If you are interested or curious about what the Current Big Thing called Social Media is, who does it and what they are working on / talking about.  There are a wide range of great groups mainly based in London (sorry outatowners) that happen most weeks / months.

If you have a reason to come to town.  Try and drop into one or other of these.

Listen, Learn, Talk....

Chinwag event  NMK’s Beers & Innovation, Minibar, London Geek Dinners, MoMo London, Social Media Club, Creative Geeks, She Says, Swedish Beers, Open Coffee, Tuttle Club / Social Media Cafe, Girl Geek Dinners, Wiki Wednesdays, Next Wednesdays 

 And of course the BIMA events

Thanks to Dierdre of Chinwag for the summary list. 

Customer data has been an important part of the advice I give most of my clients for a long time - since I worked for Peppers and Rogers I have tended to suggest that it be called Customer Relationship Management or CRM.  

But that time is now moving into the past.  The future is about 'flipping' the control of customer data out of the hands of the corporation and into the hands of the individual.  

You and I both know that many organisations have our personal data - whether it is just logins to websites or fully comprehensive bank account and credit card details from vendors we use online and offline.   Do you have a complete list of these companies and websites?  Betcha don't.  I certainly don't.

 And so when something changes - you move house, for example or you decide that you no longer want your data to be held by a particular organisation or group of companies. you have to write individually to each to 'unsubscribe' or change or amend your customer data profile.  Which is frankly a right royal pain in the bum.

Early days yet - but a possible change is for you to hold all the data about yourself and for companies and organisations that want to have a relationsihp with you to come to a private place online that you control and manage and to"collect" your data there for their purposes - with your permission.  And so if you change something, you update in ONE place.  And if you change your mind about a company and you no longer want their newsletter, you go to one place and change their permissions - maybe letting them know automatically in the process why you did or what they did to make you alter your view of them and their brand.

Sounds good?

It is called Vendor Relationship Management.  VRM.  

And the principles are still being worked out by some of the leading minds of the online age - Doc Searls and Adriana Lukas.  I am working with Adriana on the London end of the project.  

If you want to learn more, read this slide deck from Doc updating his "Cluetrain Manifesto" view of the world 10 years on... and explaining some of the VRM principles as he sees them

And Adriana's One pager about VRM post which states her future-gazing view of the future.

If you are a business here's a possible future for you

Imagine having your customers share with you what they like, want and think of you. At the moment, you are dependent on market research, which is like looking through a keyhole at the rich ‘user-generated’ world. Imagine being able to relate to your customers, consistently and persistently, where they contribute directly to your supply chain where it makes sense - whether it is R&D, product design, distribution and marketing. Interaction with them is modular, intuitive and user-driven freeing much of your resources spent on marketing and transaction cost.

And if you are a customer here's a possible future for you

The ability to manage and analyze your data will give you better knowledge about yourself, the kind of knowledge that is the holy grail of most companies’ customer data management. The awareness of your preferences, understanding of your needs will help you to articulate them easier and strengthen your position with vendors.

If you want to learn more about what you can do for VRM and what VRM can do for you - come to this workshop that I'm helping to run 

Tuesday April 15th, the theme is VRM and how it addresses (and hopefully redresses) the imbalance between individuals and their relationships with vendors, companies or institutions.

I did a coaching session for Geraldine Grey - who is changing career direction and retraining as a real estate agent.

She has kindly allowed me to write up the key biz dev tools that I recommended to her

1. Create a strong "Brand You".  For her, this is to be 'the English Realtor' [yes she'd in USA!]
2.  Have a short list of golden questions that can help you to firstly find out whether a prospect is serious and secondly to close down sales
3. Have a strong process for keeping track of prospects, leads and follow-ups
4. Get all your customers to write a reference after each job and build a Net Promoter Score scorecard

Good luck, Gerry - hope it all goes well for you.

Read this presentation on the Art of Self-Branding.

Indirect and oblique marketing opportunities.

One fantastic marketing tool that is often used by technology companies (but is available to most types of business) is to write a case study about your business. This details a particular product or service that you use and why you chose a particular supplier and the net outcomes of using the product.
This is a great marketing tool because it talks about YOU, but the hard work of promotion and message delivery is being done by someone else!
At an Earl’s Court show for marketing and technology, I picked up a case study one page flier written by Concrete (never heard of them before....) because it featured the logo of a company that I do know, Loewy the design and advertising group headed by Charlie Hoult. I read the case study – it is about them installing an advertising management system that delivers print artwork for clients to the media owners in a trackable, real-time web environment.
The benefits to Loewy are of course being picked as a case study that the software company is promoting (presumably to Loewy’s clients and competitors!) and also the fact that they are probably an early adopter of the software. The risk that Loewy took in buying from Concrete is being rewarded by the case study positioning them as a leading edge, innovative agency.

Neat.

On a smaller scale, I have been working with a web agency, Howard/Baines who are building a name for themselves as the ‘designers of choice’ for both large enterprises and web 2.0 start-ups. A broad church of customers. Their offering is also quirky – they take paid-for software and open source and use the best tool for the job, frequently combining and integrating both in order to produce the solution that is right for the client.
Howard/Baines needed to get a stronger presence in a highly crowded marketplace for web strategy, design and development and came up with the idea of writing a case study for Microsoft’s new Visual Studio 2008 suite.
They wrote an online meeting organiser tool "Meet with Approval" using both open source and MS tools, a commercial site where users pay for the tool and which has netted over 2000 users and 500+ meetings since launch in October 2007.

Approaching Microsoft, Clive Howard offered them the opportunity to use this as a case study to prove that it is possible to use both open source and paid-for software tools and that four key “myths” about open source were not always true: (speed, support, price and integration).

Microsoft has a business need to improve its relationships with the open source developer community. It is a huge potential market for MS products and is a place where many of the most vocal anti-Microsoft messages are promulgated. And so we hoped that MS would pick up on this opportunity and agree to write a joint case study.

They did and the outcomes have blown us away.

Microsoft has chosen Howard/Baines to speak at the UK launch of Visual Studio 2008 to an audience of press, analysts and key MS users. Now that is a powerful group of people who MS is very keen to impress... and they have been very generous to Howard Baines, inviting them to the whole day including lunch with analysts and one-on-one press interviews with key technology journalists. This has enabled Clive Howard and Jeremy Baines to gain both great brand building opportunities with audiences that would have been beyond their reach (without Microsoft) but also to use the case study in their own media of choice for promotion as well.

Well done, lads!