Month: October 2013

VRM

• There is an interesting correlation happening right now between online advertisers and adblocking technology: they’re both growing. By Till Faida, co-founder of Adblock Plus, in RealBusiness. Pull-quotage…”Our ultimate consideration, however, should lie in keeping these decisions in the users’ hands. So, adblockers should not rid the Internet of all advertising, they should give users the choice to rid their version of the Internet of annoying advertising. Giving the public control is the crux on which the entire issue pivots.”On this front we are not alone. We’ve found common ground with user-rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and researchers like Doc Searls and his Harvard-based VRM-Project. In addition, groups like Mozilla and news outlets like CNET have recommended this approach.”We believe in an Acceptable Ads initiative to provide a middle ground for a sustainable advertising landscape. Websites that wish to do so apply to be whitelisted and if their ads conform to the established guidelines, users see the ads they serve under default settings.”
• Till also wrote this piece, in French for Rue89. I believe it’s the same one, but not sure.
• Mobile Is Huge — But Two Key Elements Could Slow Its Growth. By Terry Heaton in StreetFight. Sez Terry…”We’re weary of running a relentless gauntlet of jumping, screaming, frantic warnings, hands grabbing, voices shouting, noise-making, disjointed movements, and the almost demonic reaching for our wallets coming from advertising. This is Madison Avenue’s idea of perfection, and the only way you can get there is to completely ignore the effect of advertising on the very people you’re trying to influence. The Web is, at core, a pull mechanism, not one that pushes. It’s why all those big projections of advertising “potential” have turned into a commodified “pennies for dollars” reality.”Doc Searls is onto something with his “Vendor Relationship Management (Project VRM)” concept at Harvard, for it fits the postmodern cultural shift like a glove. VRM is all about empowered consumers who send advertising messages back to the market, where they are bid on by service and goods providers, and you can bet that it will be primarily a local experience (although let’s not underestimate companies like Amazon). In the VRM model, there are ‘fourth parties’ who work on behalf of consumers to send the messages to third parties representing the manufacturers, retailers, or whatever.”
• Fundamental Features of Persistent Compute Objects by Phil Windley.
• My Dryer: A SquareTag Case Study By Phil Windley.
• CRM Meets VRM: How a Personal Cloud Network Will Enable Real Vendor Relationship Management. A Respect Network event. Watch that space for a recording of the webinar.
• Bill Wendel, Real Estate VRooMer, on the above. In answer to “How can homeowners who are watching the housing market to decide when to sell,” “How would they issue that IntentCast?” and “Right now, there is a shortage of inventory, so seems the opportunity for intentcasting (in real estate) is at hand,” Bill writes,  Eager to pursue answers to that question at IIW, and glad to Hangout on Google before that event with others interested in real estate use cases, or what we call reVRM.  For 22 idea starters, see reVRM-Minifesto on slides 13-15: http://bit.ly/reVRMgameChanger
• #datatuesday, a #VRM event in Paris.
• Personal Clouds Are Rolling In, by Elizabeth Glagowski of Peppers & Rogers Group. A flattering short piece. (Small correction: I am no longer a fellow at the Berkman Center — which I was from 2006-2010 — but remain involved while continuing to run ProjectVRM.)

Intention Economy

• The Art and Science of Creating a Psychic Brand, by BusinessWire, for Peppers & Rogers. It begins, “Many companies today are still trying to scale relationships with their customers – by minimizing actual human contact, scripting human interactions and treating customers according to antiquated stereotypes and profiles. In reality, brands should be ‘treating customers like the gods by whose grace every company exists.’ Those words, chosen by Doc Searls, author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, may seem a bit excessive, but they are as true as they are shocking to hear. Customers are the gods of any brand, they can give it life or banish it into obscurity – in order to thrive, it is important for a brand to be psychic, so it can anticipate the will of the gods and avoid their wrath.”
• Everything you think about big data is wrong! By Tracey Parsons in Social Media Explorer. Pull-quotage: “We must change the way we think about customers“When we remember that our customers are people and not “consumers” or “targets” we can better treat them like people. Brands desperately want relationships with their customers. Customers just want their toothpaste. They don’t want big data, but they might want a coupon for toothpaste. They are not thinking about us in the same way we are thinking about them. In fact, customers are getting wise to our trickery and it is having quite the opposite effect. Instead of thinking about our products, they are thinking about ways to block our product messages. They are looking for ways to hide from us. They are feeling stalked.”Trust me when I say that I understand that tracking and building shopper profiles allow us to measure our work. Measuring our work is one of the most critical challenges marketing leaders face today. Showing a return on investment keeps many awake at night. But if the data is bad and turning off our customers, it is time we look for new ways to reach customers. We need to be thinking about small data, personal data, one person’s data, not big data. We should be thinking about intentions and how we can allow our customers to share their intention with us in a way that is not creepy. People are not ones and zeroes. They are more than that, and we need to start treating them that way.”Project VRM inspired this post. If you have some time this fall, do read The Intention Economy.”
• If ad-blockers threaten revenue, then what’s the solution? By Colin Strong in Newsline. Pull-quotage: “Just as robotics expert Masahiro Mori first suggested in the early 1970s, perhaps there is an ‘Uncanney Valley’ where automated systems get too human like and leave us feeling ‘creeped out’. If we accept this premise then there comes a point at which targeted advertising ceases to improve in effectiveness and consumers get turned off. And this is perhaps an indication that a new era of Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) may start to replace the current authority of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This is a world in which consumers are actively managing their relationship with brands rather than being the passive recipient of advertising. The term for this shift, created by academic and commentator Doc Searls, is the Intention Economy. In the Intention Economy consumers take responsibility for holding their own data about themselves in personal clouds, collecting it from a variety of government agencies and brands – which forms a fundamentally new value exchange between brands and consumers. So consumers are placed firmly at the centre of their own personal data, being able to collect and integrate it from a multitude of different sources. Consumers may choose to provide brands with selected parts of this data when they wish to engage with them on a purchase decision.”
• The Cost of Identity in the Personal Data Economy. By John C. Havens in Huffington Post. Writes John,’We have to rethink our institutional structures.’ John Henry Clippinger is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab Human Dynamics Group and the cofounder and Executive Director of ID3, (the Institute for Institutional Innovation & Data Driven Design). He and his ID3 cofounder, Alex “Sandy” Pentland have created The Open Mustard Seed Project (OMS) to combat the existing model of data exchange for the Internet economy. ‘There’s a logic among companies that collect data which is, If I can get away with something, I can do it,’ notes Clippinger. ‘But they don’t understand the ecosystem they’re creating.'”OMS is building a data banking methodology through a technical architecture they call the, ‘Trustworthy Compute Framework’ (TCF). This allows users to create their own personal data cloud that reverses the current transactional nature of the ‘freemium’ Internet economy. Instead of individuals sacrificing their data in exchange for services, they create general preferences around which companies they’d like to engage with and how. Here’s how the Open Mustard Seed wiki describes the need for this new paradigm:
  

  Users have not had an easy or reliable means to express their preferences for how their personal data may be accessed and used, especially when one context (a bank) differs so much from another (a health care provider) and still others (family and friends). A user may not know with whom they are really transacting, nor can they readily verify that their privacy preferences are actually respected and enforced.

  “OMS lets users curate their digital personas and manage the data they collect, produce and distribute. They can also pre-determine privacy and other settings for social networks or transactions with brands. This is a critical idea regarding personal data banks — they don’t hinder transactions with companies looking to communicate with consumers. Relationships are actually enhanced via increased trust since people know what organizations will do with their data, and will be more likely to volunteer specifics about their lives in this new transparent framework. (This is an idea known as Vendor Relationship Management, or VRM, eloquently elaborated in the book, The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, by Doc Searls.)

  “Clippinger is evangelistic about the timing for a solution like OMS, noting what will happen if we don’t change the tide of how our data is managed in the current Internet economy — ‘If you don’t have an open platform, you don’t have an open society.’

  BTW, John was for a long time a Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center, and brought me in as a fellow there, back in 2006.

Trends

• Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014, in BusinessWire. SD Times (@sdtimes) explains: “Gartner’s Top 10 strategic technology trends for 2014 include:1. Mobile Device Diversity and Management
  2. Mobile Apps and Applications
  3. The Internet of Everything
  4. Hybrid Cloud and IT as Service Broker
  5. Cloud/Client Architecture
  6. The Era of Personal Cloud
  7. Software-Defined Anything
  8. Web-Scale IT
  9. Smart Machines
  10. 3-D Printing”
  You’ll find at least the first six touched upon by the writings of Phil Windley, including those below.

Advertising and Marketing

• The Rise of Ad-Blocking. A .pdf report by PageFair. Average rate: 22.7%. Growth rate: 43%. Expected rate by 2018: 100%
• Adblocking — Looking for a solution. By Sue Gee in I Programmer. Part II: Fighting Back.
• Contrarian Marketing in the “Us” vs. “Them” era. By Marc Canter in Holding Office Hours at the Creamery. “This is the era where US (the users) are increasingly figuring out that commercial interests (THEM) are exploiting and manipulating US for the purposes of generating the evil dollar.  While the social networking powerhouses do their IPOs and desperately search for additional revenue streams; true sharing-economy powerhouses are being born every day – which bring true disruptive power to the masses (AirBnb, Uber, etc.)”
• Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful. By Don Marti.
• Targeted advertising to be subject to ‘do not track’ standard. At Out-Law.com.
• Resignation from the Tracking Protection Working Group, by Jonathan Mayer.
• Jonathan Mayer To ‘Do Not Track’ Working Group: I Quit. By Judith Aquino in Ad Exchanger.
• Pinterest Won’t Collect Data When Users Turn On Do-Not-Track.By Wendy Davis in MediaPost.
• Third Party. Mozilla Wiki. “Prevents automatic tracking by third parties across different sites.”
• Let’s Turn Do Not Track Into a Dialog. By yours truly, last September. Still holds.
• What Matters to Users? Factors that Affect Users’ Willingness to Share Information with Online Advertisers. By Pedro Giovanni Leon, Blase Ur, Yang Wang, Manya Sleeper, Rebecca Balebako, Richard Shay, Lujo Bauer, Mihai Christodorescu, and Lorrie Faith Cranor, of Carnegie Mellon University, Syracuse University and Qualcomm.