Customer Experience Crossroads

Twitterati vs the banks

Twitter is one more thing that somebody said of it: "this changes everything". [656 hits for that exact phrase on Google, and probably bigger now]

One of my favorite reads is Bankervision, and author James Gardner had the audacity to go public with a Twitter-is-a-stunt-for-banks stance, releasing a firestorm in a teacup as Twitter defenders and bank bashers both rose to the challenge of commenting.

Some of the points made are interesting, though, so let me see if I can distill the main arguments.

From James:

• Banks that hang with the cool kids want to be first on everything. They like getting attention from social media mavens and marketing gurus
• Unpaid media is a compelling value proposition, but you have to be first to get any benefit
• Twitter is not economic for reaching thousands of customers with relevant messaging, because you'd need a roomful of people tweeting to do it
• It's a lot like virtual worlds -- looked important, but off the radar at the moment
• To invest real development time, banks need to see a real money business case
• Twitter experiences a lot of user churn - a lot of people go dormant after a few weeks
• Bank innovators should focus on mobile

Commenters:

• Twitter is more about listening than talking, if you are an institution. Case in point here.
• Twitter may not have reached critical mass, but it's way too soon to write it off
• Twitter is part of social media, and if you are going to be relevant to your customers, you need to find a way to be relevant in social media
• Twitter opens a channel to pass on good stuff, and limit the damage from bad stuff (Remember the Domino's viral video situation)
• Twitter has more utility when you add a bunch of other tools like Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Twitscoop, Monittor, etc
• Bankers just don't get it
• Virtual worlds that require a huge software download and big investment of time are not comparable to razor-thin Twitter apps that take almost no time and are totally mobile

Okay, I think you get the picture.
Among the more interesting remarks made on both sides is the challenge of scaling up such a system to communicate with customers.

Let's consider customer wants

The part that I think is getting short shrift here is the underlying desire, need or want. [I know, I do go on about that, don't I?]

Yes, banks and others need to monitor Twitter. But if that ever became a primary communication channel, something is seriously wrong. I do think that the banks running a help line on Twitter are probably doing a good thing. I monitor a few of these, and I don't see them getting that much traffic, and what they are doing is redirecting the enquiries, for the most part.

Long before the internet, a disgruntled customer could call their local newspaper columnist or local TV consumer reporter with their gripe. And the company would get right on the problem and fix it. This did not mean it was a primary communication channel.

Since that time, banks have made many changes. They have standards of customer service, much better quality control and quality tracking, faster decision turn-around, and many other service improvements at banks. And ombudspeople as a last resort.

Social media have a democratizing effect: it means small voices can more easily be heard. They help balance out the power imbalance of one customer versus a big institution.

The scaling thing is still a big issue

Regardless of what the communication channel is, people want more access to institutions. They want it fast, and they want it convenient. They don't want to be on hold for half an hour. Call centres were certainly scaled up to provide more convenient access. And a few institutions do a good job with e-mail, which has got to be a demanding operation, and fraught with potential problems.

Twitter seems to offer possibilities for alerts

Relatively few banks offer customers feed services for things like rates. This would appear to be a good application for Twitter. What about campaigns and promotions, announcements of new locations, all that sort of stuff.

Or maybe an automated system should tweet me about the status of my application.

Lots of other innovations are possible using these new channels.

[Note that what I am suggesting here would also work well or better on mobile. And probably be more secure]

Most consumers expect banks to innovate first in helping them stay on top of transactions and money. They expect a lot less in the 'cool' department than they do of brands like Virgin Atlantic or Pepsi.

We are all trying to figure this stuff out, for ourselves and our clients. Thanks James for putting on a nice show over there.

The evolution of mobile: Waiting for mobile 2.0 to arrive

 

Remember the early days of the www? People shared good sites to "surf to". We still talk about surfing, but it's not some heady "let's sit down after dinner and surf the web" thing. It's now part of our everyday lives.

Early web sites were called brochure-ware. They were digital versions of print brochure content.  There might be lots of it -- many of thousands of pages of it, in fact, on many corporate web sites. But the first people to put rich media content on their sites were lauded as visionaries.

Well, current mobile communication is the same. You have a device that can go on the internet, so you can read the same stuff, but very tiny. It's just so much web-ware for the handheld, the brochure-ware of our era.

We're now getting some interesting standalone applications. We can interact with the web from our mobile, like posting to Twitter. The whole concept is still largely about using the tiny screen in a highly visual way. For example, there aren't many mobile sites that have voice-driven interaction, for example.

And the real power of mobile -- to leverage location context and location technologies like GPS -- that's just starting. So the customer experience should get a lot better soon.

It should be fun. Remember those heady days of the dot-com bubble? Well the mobile bubble is going to reach a much bigger crowd, because it will reach the unwired developing world.

 

Improved local search is coming soon to a smart phone near you

 
I was looking for maps of local meeting places (aka Starbucks) one day recently, and found this great little tool called FindbyClick. It looked like something I could really use, and I was excited to see it had mobile download availability. Just not for my Blackberry. Darn.

This prompted a quick e-mail to the company, which resulted in a delightful conversation with Kevin MacDonald, head of the location-based product group at developer Pentura.

FindbyClick was a media darling for a brief period when it was first introduced, but is not the main line of business for this IT development company. Nevertheless, it has a place in the hearts of the team, and is still in line for some development.

"My dream is to tap into the community, to help take content that would be of interest to others, and to use this content to create a social network on a map," Mr. MacDonald says.

He observed that a challenge for all mapping services, whether Google Maps, MapQuest or TomTom, is that "they have a lot of stale data."  He had hoped to build enough of a community that people would go in and correct incorrect data. This did indeed happen in some instances. "We had one guy who had a Wal-Mart obsession," who did considerable work tagging and moving points around to their correct locations. Another individual provided many of the locations and tags for Starbucks in Hong Kong.

Mr. MacDonald believes that the launch of FindbyClick was "a little ahead of the curve." IPhone had not yet been released, and mobile device capability was constrained. At the time this service was built, only Nokia had the capacity to put such an application on their phones.

Subsequently the firm has worked with a number of major organizations on location-based applications, including Google.

Maps as information sources

You can learn a lot from mapping. For example, Mr. MacDonald notes that Manhatten is covered with Starbucks, but New Jersey has almost none. We speculated that perhaps New Jerseyites were more of a Dunkin Donuts crowd. Or perhaps they get their Starbucks at work, not in their home neighborhood. You can tell alot about the people in an area by the stores and services in the area.

The future of mapping is definitely bright

Mr. MacDonald agreed with me that push marketing to your mobile device is not likely to be appealing to many people -- the "turn around now for a great deal" kinds of applications that were forecast a decade ago.

Instead, what he sees is the potential for predictive functionality based on an individual's own tags. So my phone might tell me about things that are similar to what I have already expressed interest in. If I have tagged a lot of delicatessens on my maps, my phone might find additional delis for me from the lists of things others have tagged. This feels something like Del.icio.us functionality brought to a map, and that would be excellent.

Another limitation has been the lexicon of descriptions available to tag a given location, which Mr. MacDonald likens to working with a limited vocabulary. In the future we will have more free-form searching, instead of being limited to a specific set of tags.

FindbyClick will launch a new version in 2009, "with more data, more content, and content more personalized to you."

Experience design implications

So many of the things we want are local. And the web has not been very good at local search. When we are looking for a hair salon, we want one that's convenient. Even more for a drycleaner. Same thing for a daycare, a dentist, or a framing shop. Sometimes it's urgently local, as is the case with a gas station or a bank machine.

With local search and mapping getting better, and with smart mobile devices ready to help, we will all be able to get out from behind our desks more and find the places we need. If your company has any kind of physical presence, you will want to be considering how you will take your place in these interactive maps.

Resources:

Pentura Solutions Inc.-- an IT consulting firm that developed FindbyClick

Google Maps Mania --  a blog about Google Maps. Here's their story about FindbyClick

FindbyClick the blog -- Kevin MacDonald's blog

How consumers are reacting to the economy

Using GPS to build customer experience: yes, it's another Harley-Davidson story

GPS device maker Garmin is launching a specialized version of the Garmin Zumo - the Road Tech Zumo. It will come pre-loaded with all the Harley-Davidson dealerships, as well as a program to share rides. These will be the kind of rides motorcyclists love, of course -- with windy roads, good scenery, and an absence of express-lanes.

As GPS becomes ubiquitous, I expect to see a lot more innovation of this nature. Read more on the GPS Lodge story.

Resources:

Harley-Davidson Zumo GPS - the Road-Tech Zumo, on GPS Lodge, Aug. 4 08

More than Scrabulous: Credit unions, P2P lending and payments now on Facebook

While some of the major FIs have garnered publicity for their pages on Facebook, others have been starting to offer actual transaction capability. So when I take a break from playing Scrabulous, I can check out account balances or send money to a buddy. Soon, I'll be able to apply for a peer-to-peer loan, or check out my loan portfolio.

Credit Unions leading the charge to transacting on Facebook

SEFCU is a credit union with 160,000 members serving New York State, and is the latest to announce transactions on Facebook. MShift, a provider of mobile banking solutions, built the SEFCU application, as well as the KeyPoint Credit Union Facebook application, launched November 2007. KeyPoint's 80,000 customer base is heavily weighted to technology professionals, and it only makes sense that they would be at the forefront of access innovations.

FiServ, the giant solutions provider for financial processing technology has launched the MyMoney application (screen shot above) that offers access to a number of credit union accounts. And possibly the ability to aggregate from multiple credit unions, although that wasn't entirely clear to me after researching this. Although the application was built with credit unions in mind, Fiserv says they can work with any operating platform.

[One thing I didn't care for too much were the gushing testimonials from Fiserv employees on the comments page.]

The driver behind this initiative is simple -- bring the banking to where the people are, especially Gen Y potential customers. But not only them, of course -- other demographics are rapidly adopting social networking as well.

P2P Lending

Lending Club has a Facebook application that is really just a page at this point, with redirects to their web site. But they are in a quiet period while awaiting their SEC approval to issue another 600 million in notes. So I'm guessing things will look quite different here in the near future.

Prosper, another P2P lender, is also live on Facebook. Prosper's application appears much more interactive inside Facebook, adding items to your feed about opportunities you are following, etc. Transactions still occur inside the Prosper web site.

Sending money around

A few operations are now launching that promise to let you send money around the web via Facebook as well. PayMe promises to let you use PayPal from inside Facebook. OneClick Pay is already live, as is Moneybookers.

Is Facebook taking over the world?

Most of these applications have users in the dozens. So there's no need to panic if you're an FI without a strategy in place yet. However, exponential growth curves do tend to look slow in the beginning.

Some buffing up is needed in the customer experience

One thing I noticed about these Facebook apps and the associated pages is that the companies are not doing a tremendous job of interacting with people. For example, the KeyPoint page has a question about the app dated April 1, 2008 that has no response.

Here's my tip: if you launch a social networking application, you need to build communication protocols and revise job descriptions to ensure that ongoing communication occurs. What's the point of opening a dialogue with your customers  and then failing to talk? 

Resources:
Finextra: SEFCU taps Facebook, July 10, 2008

SEFCU press release about Facebook

Credit Union Journal, Fiserv units unveil  financial platform for users of Facebook, April 2008, PDF file

Bloggers writing on this topic: CU Tomorrow; NetBanker, Inside Facebook

The "me" portal: Why you need a Facebook portal strategy, not just a viral/WOM marketing strategy

Finextra reported on a survey that says about half of Facebook users (25 to 34 year olds at least) are interested in banking on Facebook.

The sponsor of the study, Worklight, builds secure Web 2.0 applications. (Such as, presumably, banking on Facebook. But also corporate collaboration on Facebook).

While I am skeptical of the value of some of the findings, in the absence of a lot more detail, this is certainly a clear indication of where things are headed. I'd like to put this in context for you, because we look at far too many of these things as isolated events. They aren't.

I did a major trend study in 2001 on wealth management on the web. At that time, banks were still hoping to become portals, a strategy I predicted would fail. (And it did.) I also predicted Yodlee and its aggregation strategy would fail, because of the security and privacy fears expressed by people. Despite, I might add, the real interest people had in aggregation. Well, Yodlee didn't fail.

Yodlee, as we now know, changed tactics, and became a platform for trusted front-end providers like Citibank, thereby neatly solving the security and privacy concerns for many. The build in the area of aggregation has taken a lot longer than many thought it would, however. Seven years later, it's still kind of leading edge. Perhaps because the FIs themselves are wondering what the real benefit is from their perspective.

We also investigated stock trading on your cellphone. There was a surprising -- at least surprising to me -- amount of interest. It wasn't high, but it was a lot higher than I expected for 2001. And everyone had the usual concerns. But this was before the smart phone as we now know it had really arrived. Cellphones are quickly becoming a communication hub for many, especially youth. As time goes by, people will wonder why they can't get SMS alerts on interest rates, stock price movements, and many other financial things. They'll want to transfer money to a friend by phone, instead of just by e-mail.

Small payments are a natural for the cellphone, and are hampered in their growth largely by existing stakeholders. Where there are fewer entrenched stakeholders, lower barriers to entry, and less built-out infrastructure, cellphone payments have taken off. Seriously, why would you want to dig around in your wallet for coins or cards for a can of liquid refreshment when you already have your cellphone on your hip or in your hand?

Finally, the ME portal

Facebook, and it's cousins, are becoming a kind of portal. As meatier applications are added, it's easy to envision a time when your Facebook account is open at least as often as your e-mail/calendar manager. Indeed, would I want Outlook if I could get that kind of functionality on something like Facebook or LinkedIn? Although some of the features on FB and its cousins are kind of clunky still, the trend is definitely moving in this direction -- the "me" portal.

Why wouldn't I want package tracking for FedEx in Facebook, instead of having to log in somewhere else? Sure I get e-mail, but then I have to manage it.

Why wouldn't I want E-Bay watch-list tracking in Facebook, instead of having to log in somewhere else? Again, the messages would be there when I want them, but I wouldn't have to wade through them.

Surely we could make this "Why wouldn't I" list longer. [What's on YOUR list?]

Will Facebook be the winner? Who knows. What we do know is that these applications are picking up steam, not slowing down. If you aren't thinking about social network strategy, you need to start. Because it isn't all about viral marketing. It's also about real functionality and access points.

Resources:

Facebook users want web 2.0 banking, Finextra, June 4 2008.

You know advertising is hot when it's displacing IT among IT research houses

I always thought of Forrester as an IT-oriented research house. And then they were on stuff like supply chains and outsourcing. However, they are now getting talked about for their thought pieces on where advertising agencies are going.

This suggests two things to me:

1. Forrester is good at figuring out what's hot
2. Marketing, advertising, and brand building are hotter than they have ever been, but also under more scrutiny than ever.

I have other evidence of this trend.

The Globe and Mail, my daily must-read newspaper, never deemed marketing topics worthy of business coverage. [Well, any kind of coverage, actually.]  Not long ago -- within the last 18 months for sure -- they have added regular material on this topic. It's thin, but it's there.

Friday, I heard Terry O'Reilly speak at a conference on qualitative research. Mr.O' Reilly is a regular feature on CBC radio, and known for his expertise in advertising, as both a creator and a commentator. Here's one of the notable things he said on the topic of insight and advertising:

"Creative ideas born of intuition are the last legal means of gaining a competitive advantage over your competition."

I thought this was a) brilliant, and b) true.   

Forrester seems to think that advertising agencies are not helping marketing people connect with consumers and customers in a meaningful way. This is the summary of their recent research report, The Connected Agency: Partner With An Agency That Listens Instead of Shouts

"Today's agencies fail to help marketers engage with consumers, who, as a result, are becoming less brand-loyal and more trusting of each other. To turn the tide, marketers will move to the Connected Agency — one that shifts: from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations. Over the next five years, traditional agencies will make this shift; they will start by connecting with consumer communities and will eventually become an integral part of them."

I have not read the whole report, but I am having trouble seeing this as news. And it's far too easy to just blame the agencies, who are under tremendous pressure to deliver results these days. But they can only do what they get a mandate and a budget to do from the marketing people. Surely marketers themselves must take responsibility for connecting with consumers.

And so must executives.

Being in the insight and intuition business myself, I can only agree with Mr. O' Reilly: we need better strategies. We need insights. We need innovation in marketing and advertising.

At the same conference where Mr. O' Reilly was a headliner, I presented with a client a case study on some innovative research we did together. When we got to the Q&A, the biggest question that came up -- which we brainstormed as a group -- was HOW to convince executives to do something less conventional than a focus group or a survey.

These researchers and marketers -- they want to deliver innovation, they want to deliver category-changing insight, but feel challenged to sell it into the organization.

We came up with a flip-chart full of ideas of how to do this. Things like: start small, start with intractable problems where there is motivation to try something different, and so on.

But as one of the research buyers said, "We want innovation, we want to do something new, and we want amazing insights, but we only want it once it's been done before. How do you sell this into the organization?"

Of course, we on the practitioner side have another challenge. Having promised these category-changing insights, we need to stand and deliver.

I only wish these insights that can change the landscape could be produced on demand. [I'll be hunting for a good one this week, wish me luck.]

Web 2.0 Watch: Facebook as the new collaboration tool

I started a new Facebook group recently, and am finding the groups application a bit sluggish. When I went searching on Google for a way to upload a document to Facebook, I discovered a whole new set of collaborative tools.
Here's a few of the ones I found:

Scrib'd -- a free service that lets you upload and publish any document on the web, and also embed it in many different formats. To solve my problem with Facebook, for example, I would upload the document, then link to the document's permalink in Facebook. Problem solved. Read their FAQ here.

ThinkFree Docs -- they describe themselves as YouTube for Office documents. They have a Facebook application already set up, and are working on iPhone integration, according to the ThinkFree blog.

Adobe Share -- discussed on Tim O'Reilly's blog. Adobe Share will be a place to upload or download any digital object, and share it with either a specific group, or the whole digital world. Mr. O'Reilly also referenced  Adobe's recently acquired Buzzword, which is an online word processor that also allows collaboration.

It turns out that I'm not the only one who wants better group functionality on Facebook. Some companies are starting to use this platform for business purposes. Serena Software in California reports that they are launching Facebook Fridays (part of their recruiting and profiling strategy), and also launching an employees-only Facebook group. Reported in Businessweek, second BW story here.

My take
Web 2.0 is really about working together online, not just putting up information. It's not just two-way traffic, it's more like multi-dimensional traffic. It's the brain xynapse model on a computer.

Social networks may be a starting point, but they are going to morph into work networks as well. This means -- once again -- that weensie enterprises will have access to similar capabilities as huge enterprises. Such as collaboration tools.

I spent a lot of money on a collaboration tool for the client part of my web-site a few years ago. It was only a qualified success. I will soon be able to supercede it's capabilities for free, or very close to free.

And this development of document sharing online is also another major democratization to publishing, just as web sites initially were, and blogs now are.

I recently conducted a study [on my own dime, or I couldn't tell you this] on teens and technology. Canadian teens are fully expecting to be amazed and delighted by the new technologies that come their way. And I'm 100% with them on that. It's just really cool. Our challenge as business people is [a] staying on top of this stuff and [b] figuring out how to leverage it. Equally cool, but somewhat more difficult.

What's your take?

Web 2.0 watch: how to build your own anything

You may think you have heard altogether too much about web 2.0. But in fact, it's like seeing a big boat slowly move across a lake -- you can hardly believe the size of the wake when it finally hits shore. In my usual Agatha Christie / Miss Marple way, I hope to draw some interesting ideas from some applications you've seen or heard about.

Instructables
Here's a personal favorite:  Instructables.  There are instructions from ordinary people here on how to do everything from avoid having to sort laundry to building your own Computer Numeric Controlled Router from scratch. I'd really love to have one of those, but it's a bit beyond -- actually WAY beyond -- my assembly abilities. Here's my own modest contribution to the pool of learning.  The site is extremely easy to use. Explore only at your own risk, because honestly, if you have a creative bone in your body, it will take you half the day.

This site is primarily built around visual instruction for things that have a physical world presence. Like laundry, lathes, earrings. I haven't seen any instructables yet about how to set up a trust fund. But why not, really?

Imagine cross-breeding Instructables with banking and investments. What we see today are a lot of bulletin boards that have disjointed information provided by investors and home budget gurus. What if this kind of information were more carefully harnessed and structured?

Implication of all of this: as information about how to do things continues to get easier and easier to find, by itself, it won't have much market value.
What this means for you and your service business:
--> you need to keep raising the bar on the knowledge and skill you are selling. Because low level knowledge and skill is free
--> you should be thinking about ways of taking existing platforms and leveraging them for your own content. Get out there, get in the conversation!

Idea City wrap-up: The science of aging

Dr. E.E. Baulieu spoke to Idea City about the science of aging, and the challenges of a world population that is aging.

No one signs up to get old, he says, because it means "frailty, vulnerability and dependence." Not exactly a marketable brand promise, as it were.  He hopes to change this to "autonomy, freedom and independence." 

He showed us that the maximum life span is not going anywhere, but the average life span is longer. What this means is that the aging and lifespan curve now looks more like a cliff, with many people living to an older age, and then dying within a relative small age range.

The implications for us here, however are this: as aging becomes a healthier experience, we will need to think very differently about the business and marketing opportunities presented by consumers in the last half of life.

This is a mega-trend that has already started, and will continue to pick up speed for decades. We simply must abandon any notion that everyone over 65 is in the same segment -- they aren't. We need to map out some entirely new life-stage models and look at ways to engage these consumers quite differently.

Idea City wrap-up: Greenification of everything

g As concerns about the environment continue unabated, we need to start thinking carefully about how consumption patterns can be changed. I have a bald assertion to make here: almost no one will be willing to change to something significantly LESS appealing just to be environmentally friendlier. The people who are prepared to make personal sacrifices for the environment have already done it, and there aren't that many of them. Unfortunately, the rest of us are going to have to change. And how will we motivate changes short of legislation?  I believe we are actually going to have to offer benefits -- emotional and rational -- that go beyond feeling good about being green.

With opinions like these, I was naturally very interested to hear the presentations of ZIP Cars and ZENN cars at Idea City this year.

ZIPcars

Zipcar is a shared-car company, very similar to AutoShare. Scott Griffith, CEO and president spoke. Here are a few of the facts he shared that interested me, based on their research:

• One Zipcar takes 20 cars off the road  -- these are shared autos, and that's roughly the ratio of usage of customers to cars
• Users save about $5,000 per year through not owning a car (full cost of ownership, including insurance)
• Once people sign up for Zipcar, they use the car less. He attributes this to the need to make a financial decision each time you drive. Because you pay each time, you think about car travel differently. Zipcar users take transit more often, walk more often, bike more often than they did before they were Zipcar users. Lots of good impact, and no public money involved.

Their operating model is all about making the booking and use process very seamless and simple, with a minimal need for staff support.

It seems that many of the benefits Zipcar users experience have little to do with the environment: they save money; they don't have to maintain a car; they can drive a Mini sometimes; they don't have to find or pay for home-base parking for the car, which can be a challenge if you are an urban dweller.

ZENN Cars: Zero Emissions No Noise

ZENN cars were completely new to me. Ian Clifford, CEO of Zenn Motor Company spoke to us. They are a Toronto- based manufacturer of fully electric cars that use a standard 110 volt plug.  These are two-seaters that have a top speed of 40 km/h (25 mph) and can go about 56 kilometres (35 miles) on a charge. 

The reason we've never seen these cars in Toronto is --- they're not street legal here yet. [jeez..!] So ZENN is mainly exporting to the U.S.A. Most of their dealers are in Florida and California. The cars are ideally suited to gated communities where you might otherwise zip around in a golf cart. They are inexpensive, wierdly cute, and they are quiet. Compared to a golf-cart, they are also a lot more luxurious, in addition to weather-proofing the occupants.

Mr. Clifford believes that most cars could be electric powered by using off-peak generating capacity. He noted this wouldn't help much if we are still making power from coal. And batteries are not a very efficient method of storing energy yet.

However he told us about an interesting development in energy storage that might change things a bit. ZENN has invested in EEStor, an Austin, Texas company that is developing a new type of highly efficient energy-storage technology. He showed us an object not much bigger than a free-standing hard drive, and suggested that this type of object would in the near future be able to power a car. 

Conclusion: electric vehicles could suddenly get a lot more interesting, along with other electric stuff.

One of the images Clifford used stuck in my mind -- if you have energy storage that is highly efficient, you could gather energy in very different ways. You could build large boats with solar collectors, send them out to sea, and bring them home with batteries fully charged, then transfer that power. And wouldn't that be cool?  Business 2.0 wrote about this here.

Vendor Relationship Management -- what the heck is it?

Vendor relationship management -- VRM of course -- is something new on the technology horizon.

"VRM provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties."

As a definition, this is a bit vague, but a look at some of the ideas this group is bandying about is helpful. The idea is to create tools that help empower individual customers / consumers / viewers etc. to manage out from ourselves our needs and wants, thereby giving us better tools to support our recent empowerment in the information age. So instead of just feeling empowered and overwhelmed, we feel empowered and in control.

There's a very good diagram here that helps to understand how a VRM system might work.

Examples of VRM

• Instead of having to deal with telemarketing and mail efforts to support public broadcasting, perhaps having provide us with a way to donate directly on our own, revealing only what we want to reveal. This one is a project of the VRM Project at Harvard (see resources below)

• Being able to generate offers -- sort of like consumer RFPs, but less cumbersome -- instead of lead generation. So perhaps I could put out an offer for a bookkeeper, or a house painter, for example, and be able to effectively manage the responses to that. I would identify myself as a lead, and vendors would respond to my offer

• You want to buy a server, so you use Technorati tags to identify your needs and the stage of your purchase, and monitor the incoming expressions of interest using an RSS reader

Essentially, VRM feels like it could be like a want-ad on steroids, a combination of Craigslist and virtual agent. We never really got CMR (Customer Managed Relationships), we got stuck with somebody else's CRM. So we can't really tell them what our needs are, what segment we are in, or anything else that might help both parties. We have to engage on the terms of the vendors only.

VRM is a concept about creating the tools to turn this CRM/lead generation formula upside down.

It reminds me a bit of the electronic invoicing and payment systems introduced first in the 1980s by companies like GM, and embraced on a much wider scale in the early 2000s. Companies were faced with miscellaneous invoicing formats from their thousands of suppliers, and were forced into a very inefficient process. Technology changed that, ultimately for the benefit of the suppliers and the buyers, although it was the large buyers who drove the development and adoption of the process. Just-in-time inventory really only became possible because of the infrastructure established around invoicing and payment, which could then be extended to ordering.

Zopa and Prosper -- the non-bank intermediaries in personal lending -- clearly share some genetic material with the VRM meme.

All rather exciting. And just when you thought the information age was starting to look mature and predictable. Surprise!

Resources:

Thanks to the Computer Assisted Management for Performance list at GoogleGroups for the heads up on this.

The Harvard VRM wiki portal is here, hosted by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and led by Doc Searls. The public broadcasting VRM initiative is here.

The RFP idea came from Phil Windley, here.

The server purchase example came from Don Marti, here.

More examples of other people writing on this idea are here on the wiki.

People with a problem are a gift to marketers: new business opportunities in travel and tourism

The glamour and excitement has definitely gone out of most air travel, between the general withdrawal of services by the airlines and the increased security. This is just the sort of environment where there are NEW PROBLEMS FOR PEOPLE! UNSOLVED PROBLEMS!  In short, a marketing gold mine.

Check out some of the new businesses that have launched to address our travel-related problems.

Beep Tech Inc  provides beep-free products like belts so you don't have to disrobe at security. They also have leather travel accessories to make the presentation of ID and boarding passes more convenient.

If you hate lugging luggage around, you can get it shipped for you by several different services such as SportsExpress, LuggageExpress, Excess Baggage, and so on.

You can go one step further and avoid packing the bag in the first place. Flylite will give you a virtual closet that you can use to select the items you want for a specific trip. You send them the items you usually take when travelling, and they store, dryclean and ship these items for you.  Perfect for the chinos and sports-shirt consultant that's on the road a lot.

When you see a sector where there are unhappy people, you are looking at a sector rife with opportunities.

Co-creation watch: Make Your Own Wired Cover

I missed the chance to get my real July issue of Wired issued with my own picture on the cover. But we can all have fun making our own Wired cover just by going to this link.

Fun promotion, and a good way to get a story into a blog or two.

"Technology is the New Intimacy:" Blackberry matchmaking and porn-by-phone

Online dating goes mobile with Dateberry

Rasool Verjee is the founder of Dateberry.com, an online dating service for the Blackberry brigade.  The concept is intended to bring like-minded people together. You can join by being invited by others, who have to provide some information and a recommendation about you. Men can only invite women; women can invite men and women to join.

Since it's a new service -- official launch date is April 2007 -- it looks like you can probably wangle an invitation just by requesting one from the site.

I guess this was an inevitable evolution. And given the cost of maintaining Blackberry devices, perhaps this approach will limit the network to those with a certain level of economic means. I think Mr. Verjee is right when he says that "Technology is the new intimacy."

Or if you can't get intimacy... try cell-phone porn

Telus is loved for the warm and friendly advertising that makes use of crisp, intensely colorful images of flowers, insects and animals, often in a whimsical way. No doubt this corporate capability with graphics will stand them in good stead as they dish up web-based porn.

Apparently we've been lagging behind here in North America, and cell-phone porn is well established in Europe. Nevertheless, I wonder to what extent this will diminish their brand, since they have had fairly negative response.

References:

"But only the Berry crowd need apply: mini-keyboard Casanovas have a new dating service to find the perfect match" by Dierdre Kelly, Globe and Mail, Feb 10, 2007. [subscription required 7 days after publication]

"Telus defends cellphone porn offerings", CBC, Feb 2, 2007.

Intelligent agents are among us

A buddy just suggested I install the Firefox music player, FoxyTunes. It's a wee little control bar that allows me to adjust the music without switching over to the player window. Cool and kind of fun.

What's really interesting, however, is the sheer number of little add-ons now available for Firefox. Over 1000 according to their site.

I cruised around a bit to see what was there, and picked up a nice little information bar called Forecastfox that allows me to monitor the weather anywhere. So I picked Barcelona, a city I'm hoping to visit soon.

*** This feels like an intelligent agent to me. I can sit here doing other things, while the agent goes and gets information for me, in the case, the weather.

When I first heard about this idea years ago, it sounded like something very complicated that only a true geek could program. But in fact these things are now all around us in the web world.

It might be a stretch to call these intelligent agents.  A truly intelligent agent could monitor the web and let me know when it has found -- and booked -- flights to Barcelona. But this is a great start.

A few of us oldsters might remember "push" technology -- applications that would allow companies to push advertising to you. This stuff has had a relatively quick death, for the most part. [And thank goodness!]  Because we've got the power now, and we ain't playin' no push. We playin' pull.

So if you want to talk to me... or pretty much anyone else now... you had better have something interesting enough to tell me that I want to pull it in.   This will be like the difference between RSS and e-mail: I'm in control with RSS, so you can't spam me without my permission.

As we get more intelligent agents working for us, how will this all play out? Will advertisers buy the right to push things at us disguised as pull?

I went looking for an illustration for this article, and found Verbots. This thing does look a little too complex right now. But I bet it won't be too long before even us non-geeks will be able to get someone else to monitor things and get back to us.  [Now if I could just figure out how to virtually deal with expense receipts, we'd really have something....]

And oddly enough, as these things become more animated, they feel like company. Like my office cat, pictured above.  Sometimes I forget to turn it off when doing a presentation. But -- surprise -- people usually find it quite amusing and engaging.

Intelligent agents. Coming soon to a computer near you.

Keeping up with the connections

Sean Moffit at Buzz Canuck has created a wiki to enable more connectedness among the Canadian bloggers, called the 1 percent army. (Aren't lists fun?) Now someone has proposed that we have a virtual meeting in Second Life. [Which means I need to visit again soon, and re-learn how to walk, fly, and talk...Just as soon as I finish my GST return...]

The wiki has a wonderful quote attributed to Victor Hugo, and totally appropriate not just for this wiki, but for this year:

"One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas." (Victor Hugo / 1802-1885)

At the same time, a client said to me today that "blogs are so passe ... it's all about podcasts now." Indeed, she may be right. It's hard to keep up. People keep asking me how I keep up. If only...!

Dunbar's number: or why you can't have all the coffee dates you want

I was thinking about something called Dunbar's number recently, which seemed to fit one aspect of this keeping up issue: I can't keep up with all the people in my network.

Dunbar studied primates and their social networks, which had an average size of about 50. Based on this work, he predicted the average size of human networks would be 150, based on our brain size. [whatever...]. Turns out that he was pretty close to right.

I heard an O.D. consultant describe that number as the campfire circle -- the number of people who can form a ring, and still feel like part of a shared bonfire experience.

In an actual coffee date with a very interesting person today, we discussed the formation of networks of resources among entrepreneurs, and how one might facilitate more of that kind of good thing. So people can find a good lawyer, a good banker, and so forth. The challenge is, if you're not careful, you reinvent the Yellow Pages. And it's been done.

But you can't have coffee dates with that many people, or even exchange e-mails regularly with them, no matter how interesting they are. Not if you want happy clients, at any rate. Eventually you just have to let go, and hope you bump into them at a conference somewhere. And hope they don't think you're a snob, or arrogant, appallingly disorganized, or just a plain old jerk of the first order.

I have had e-mail replies to notes I sent to people who I imagine to be much busier and more connected than me, such as Seth Godin and Warren Bennis. How on Earth do they do this? Do they have a small army of executive assistants? I can't even keep up with my comments page, and let me just apologize right now if I've offended you by not sending a personal note, as I used to be able to do.

What is the Dunbar's Number for brands?

With all this connecting going on, who's got the time for strategic thinking out there?

And why do you think anyone has the time or interest to read your lame advertising, listen to your direct marketing call, open your multi-page PDF brochure, or anything else that isn't completely compelling?   

Indeed, why should anyone develop a connection to your brand? If you aren't in the inner circle of brands, maybe you'll just be disconnected, like a friend we used to have that we don't have time to have coffee with anymore. We still send them the Christmas letter, but it doesn't have a personalized PS. It's a lingering remnant of a past relationship, a memory, a memento of something that used to be relevant.

This is the joy, and also the challenge of social networks and all the cool technology that enables them. I am now in touch with researchers around the world, but didn't have my neighbors in for coffee. [And what with global alarming, we may not even bump into each other shovelling snow this year]

And somewhere in my inbox is at least one invitation to coffee from December that I still haven't answered, from an interesting person. If only one could make a living going for coffee, e-mailing and of course writing blog articles.

References:

Dunbar's number, according to Answers.com is here.

Amusing version of Dunbar's number and what it means for man's inhumanity to man is here. 

Buzz Canuck's list of Canadian bloggers is here.

[Imagine what such a list would look like if it were U.S. bloggers... I think it's called Technorati?]

Obligatory New Year's Predictions

We're still single digits into this new year, so I hope it's okay to make a few trend predictions. I'm counting on the curmudgeons in the audience to remind me to check back later and see how we did.

Second Life and Avatars:
As noted in an earlier post, Second Life is not the end point, but the beginning. Yes, we will see lots of marketers climb aboard the virtual world. They'll be doing it to keep in touch with the evolution of the virtual world, and to learn, because there isn't going to be a lot of ROI there for a while. But it's well worth doing anyway. The ROI will all go to the designers, script-writers and consultants.

Innovation Gets Real:
Innovation is not going away in any meaningful sense -- the pressure is on everyone to be more innovative to compete, and if you happen to live in the developed world, even more so. For many, the real thrust of innovation will be on the next trend, the environment, and that's what we can expect to see on the covers of magazines.  Meanwhile, in my little corner of the universe, the Innovation project at Schulich will be launching the final phase of research, as well as a conference. [Reports on the research are available here]

The Greenifying of Everything:
The environment will be the real star of everything this year, and you can expect all the innovation stories in the business press to relate to the environment. The cool kids will all be looking to show how their organization, product or service is environmentally friendly. A lot of this will not be true green, it will be "greenification". 
Consumer culture abhors inconvenience, and truly being green sounds highly inconvenient. [Which of course is why we must push for government action, because as individuals, we'll never take big enough steps.] We don't want inconvenience, but we want to feel good about ourselves, and smart marketers will be coloring everything green, or at least making it out of bamboo.

Personalization and Customization Continues:
This major trend will continue, and probably pick up speed.  Consumers want the ability to get exactly what they want, not what you want to sell them. They'll continue modifying and tweaking, and if you help them tweak, they'll love you for it.
We want anything that makes us feel like individuals, without necessarily wanting to be too different than everyone else. To understand this phenomenon, watch the high school kids on the bus. They're all different, while being all the same.

Boomer Life Changes Aging:
There's little doubt that the boomers will exert tremendous impact on everything they need as they age.  In fact, their parents already started the movement. Most recently, I've noticed a lot of really cool reading glasses around. Sample packets of anti-wrinkle formulations are stuffed into all manner of magazines. I see more men at the hair salon getting a color than ever before. I bet you could add about a dozen items to this list with almost no effort.

Organization Life Keeps Changing:

Just as Boomers are changing aging, everyone under 35 is changing the definition of a career and an organization. There are a whole lot of forces at work here, from globalization and the loss of long term job security, to the culture of young people who want to be hired where their friends are hired.

For geezers like me, work-life balance meant having enough space in each box. There was even a book, called "The Three Boxes of Life", that told you how to get there. For the twenty-somethings I meet now, they want it all mashed up together, not neatly divided into boxes. There still needs to be a balance, and the fun can't all be after hours.

Not only that, but these folks aren't prepared to wait ten years to get roles with impact and interest.

At the same time, there are a lot of people in their early fifties that are tired of working so hard, and want much more flexibility and much more variety in their lives. They'll want to contribute their wisdom and managerial talent, but they don't want a conventional role definition either.

Any organization that can figure this stuff out and do it well is in great shape. Everyone else will continue to whine about the lack of managerial talent and other such blah, blah. But don't expect to see the organization man anytime soon, I think he's dead, and resting in peace.

Customer Experience Gets Funded:

When I started writing about customer experience here two years ago, a lot of people didn't know what I was talking about. There were only a few of us consulting and researching in this area. Now everyone is in on it.

And for good reason: to compete as a service business, you have to put real resources behind customer experience. That's finally starting to happen, and we will see a lot more thoughtful effort in this area in the coming year.

And it will take the form of cross-functional work that brings marketing and design thinking into contact with operations and front line delivery. [Could be exciting!]

One last prediction: Apple loses its cool

I have the sense that Apple is now so pervasive in the iPod and music space that they may not be the coolest kid on the block soon. We'll still love them, but we won't think they can save the world anymore.
 

So happy new year, dear reader, I think we are in for an interesting ride in 2007. How lucky we are to be born in this age, when there is still time to save the planet, and we can do it carrying a pink Razr and wearing a bamboo t-shirt.

Trendwatching: world of avatars

Make an avatar in your coffee break with SitePal

This is my new Sitepal avatar.  I can change the way she looks, what she's wearing, and add a short audio message. It's pretty easy to take the HTML and embed it in a web site.  And every time you change the original character, the link updates itself.

Sitepal is intended for supporting sales on your web site, however it clearly has a lot of other potential uses. When you click "play", the eyes blink and the mouth moves, and it gives a credible imitation of a real person's movements when speaking.

Let your avatar try on clothes

I got an avatar while shopping at LL Bean one day [pictured].   I don't think they have these anymore, as I haven't seen this option for a while. They have more shots of the clothes on a human model, which feels superior to me, actually -- because everything looked good on my avatar, which is a problem. But it was fun taking my measurements and building the avatar. [I tried gaining and losing weight to see what would happen -- amazingly, she still looked great in LL Bean jeans, even at 300 lbs.]

Start a secret life with the avatar of your dreams

I have a Second Life avatar as well, called Trif Sixgallery. My Second Life avatar has very ordinary clothes, and a body shape that is reasonably close to my real self. I wear a leather jacket and an orange t-shirt with brown jeans. [not pictured]

Most Second Lifers appear to be going the cosmetic enhancement route, however, and my ordinary appearance has clearly marked me as a newbie. A lot of Second Life is clearly adult-only -- the clothing you can buy in boutiques would more than challenge anything you can envision from Frederick's of Hollywood. In fact, Frederick's should probably have their own Second Life boutique, since clothing design was among the first things to be monetized.

In my newbie-ness, I thought that the Second Life environment might be an interesting place to conduct research. Turns out that at least one organization is already doing it.

It's Time to Experiment

If you don't have anything happening in Second Life, you should probably start. And get someone exploring a few other ideas along those lines as well.

You will likely hear a bunch of dismissive stuff about this. And here's what you need to say: "It's not about making money in Second Life. It's about learning how the virtual world is evolving, so we can keep up". Think of Second Life, and other applications of this type, as a university where you can experiment and learn.

Second Life is not the pinnacle, any more than Pac-Man was the pinnacle of electronic gaming. It's clunky and hard to learn. Like, if you want to build a house, you have to learn a bunch of scripting stuff. If I want to design my own clothes, it's definitely harder than it was to do it for my Barbie doll when I was 10 years old. Second Life is not the pinnacle -- it's the beginning!

When we gave the world automated transactions, we made things easier, faster, cheaper. Now we are going to make the virtual world please our sense of aesthetics, and feel more like the real world. Or at least the real fantasy world.

The green-screen is gone for good, and we're heading toward something that looks more like the metaverse envisioned by Neal Stephenson. The Diamond Age is coming.