Helping the Public Buy Radio

CRM -- Customer Relationship Management -- is a highly developed set of disciplines: market research, call center tracking, marketing campaign tracking and reporting, contact tracking and so on.  Here's a white paper (http://www.crm2day.com/library/pdf.php?pdf=50364-0.pdf) featured at CRM Today (http://www.crm2day.com/) that makes a "business case" for CRM by promising to "increase the response rates to our marketing campaigns by delivering a tailored message to customers and prospects" and to "segment customers and prospects in line with our marketing strategy".

This kind of jive is what you get when it's easier for companies to talk to themselves than to their customers.  And when it's easier to talk to populations than to individuals.  When a recording says "Your call is important to us" or "Your call may be recorded for quality control purposes", it's not talking to you as a person.  It's saying, "Calls like yours may be recorded..."

CRM is lame because it is in complete control of its "relationships" with customers.  Customers contribute as little as possible to the system other than money, patience and feedback on forms.  Complete control is what causes CRM systems to become silos.  Those silos become echo chambers for the voices of those in control, and of the inmates who stay and make agreeable noises.

VRM -- Vendor Relationship Management -- obsoletes silos and saves CRM by giving it something to relate to.  VRM provides customers with tools of both independence and engagement.  It gives customers ways of notifying sellers of readiness to buy.  It also gives customers safe ways to share useful information without taxing the energies of the vendor or insulting the intelligence of the customer.  In all these ways VRM is the reciprocal of CRM, and a powerful way to make CRM useful and to stop being lame.

VRM changes the world by making markets truly free rather than "your choice of silo".  It appeals to customers by providing them with useful, safe and productive ways of relating with vendors.  And it appeals to vendors by relieving them of the need to waste money and time on trapping customers and still guessing at what they might want.

The problem is, VRM doesn't exist yet.  We need to make it exist.  For that we need a use case where concepts and code can be tested, proven and improved.

I have one: public radio funding.

The challenge is to radically reduce the friction required for listeners to pay for the goods they get from public radio, and to allow listeners to pay for what they want, on their own terms.  Beyond that, VRM should provide listeners with ways to relate with stations, and with producers of programs -- again, on the listener's terms.

Most loyal public radio listeners care about stations, but they care a lot more about the programs those stations carry.  They like "This American Life" or "Car Talk" or "Folk Alley".  That's what the stations pay NPR (among other sources) for, even if the same goods get given away free on the radio and online.

Ideally, the stations should be able to retail to listeners what they buy wholesale from NPR.  That's how the system is set up.  Listeners can't pay NPR directly.  They have to go through the stations.

So how can we help listeners pay for programs, and have those payments go through (or get credited to) the stations? There are lots of answers here.  All of them are made easier by the free (as in beer) nature of the goods.  They are not scarce.  You can listen without paying.  Yet the goods still have value.  After all, the station pays NPR, PRI, APM or PRX for those goods.  Even if they can't mark the programs up and sell them on a shelf, the programs do have value.

With VRM we can let the demand side set the value, based on what listeners are willing to pay, provided the paying is easy.  It has to be easy or we won't have a system that works.

So, how do we make it as easy to pay for a public radio program (or for a whole station) as it is to tip a barista? David Sifry put up an idea yesterday morning on his blog (along with a great picture of yours truly):

How about using a shortcode from your mobile phone to 'vote' on your favorite shows while they're playing? Think 'American Idol' style, and you'll immediately see how interesting and lucrative this could be.  First off, you're getting your listeners and viewers more active, and what they do has an immediate effect.  But what also happens is that the people formerly known as the audience are then in control - they don't get signed up on a list, they don't have to give their name, address, and credit card number .  So here was the thought experiment: What if you made a policy that you'd never collect or sell personal information about your donors? And what if you made it really really easy for people to become donors, like using that mobile code to vote for the story they just heard? What if you really put the listener in charge?

Before yesterday I'd never heard the term "shortcode".  I hope many other fresh terms turn up as we talk about approaches to make supporting programs and stations as easy as possible.  Last night I talked with Dave Sifry and Jake Shapiro of PRX about the need for a new verb to represent a low-friction payment gesture in an electronic context.  The current process, which typically involves going online, filling out forms, becoming a member of something, signing in, and using PayPal or some other method to carry out payment -- is way too complex and aversive.  We need something as simple as a button or a set of button-pressings that isn't too long or hard.  Easier said than done, of course.

But can we make it happen? I'm sure we can.

And the market is there.

I vetted the VRM idea with NPR last week, and with public radio executives on the "CEO track" of the IMA conference yesterday.  The response was enthusiastic and positive.  They're colossally tired of pledge drives, of maintaining membership databases just for the purpose of funding appeals, and of having to build complex ways of relating to listeners only as funding sources.  One executive said he'd rather see a hundred thousand one dollar contributions than one contribution of a hundred thousand dollars.  In fact, everybody in the business is leery of becoming too reliant on large sponsoring organizations that relieve stations and program producers of the need to relate to listeners.

Folks from WGBH, WNYC, WUNC, KQED, NPR, CPB and other public radio organizations expressed their eagerness to help us get going with developing whatever VRM will become.  That's in addition to the interest already expressed by executives from HP, BT, Johnson & Johnson and many other companies I've talked with over the past few months.

So now we need to start thinking through what's required here.  Some of this is already being done by the growing gang gathered around the ProjectVRM wiki: http://projectvrm.  But we need to start organizing this thing a bit more.  More importantly, we need programmers to come in and help out.  And that's who I'm appealing to here.  We need advice and guidance as well as code.

Feel free to join ProjectVRM and contribute to the wiki.  And please come to the next Internet Identity Workshop, May 14-16 in Mountain View, where VRM is already a substantial branch of the user-centric identity movement.  Register here: http://www.windley.com/events/iiw2007a/register.shtml

-- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Visiting Scholar with the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.