Who's Talking to (or with) Whom

From Berkman Fellow Doc Searls...

In CBS Video: Not In The Conversation, John Battelle writes,

Close readers will notice a trend in 2008 here on Searchblog: I’ll be posting stuff about conversations, and in particular how companies are doing when it comes to having conversations with their key constituents.

I want to look at it from the opposite side, asking How are customers doing when it comes to having conversations with their key companies?

More to the point, how can we equip customers with better tools for communicating with their suppliers — across all those suppliers’ CRM (Customer “Relationship” Management) systems? Especially when most of those systems are designed to deflect or prevent actual human-to-human contact.

For example, I would like a dashboard — or the technology and standards that would allow anybody to build a dashboard — by which I could manage my billing relationships with all my suppliers...

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For more on Doc's work on Vendor Relationship Management, check out the the ProjectVRM site and the project blog.