makes for an attractive sounding buzz phrase. Without that, much of what passes for this new way of thinking will be lost.
It’s early days. I’m sure it is happening. Somewhere. I’d just like to see it.
For additional context there I’ll point to Enterprise 2.0 (the subject for which E2.0 is an abbreviation), the excellent new book by my colleague Andrew McAfee.
Robin Wilton in Paying for Privacy:
The older reason is that “point” privacy protection products can usually do little or nothing about the elephant in the room… the vested and mostly-invisible commercial interests behind online advertising are so huge, so entrenched and so opaque to the user that it is all but impossible to change the balance of power between the ‘data subject’ and the ‘data gatherer’. As an example, look at the difficulty some very bright people have had with turning VRM from concept into reality. (VRM, or “Vendor Relationship Management” was coined as a flip-side to “Customer Relationship Management” – CRM – … the idea being that my interests would be better served if I took control of my data and used it as the leverage to change vendors’ behaviour). The idea, the principles and the technology might all be fine, but those factors are not enough to convince/persuade/force vendors to do things your way instead of theirs.
Yep.
a deep and helpful piece by Cliff Gerrish on his 
