Are you as tired as I am of typing in contact information just about every web site these days? Going a step beyond that, do you ever really read through an entire Terms & Conditions for the many web sites you register for? What if there were alternative approaches that both accelerated this common action, as well as help to balance the risks?
Entering such information time consuming and even frustrating because it is a gatekeeper to getting to the information we want. Yet, we are bound by these terms to the companies without really considering or perhaps understanding the consequences of participation. Multiply that by dozens or hundreds of registrations across many web sites in a year that we do not really track individually, we find ourselves at a disadvantage and possibly at risk. Think of the increasing rise of both financial and identity theft, and other cyber-crime that not only affects the individual, but also creates significant legal liability for organizations.
We abdicate deep trust in favor of speed, and our expectations of a brand. The risk mitigation in these Terms and conditions favor the vendor behind the site, not the user or the organization they represent. It’s definitely costly to challenge these terms legally, most of us don’t really try.
Yes, there are browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Opera that help by storing data that you type into the most common fields (e.g. Name, Email, Title), but this at best a band-aid and does not address the risk mitigation issues. Instead we need a new way that acts as our own watchdog and accountant, an agent to help us keep track, warn of unusual or incompatible terms, or even perhaps negotiate it for us.
Per my presentation on the Blurring of Loyalties at work and individual identities at two recent conferences, I mentioned the World Economic Forum paper Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class, that ascribes talking a end-user centric view of data rather than many separate sites and organizations each taking an independent customer view. In doing so, organizations are facing the reality of customers being in control of relationships and e-commerce, and supporting the goals of building trust and transparency, and showing value to them. This in turn becomes a new type of asset that each user owns, and therefore a step towards building new economic and business models towards capitalizing on that information. Here’s a vision: Is this evolving into a future concept of money? If so, how then would we build banks for such social capital in the future?
For the present, we’re still faced with the issue of handling this information. Perhaps the better way rather than asking a user each time for this information would be to automate this transaction through agents for each party. In doing so, we would have audit trails and accounting for the activity – very useful and necessary on the legal side of things – that help to build a stronger safer future.
A Project to Save Us
At the Constellation Research Group’s Connected Enterprise 2011 event, I had the chance to meet and discuss these issues with David ‘Doc’ Searls, author, speaker, Internet luminary, and a former Fellow from Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is well-known as one of the co-author’s of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a seminal book now in its 10th anniversary edition that speaks to the ethos of the open source and standards revolution that radically affected the entire technology industry, how they design their products and implement their business models. He has been described by author and New York Times columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, as “one of the most respected technology writers in America.”
Doc spoke about the Berkman Center’s Project VRM, its approach to this problem and the implications of such a system. The acronym translates to “Vendor Relationship Management”, a complement to the well known concept of Customer Relationship Management and the entire industry of tools and processes that has grown around CRM.
The project is centered on building the software technology to allow end-users and web sites to define the business rules and negotiate the terms of how they would be willing to interact with each other. In essence, it sets up a third- and a fourth-party that are agents for the end-user and site, respectively. Considering this project relating to cyberlaw is coming out of a Harvard University entity, you can see the weight behind this need.
This approach of having a software agent negotiate trust with the web site for you requires some new technical innovations. For example, we need a way to simply define the rules by which we are willing to engage (either party). This can be trivial for some of the basic fields like name, and title, but we now have the allowance to create more complex rules of sharing.
Consider the Creative Commons license which allows people to say how they would be willing to share some piece of content of theirs. Some basic rules are that a second party could download the content and reshare or reuse the content but must retain who created the original material. You could set a rule that the material can be reused but not for commercial purposes. These basic rules help to clarify what people allow with their content while opening the possibility of social business.
Similarly, Project VRM can allow such rules to be auto-negotiated as long as each party declares what they are willing to share and what they are willing to accept. Mr. Searls described how Kynetx, a Utah-based vendor so Web browser based apps, has create their easy to use their Kynetx Rules Language to support this ability
Another interesting aspect is the statement of being able to revoke these rights as well as the data available to the other party. On such an event, the data must be removed from the site and de-authorized for use. This can help both sides; the site no longer needs to keep track of a particular user’s behavior and thereby has a more accurate current view of its audience, rather than being overloaded with ghosts of historical information that skew their demographics.
Finally, a point close to my heart is how data analytics for each user would be placed at the control of each user. Today’s social and non-social Web sites all store the data of what each user has done on their site directly on their servers. Most users have no idea of what is being tracked about them. More so, this information can even be useful to them. Imagine being able to build a network of which sites and who you’ve interacted with on the Web over time; you would be able to see the spread of influence and impact that you had on others directly. Today this is practically impossible because the data is spread across so many sites, and more so, it is often locked away from your own eyes. This could become a new statement about your productivity and influence.
That’s great for people, but what’s in it for companies?
The success of Project VRM relies on both, the users and the organizations behind the web sites, to agree to implement these capabilities. This means that both parties need reasons and value to do so. The value to most users is fairly apparent: they retain control over what they are willing to share, they can keep track of who has negotiated with them, and they can see their data and how they’ve interacted. Doc described this as the age of the super-empowered social customer: “Adaptive companies are going to wake up and smell the customer.” On a more philosophical stance, it is an extension of democratic freedom over an aspect of the Web that we have all taken for granted so far.
What’s key is explaining the value of implementing Project VRM to organizations. Doc’s quick answer: “More money.” Web sites that require registration involve marketing processes intensely reliant on accurate demographics. This helps to shape things like on-site advertising, product recommendations, and even social data like ratings and reviews. Through VRM, sites can negotiate for more specific details with each user, rather than trying to guess what you are thinking. Consider this: an auto dealership or manufacturer can ask the user what style of cars they really prefer separately from what they would settle for, and not try to guess at it based on which web pages they visit.
The hyper-accurate and hyper-detailed information directly from the owners, and occasionally presumably verified by another party, is what is at stake here. It makes true personalization and customization possible. On the other hand, it can also be a cost savings in having to rely less on a third-party service to gather demographical information about a person; a typically poor data set result outside of the US and a few other countries.
This in turn improves the quality of leads that come through the pipeline, one of the most important roles for the marketing department. It also incidentally can help other departments such as customer service, product development, and even research and innovation because it can provide some of the basic information about people and preferences that they all need.
How we interact with customers in these various departments (marketing, sales, service, R&D, etc.) through the Web and now through social networks is the domain of Social CRM. It is taking customer relations to a deeper level of interaction and trust. It is also creating the need for a new generation of tools to handle this degree of social business that marketing, sales and other departments will need to capitalize on these capabilities.
While Project VRM has been in existence since 2006, the fruits of its labor are now beginning to emerge. Their site indicates several dozen commercial and open source projects and vendors of these tools. The work continues and is growing in commercial value. Mr. Searls is also writing about his thoughts on this topic in his next book The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge to be published in 2012.
