November 11 2009 Conference Call
Conference Call Notes
Drafted by Joe Andrieu, November 11, 2009
IRC
#vrm at chat.freenode.net
Other Calls
Attendees
- Joe Andrieu
- Dean Landsman
- Keith Hopper
- Adriana Lukas
- Doc Searls
Notes
Droid Phone
Note quite a 1.0 phone--keyboard sucks--but at least it points to a liberated future of standards-based, open phone.
Research
Keith has led a variety of informal meetings, talking about research opportunities with the Berkman Geeks. Doc & Keith have presented a case for VRM research and the Geeks have a bunch of tools that might be useful for such research. The current conversation is figuring out how to marry those tools with a VRM research question. This means we are probably going to be focusing on closer, shorter time frame work, rather than some of the bigger, more visionary research, such as JP Rangaswami has suggested at one of our meetings. Current focus: is a free customer actually worth more than a captive one? Working with the Geeks, we would utilize Amazon's Mechanical Turk to set up an A/B test where users are faced with being a captive or a free customer and they can choose what they prefer.
After IIW, Doc went directly to a pretreat, then the retreat both for Berkman folks, and got to explore the possibilities for research. Doc has a desire to get some research done in this school year and the man-power available also tracks to the same timeframe, which makes for good motivation to push something through on a relatively short timeframe, which means simple and to the point.
Insights from the Berkman Retreat
There's a form of search that Technoratti pioneered... essentially "live search" search just of current blog posts. Unfortunately, the ad-based business didn't suffice. A little known dirty secret is that the demographics of most clickers on ads are lower class and less desirable to many advertisers. In conversations Doc's been in, he's surprised that most people just don't get it. In part, they don't get it socio-politically: they don't really get how businesses create value and how original ideas turn into wealth. Also, the advertising framework--the notion that business belongs to the sell side, supplemented by what non-profits do--is what's most familiar. These are barriers to the VRM gestalt. A lot of folks interpret VRM as ways to improve the advertising framework... but VRM isn't just MORE than that, it is fundamentally orthogonal to that. It's coming from a different direction.
Free customers v captive customers. The value in both directions. The value to self and the value to the seller.
Doc imagines a 2x2 axis, with individual/vendor on one axis, another in captive/free. A lot of people /like/ being captive. And most of those slaves will deny they are captive. (See iPhone addiction for examples of people who love their captivity.) The benefits from generativity are more public than private: that is they are more of a common good, emerging from the large scale interactions of generativity rather than the immediate, private benefits of a singular, amazing product experience. So, often a "shiny" product can seduce users who like the immediate experience without regard to the public good lost due to the lockin of said "shiny", captivating product.