Scratch your VRM itch

meeting notes

 

 

All day VRM meeting,Tuesday April 15th 2008 October Gallery

 

 

 V 0 1 - attendees, please edit if I have been inaccurate (which I doubtless have been... Paul)

 

 

Attendees:

 

 

 

David Cushman, Digital Development Director, Bauer

 

Interests: evangelising the power of networks to help media firms work differently / better

 

follow-up posts: Identity: Complexity or opportunity? Depends who is asking the question?

 

 

 

 

Adriana Lukas, VRM Hub, Media Influencer

 

Interests: buidling VRM network and usage, web/user-driven VRM, VRM infrastructure (Mine! and FeedMe), self-defined identity, new business models

 

 

 

Philip Sheldrake, OnOneMap, Racepoint Group (formerly Fuse PR), Marcom Professional

 

Interests: Commercialisation and geekery

 

 

Alexander Grünsteidl - dwb

 

Interests: fed up with doing projects where the user centred design runs out when the product arrives in marketing. Interested in digital showrooms - a different relationship between consumer and producer

 

 

Chris Osborne - Boxed up

 

Interests: customers data, communities of interest, platforms and discussion about VRM.

 

 

Nilhan Jayasinghe, iCrossing

 

Interests: Search / SEO expert who has got into VRM in last few months. Special interest in insurance apps.

 

 

Rebecca Caroe: independent business development consultant, ex-Peppers & Rogers, CreativeAgencySecrets

 

Interests: robust commercial implementations

 

 

Graham Sadd - CEO PAOGA email, blog, web, MySortingOffice (Demo) signup

 

 

Interests: Interested in VRM (and its predecessors) since at least 2002. People have been sold and targeted within modern marketing because that is what the technology allowed – those constraints are dissolving. Wants to translate VRM from concept to delivery,

 

 

 

Peter Murton - CTO PAOGA email, web, MySortingOffice (Demo) signup

 

Interests: Into VRM and related areas for a very long time. Trying to do secure hosting of personal data released on a permissions basis and seeking to stop businesses aggregate personal data on individuals.

 

 

David Stobs-Stobart – Pintarget

 

Interests: Ex financial services. Pintarget is a tool to help research larger product purchases, not search for price but search for key offer characteristics

 

 

David Man - TCV

 

Iain Henderson - TCV

 

Paul Hodgson – TCV

 

Interests:

 

Into VRM and predecessors for a long time – formed The Customers Voice in 2002 from work done years earlier. Interested in launching viable VRM-based businesses founded on helping the individual leverage their data

 

 

Alan Mitchell – Right Side Up blog and various other enterprises

 

Interests:

 

Into VRM and Buyer-centric commerce for years. Wrote the key books on the subject including Right Side Up. Leading writer, commentator and consultant on the subject.

 

 

 

Adriana Lukas – introductory presentation on the VRM project

 

 

• VRM historically came out of digital identity conference in 2006 – but identity is essentially an enabler of VRM (and other applications)

   

•   Adriana’s perspective is that a valid definition of identity is as a self-created socially networked construct – in other words, you assert your own identity. This is very different to the more established identity players (such as the Higgins framework) who define identity in terms of validation by third parties who own and define documentary evidence of identity. She seeks an identity that is optimised for the web. Personality is as important to this vision as identity – the use of blogs and social networks to create a reputation that arises directly from the protocols and practices of the web.

   

• Adriana distinguished between user-centric identity (the provision of tools and infrastructure that helps individuals construct identity out of the assets held by institutions) and user-driven identity (the creation of identity by individuals themselves which may or may not utilise assets held by institutions but is asserted by individuals regardless of others). Both approaches are valid but Adriana is interested in fostering a geek-activist version of identity that bootstraps itself autonomously in the way that all the great infrastructural elements of the web have. In short – she does not want identity to only be provided FOR you. She wants it provided BY you.

   

• (Sensible points made by others: self-constructed identity is susceptible to abuse – and challenge. But then again, multiple competing / cooperating approaches are not just acceptable, but essential.)

   

 

Graham Sadd – Paoga – an introduction to my sorting office

 

 

• The starting point is “I do not want my data to be under the control of my suppliers”.

   

• But thus far there has been little choice.

   

• The better, VRM alternative is a personal database that is accurate, write once, read many, with a usage trail to see who has used it, when and why (and to identify who is misusing or cashing in on it)

   

• Paoga’s systems help vendors too by addressing DPA risk, reputation risk, enhancing accuracy, reducing cost to serve, enhancing security (reducing the need to COPY data when suppliers can simply ACCESS THE LATEST – with permission). And on and on – there are many elements to the supplier value proposition.

   

• My Sorting Office is an email app that lets you filter out spam, while getting more of the messages you want. You let suppliers have an email address to send relevant messages to; that email address can be discarded without loss when you no longer want those messages. Facility to be paid to read email. Can track if email used for spam

   

• Craig’s list does a similar discardable email address

   

 

 

David Stobs-Stobart – PinTarget

 

 

• The aim was to create a page ranking for people that would make recommendations useful

   

• “DNA” architecture is the sum total of what a person does, a place that brings together search results at the research stage of the buying process with social networking recommendations from friends – and an RSS feed of recommendations

   

• Needs personal data to be “hot” (hosted locally) for searching to be fast enough

   

• Business model is advertising with a twist – WANTED advertising. But advertiser cannot bid its way into a search position

   

• Pitch to agencies is that this is a better return on ads – and a new way of using existing content for long form advertising pitches

   

 

Adriana – Mine! and FeedMe!

 

 

• The aim is to reclaim my data. You access it from your browser (and may not care at all where it is as long as it is secure – could be distributed)

   

• An interface like netvibes or igoogle links to modules that deal with different VRM personal data elements – such as a log of interests / desires / recommenedations for wine (or travel, or gadgets, or anything)

   

• The 'wine zone' within the Mine! would be a mash up or collage of all your data (photos, notes, bookmarks, whatever) about wines I recommend, wines I’d like to try, wines I don’t recommend, party wine I want to buy, wine I want to buy as a present etc. Feeds can be generated from the pool of this data/zone according to the recipient or target

   

• These feeds are available to anyone (or rather anyone I allow to see them)

   

• Tags are likely to be involved – click on a tag (“I want to buy”, “I recommend” etc) and see what’s there

   

• Friends can leverage feeds of recommendations – and suppliers can see feeds of desires and respond

   

• It is the WordPress model of e-commerce, in the sense that you take charge of your 'content' and display or withhold it as you wish. 

   

• At the centre is the potential for an analytical system that helps individuals understand what they have bought and what they could buy better – and help others too. This is the CRM flip - companies have analytical data systems that helps them work out useful stuff from their operation data systems. Why can't individuals have something similar for their own preferences and history etc.?

   

• It is a light infrastructural play – putting person-driven commerce into action and letting suppliers catch up and service the latent demand being expressed. None of the heavy infrastructure is needed – and no supplier value proposition exists – but it’s a valid grass roots approach to the problem, of implementing VRM

   

• Adriana and Nilhan Jayasinghe talked about their idea for a VRM-style insurance play that would disintermediate brokers by collecting individuals’ insurance details and canvassing insurers for quotes, sharing the commission with users. One objection was that this could create a more opaque market where prices are harder to discover – Alan Mitchell suggested that there may be a need for aggregators and comparison sites to show clearly what the pricing is. Even better would be a source such as Edmunds.com (or possibly Parkers?) which would use real-world data on transactions to identify prices. The response was that price comparison is optimised for aggregators – and prices are base on very basic cover. The conclusion seemed to be that what was required was a comparison site that worked on behalf of the individual – and that insurance might be a bad example since it is so intensely commoditised. Holidays could be a better VRM use case since choice is less price-dependent, and more about matching complex needs

   

 

Other stuff from free-wheeling conversation

 

 

• VRM is aimed at the innovator segment of the market lifecycle – it’s a “push”, and many other players are also trying to “push” new product ideas at that segment to see what will stick. (Darwinian selection!)

   

• Maybe local business is where a P2P style of VRM model would work? (But P2P recommendations via forums / twitter / blogs / friends is about all kinds of products from records to mortgages)

   

• People (well, geeky innovators anyway!) want data portability – but we need target users to try to define what this really means… mainstream markets won’t help define the propositions

   

• It is possible that a personality, “soft identity” version of VRM might be a good place to start and might grow into “hard identity”, transactional VRM

   

• Teenagers are experimenting avidly with identity on the web (just as they always were offline…) and will come to expect identity management when they become adults. Just as the last dozen or so cohorts of teenagers and college graduates grew up with the web and with search, and then e-commerce, and have fuelled the e-commerce boom. They might be used to the idea of “thousands of feeds” from and to friends / stars / suppliers

   

• Finally there was some discussion of the need for a VRM “Bill of rights” – a vision of VRM principles and ethics. Here is a wiki page Data bill of rights for drafting those. Feel free to start in any way, at which ever end. We'll tidy it up as we go along. 

   

 

 

ENDS