January 28 2009 Conference Call

Conference Call Notes

Drafted by Joe Andrieu, January 28, 2009

IRC

#vrm at chat.freenode.net

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Attendees

• Joe Andrieu
• Dean Landsman
• Iain Henderson
• Drummond Reed
• Doc Searls
• Alan Mitchell
• Charles Andres

Notes

Principles

Doc is working on it. It keeps getting closer, even though it has been "the next few days" for a while now... Cluetrain is done and to the publiser. That helped get the principles locked down and is now off of Doc's plate.

NPR Tuner

Nice exercise in getting a bunch of technologies working together. Asa Hardcastle and Markus Sabadello are helping out. Good to have geeks talking to geeks getting stuff made. If we have any problems, it will most likely be political, with the rallying of stations and NPR central.

Face to Face

Trying to lock down a venue.

Stanford in the spring? March 2nd, 3rd, 4th. (M/T/W) Following IIW structure. 1/2 day Monday, baselining, project Briefs. Two full days T/W Dinners M/T

VRM.org

Meeting re: VRM.org with Andy Updegrove in Boston. Who has probably been involved in many many things like this.

Graham Hill

A few cycles sucked away responding to his slam: The four failings of VRM. http://www.customerthink.com/blog/four_fallacies_vendor_relationship_management He took VRM as sort of a socialist planned economy thing, which is wrong. So Doc responded explaining why: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vrm/2009/01/25/a-little-understanding-goes-a-short-way/

CRM / VRM Workshop

Have a conference? Risks? What happens when the big providers come in.

Something towards a qualified sales lead is sort of the best output of VRM into CRM.

How quickly could we have a draft specification in place?

The purpose of a workshop would be to make things work. To get people together to work out the details.

In the beginning it should be a small add on to the systems from Oracle and SugarCRM. It's the kind of system that they should say "Of course, we'd love to have that." (Where they is both the software vendor and the software client).

But some of the players only want to back a disruption that they can win. So, we have to present the opportunity to be the winner in this new market without actually empowering that explicitly--we don't want to create a new monopolist.

VRM website

Working to get the site moved over. http://www.projectvrm.net Please take a look and get feedback to Deal mailto:dean@land-com.net .

Social Media

Lots of talk about empowerment of the customer in various different media. And yet, is our mailing list the best place to discuss things? Hard balance between.

Standards Committee

So, what we set out to do with the standards committee seems to be a bit more easily enabled by working within an organization like Liberty to take an idea and move it to a more formal specification and recommendation.

We've been thinking about tackling the VRM criteria that a specification would have to meet to be blessed as a VRM-compliant specification. This follows the OSI model for the Open Source Definition. Bullet point criteria, with a paragraph explaining each one.

Doc will join our next couple of conversations and see how things develop.

Twitter for RFP?

It has been suggested that Twitter might be used for personal RFPs. But it is problematic.

Is revocation a VRM principle.

YES! (says Joe) It's about user-driven and user-control.

Doc wants to be able to define these kinds of things ethically and practically.

Identica might be a good candidate to talk to. They are open source, open standard. And trying to make a difference with an open microblogging system.

Upcoming Meetings

• Thursdays 10:30AM PST: R-button
• Tuesdays 1:30PM PST: ListenLog
• Alternating Wednesdays (Next 1/21) 10AM PST Standards committee call
• Alternating Wednesdays (Next 1/21) 12:30 EST Marketing committee call

Next Meeting

• Feb 14 2009 Conference Call