> Joerg, you must be awake enough to summarize it as "protocols, standards, platforms and tools enabling informational self-determination in the internet". That seems to be the main meme surfacing from this thread - that what VRM is leading too is a much bigger transformation that will need its own name.
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> Since Craig is a master of lexicon, that's a great thing for him to cook on. It's funny how the names for these things evolve -- who would have thought 20 years ago that the entire planet would be talking about "browsers" and "sites" and a "Web"?
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> =Drummond
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> On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Joerg Resch <
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> Hopefully Craig won´t kill me when he will come over to Germany soon – but I couldn´t disagree more. The VRM project once started as the reciprocal of CRM. Both terms, CRM and VRM, are limited to describing relationships between customers and vendors. Like also the term used by Maarten and Marcel from Qiy: Customer Managed Relationships (CMR). CMR is a good and valid description for what you can do with the Qiy software and comparable solutions _as a first step_ . But there is much more in this concept than just customer/vendor relationships. What we have been discussing here is not limited to relationships between vendors and customers. What about government/citizen or vendor/vendor or individual/individual or individual/group? If I use facebook – who is the customer? It´s not me, because I don´t pay for their electricity bill. To say it with Dave Kearns: I´m the product in a relationship between facebook and some advertising company. It is these kind of relationships which need attention when it comes to the question who has control over what happens with information from within my privacy sphere. We are talking about complex chains of relationships with multiple actors. Instead of managing a 1-to-1 relationship between vendor and customer, “personal data solutions” try to provide end-to-end control and accountability. In a most generic view, we are talking about protocols, standards, platforms and tools enabling informational self-determination in the internet. But I´m probably not awake enough to put this into a nice sounding acronym…
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> Joerg
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> Von: Britt Blaser [mailto:
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> Gesendet: Mittwoch, 12. Oktober 2011 22:28
> An:
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> Cc: Doc Searls; ProjectVRM list;
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; Drummond Reed; Bart Stevens; Iain Henderson; Venessa Miemis
> Betreff: Re: [projectvrm] Re-name VRM?
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> Supporting an idea from Craig is like carrying coals to Newcastle, but he's right. The biggest company in the world is named for a fruit.
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> On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 12:31 PM, Craig Burton <
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> It is waaaaaay too late to even think about changing the name. There is serious equity in the existing name. Any change is only going to cause confusion and setback.
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> For those who don't like it, that is your choice but it is just too late.
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> Don't do it.
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> cb
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> On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 9:17 AM, Doc Searls <
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> Venessa in another thread does a good job in other threads of critique-ing VRM as a term. And thank you, Maarten, for explaining Qiy's reasons for not using VRM.
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> Many others over the past few years have also had problems with VRM as a label for what we're doing here, me included. So here's a new thread: R-name VRM?
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> Can it be done? Should it be done? Is now the time to do it?
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> This too should be a topic at IIW.
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> But the matter is more urgent than that.
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> I have a 90,000 word book for Harvard Business Review Press that I am finishing this week -- though some edits might be possible in the next week after.
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> The book is about what VRM will do.
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> Its called The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. It's not my first choice for a title, but it's what they want, and I can't change their minds.
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> I also just finished an article on VRM for Harvard Business Review, which will run in January. While the focus of the article is customer data (the title is "Send customer data back to its source"), it talks about VRM. By name.
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> We have a Wikipedia article on VRM.
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> #VRM, as we mean it, shows up several times a day in Twitter: <
https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23vrm>
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> Yet It's true that VRM has problems as a name, because the word "vendor" seems wrong in too many cases. For merchants, and even many enterprises, "vendor" means an upstream supplier. Merchants are customers of upstream vendors, yet have their own customers as well. Some of those people they they call customers (e.g. Trader Joe's). Some they call guests (e.g. Target Stores). Some they call consumers (e.g. governments).
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> My Trader Joe's friend suggests calling it Merchant Relationship Management. Yet it's broader than that.
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> A story.
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> Several decades ago, the ad agency I founded and served as creative director was tasked by a bank with re-naming ATMs, which were then still new and just catching on. The term was a dull acronym, and stood for "Automated Teller Machine." The bank wanted something better. This being North Carolina, they ended up calling the machines "outer banks." Clever, but ATM was already established in use, and nobody could change that.
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> VRM is not so widely used as ATM was then. But if we do change it, we will be starting over in many ways. We'll have to go to the CRM people, including the ones who wrote cover stories on VRM, and say it's now this new term. (And if we use CMR we'll hear back that it's "a dyslexic CRM." Been there, heard that.)
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> Also, VRM actually worked, in conversation, where an earlier term we used, "CoRM" (for Company Relationship Management) did not.
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> If we change VRM to something else, we will also need to do serious promotion. As a group. A coordinated one. Can this be done? Should it?
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> Reluctance by some of us to use the term VRM is a problem for our common cause. While not as big a problem as not having enough to show yet, it's still a problem -- because analysts, journalists, tweeters and bloggers don't always connect the dots. This is a tough one because all companies wish to differentiate themselves. Would those of us who don't mention VRM on our websites today be just as reluctant to mention whatever it is that we'll re-name VRM?
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> We have a cause here: free and independent customers, able to engage in their own ways and on their own terms.
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> We often broaden that from customers to individuals, so we can have, say, GRM, for Government Relationship Management -- a topic Britt Blaser is sure to bring up at IIW as well. Plus Organization Relationship Management. Or Church Relationship Management.
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> Yet even a U.K. government dude talked about VRM recently, by name.
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> We don't seem to have a problem with RM. Should we just lop off the V? If so, we bring all RMs together, including the $13+ billion CRM business.
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> I don't know the right answer here. What I do know is that any re-naming we do will have to be 10X better, or more, if we want it to work. And it needs to be promoted, by all of us, as a community.
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> And I'll have a load of re-writing to do.
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> Doc
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> --
> Craig Burton
> Distinguished Analyst
> KuppingerCole
> 2032 E. La Tour Cir.
> Salt Lake City, UT 84121
>
801-369-5974
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