Robotics guru Masahiro Mori’s “uncanny valley” theory posits that as automated activity increasingly mimics human behavior there is a point just before the mimicked behavior is completely accepted where it triggers a strong negative emotional response. As our personal and business online lives become more dependent on an Internet that tries to divine our wants and needs and as we generate more and more information about our actions and personal preferences I think we are all collectively on the verge of reaching this “creepy” valley.
The most newsworthy indicators of this approaching “valley” are the backlashes to ad tracking software and those children’s game apps whose functionality is based on accessing “personal” information. However, an enormous number of other common Internet application functions are triggering a similar response.
For instance, LinkedIn and Facebook’s recommendations for people you might like to connect with always includes people you are close to, but this doesn’t mean that you don’t despise many of them or find the recommendations disturbing (the boss who fired you, the dreaded competitor, the ex-girlfriend, the deceased relative, etc.). Other types of personalization can backfire, too, like Amazon’s recommendations to your friends that you might like something when some of those things might reflect activity you prefer not to make public (e.g., books and videos on far too personal political or sexual topics).
Some of these things can be mitigated via some pretty simple functionality tweaks (i.e., LinkedIn allowing you to flag people with negative attributes or Amazon asking “Do you want to save this transaction to your personal preferences?”), but there is a far bigger question here: Because nobody ever actually reads the “terms of use” agreements to which they blindly agree, wouldn’t be a lot easier to use vendor relationship management (VRM) to make the results based exactly on the way you want your personal or corporate activity data used?
Doc Searls’ latest book, The Intention Economy, was just released last week and he makes a strong case for just this. The implications for going down this road are extremely profound for those of us in the information business. For one thing, company directories could disappear or mutate into permission-based publicly accessible databases. When will this brave new world emerge? The answer, like most things having to do with our networked world, is once again “sooner than you think.”
posted by Shyamali Ghosh on May 14, 2012
Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is a term used to describe tools designed for individuals and companies to manage their economic relationships. In other words, the user defines who they do business with (i.e., a “reverse” CRM system) and the “way” that they choose to interact with them. For instance, inbound marketing pitches from vendors are defined by the medium used for interaction (sales via SMS; bills via email; RFP responses via specific applications, etc.) and outbound requests for proposals are carefully managed by mediated interactions with vendors in in-house and third-party databases.
The inevitability of VRM is obvious, but we are in the interesting period where dozens of industry players are jockeying to insinuate themselves into VRM and to define the ground rules for the system that will handle trillions of dollars per day when it has finally matured. The stakes couldn’t be higher and the game has just begun.
While the safe money will be on Salesforce, LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook to help us to manage our commercial interactions (for a sliver of a percent of transaction volume, no doubt) there are those (i.e., Doc Searles and the Harvard VRM folks) rooting for an open source, “frictionless,” “fourth party” to emerge. But what about the information business? Didn’t we invent the buyer’s guide and industry verticals? Okay, VerticalNet didn’t exactly work out, but can’t we play a key role in this new ecosystem? We have the best databases of middle managers (purchasers) in every industry vertical known to man and isn’t that the one required element to making this process work?
The data content folks need to get out in front of this opportunity or else it’ll be built around national databases with massive holes in them and it basically won’t work. A cooperative model based on 100 industry-specific databases is my favorite option. Data content players who run marketplaces, publish magazines, and run conferences in their designated industries need to join forces and make this happen. Data can be contributed to the co-op and VRM systems can interact with that system in such a way that purchase request data (i.e., “I need a sign for my office” or to “I need to print 10K 500-page directories”) is delivered to the appropriate firms in the co-op’s database and then they respond to a “blind” platform with their RFPs. Who will step forward to define this model and put our industry out front where it should be? Will we miss the boat again? Let’s hope not.
posted by Shyamali Ghosh on February 28, 2012
