Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 04:32:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - February 21





                                 SuitWatch -- February 21, 2007

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 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.
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