Christopher Carfi

“This e-mail/letter confirms your participation for the Distinguished
Visitor embark aboard USS Lincoln, from Sunday, April 25 to Monday, April
26.”

Whoa.  It’s happening.

Back in January, I was invited to to go on an embark aboard the USS
Stennis, on a trip similar
to this one taken by Guy Kawasaki and others.  (Thank you, again, USNavy for the invitation,
and Andy Sernovitz for
facilitating.)  However, the storms hammering the West Coast changed the
plans, and that embark was canceled.

The trip is now back on, and a number of bloggers and other social media/community types are gearing up.  Our class consists of:

 Kevin Thornton (Walmart)

 Mark Yolton (SAP)

Rob DeRobertis (Analog)

 Phil Nieman (Gaspedal)

  Scott Gulbransen (Intuit)

 Jake McKee (Ant’s Eye View)

  Len Devanna (EMC)

 Amanda Congdon (Sometimes Daily)

 Robert Coombs (CALCASA)

 Will Mayall (AllTop)

  Christopher Carfi (Cerado)

Am I stoked?  Yes.

A little intimidated?  Definitely.  (The thought of going 0-120mph in two seconds on the catapult launch on the deck on Monday has me both thrilled and adrenaline-addled at the same time.)

More soon.  Packing and rest tonight.  Tomorrow afternoon to San Diego.  Then out to the ship on Sunday and back on Monday.

Thanks again to Andy Sernovitz, Guy Kawasaki, and Dennis Hall for paving the way on this embark, and most significantly thanks to the US Navy for making it possible.

Here we go…

(originally seen here)

Some great thinking by Paul Greenberg.  The lede:

Customer
Ownership: Relationship? Conversation?
Simply Put. SCRM is not VRM. Simple Being the Operative Principle

This
is meant to be a simple post.  Flat out, I want to say that
there is a difference between “ the customer’s control of the
conversation” and “customer’s owning the relationship.”  Because there
is a discussion that I see looming on the “ownership of the
relationship” I’d like to clarify my thinking at the get go, if you’ll
be willing to listen.  Before I do that, so that there is no
misunderstanding on where I stand –

The
customer is
in control of the conversation. SCRM is the company’s response to the
customer’s control of the conversation. There is no joint ownership of
the conversation. But there is no control by one or the other of the
relationship between them. Though the “power balance” can lean toward
one or the other. Right now it leans to the customer.

He goes on to say…

That’s
why there is a difference between SCRM and VRM.  Vendor
Relationship Management is what the customer does to command their side
of the relationship.  SCRM is what the company does in response to the
customer’s control of the conversation – and all the other things
associated with that.  But the company still owns itself – meaning its
operational practices and its objectives and its records and its legal
status as a company. Speaking for myself, and maybe someone else
or some others, I’ve never said the customer owns the relationship. I
think that the customer is at the hub of business ecosystem – to the
point that you can call it a customer ecosystem. Meaning the customer
drives demand and the company is now forced to respond to that.

Rest of Paul's post is here:
http://the56group.typepad.com/pgreenblog/2010/04/customer-ownership-relationship-conversation-simply-put-scrm-is-not-vrm-simple-being-the-operative-principle.html

Historically, customers had to dial in to call centers or go to vendor
websites (or to the vendor's physical location itself) for service and
support. With the rise of social business, this is no longer the
case…vendors and customers are now meeting on neutral ground, and
everything changes as a result.

A nice presentation by my buddy Paul Greenberg, giving a solid overview of the state of the market. Worth a look. Original is here

.

I'm torn.

It would be so easy to pontificate a "right" answer, but,
pragmatically, I know there isn't one.

After finishing a re-read of Clay Shirky's prescient piece from 2000,
entititled R.I.P.
The Consumer (1900-1999), I found myself cheering.  So many
points in there were in sync with what had been written in Cluetrain, and so many of those
points were influential in what I had written in The
Social Customer Manifesto back in 2004, that I found my head nodding
in agreement paragraph after paragraph of Clay's post.

"To profit from its symbiotic relationship with advertisers, the
mass media required two things from its consumers — size and silence."

Yes.

"Silence…allowed the media's message to pass unchallenged by
the viewers themselves.  Marketers could broadcast synthetic consumer
reaction — 'Tastes Great!', 'Less Filling!'– without having to respond
to real customers' real reactions — 'Tastes bland', 'More expensive'. 
The enforced silence leaves the consumer with only binary
choices…mass media is one-way media."

Yes, again.

The "consumer" is dead.  We all now are, or have the opportunity to
be, "customers."  We have have the opportunity to be people,
and not just gullets that consume (to paraphrase Jerry Michalski).

The opportunity to be social comes up against a cold, hard reality,
however.  As Clive Thompson wrote earlier this year, in a piece entitled
In
Praise of Online Obscurity, our technically-mediated social
interactions are outstripping our human ability to keep up.  Thompson
brings forth a great illustration:

"Consider the case of Maureen
Evans. A grad student and poet, Evans got into Twitter at the very
beginning — back in 2006 — and soon built up almost 100 followers. Like
many users, she enjoyed the conversational nature of the medium. A
follower would respond to one of her posts, other followers would chime
in, and she’d respond back.

Then, in 2007, she began a nifty project: tweeting recipes, each condensed
to 140 characters. She soon amassed 3,000 followers, but her online life
still felt like a small town: Among the regulars, people knew each
other and enjoyed conversing. But as her audience grew and grew,
eventually cracking 13,000, the sense of community evaporated. People
stopped talking to one another or even talking to her. “It became dead
silence,” she marvels.

Why? Because socializing doesn’t scale."

We, as individuals, need to develop better strategies for dealing
with this increased sociality, with better filters, processes and
discipline to cull the wheat from the chaff.  If we don't, the era of
the social customer will be a
short-lived one, with "broadcast," and not conversation, again being
the dominant model.

A great three-minute segment on CBC featuring wine writer Natalie Maclean,  who talks a bit about her approach to making a mobile experience available to the 110,000+ members of her customer community of oenophiles.  Three key takeaways:

• Use mobile to provide access to the breadth and depth of information that’s available to customers; plus,
• Simplify the experience to make it easy to navigate; and,
• Always ensure it’s available, not just when customers are in front of their computers

As a wine journalist, it’s interesting to see how Natalie is leveraging the capabilities of mobile to make it even easier for the members of her community to access the information she’s providing, as well as connect with each other.

Disclosure: Our company, Cerado, worked with Natalie to create this iPhone app

"Some corporations will attempt to maximize the business value of each
individual worker, stripping out all the extraneous human factors. Chinese walls will be erected to keep the outside from the inside, the personal from
the business, and the public from the private. But when you put
messaging and communications tools into the hands of people they will
find ways to talk to each other— about work, life, play, the project,
and the joke they just heard at the water cooler." – Cliff Gerrish

The line above is from a brilliant post by Cliff Gerrish, touching on CRM, VRM and the rise of tools like Google Buzz and Salesforce.com's Chatter. 

Read the whole thing here.

Is "fatal flaw" too strong a term?  Maybe.  Then again, maybe not.

First off, what is Google Buzz?  It's Google's new shot-across-the-bow to Facebook and Twitter, an attempt to integrate real-time web interactions with the well-known and widely-used Gmail interface.

However, Buzz does two things that will simply make it unusable.

1. It shows threaded conversations and strongly highlights the initiator of those conversations, and makes the comments subservient to the initial post.
2. It takes posts that have "new" comments and immediately bumps those posts to the topmost position of the viewing window.

This interface will greatly reinforce the existing power law relationships online, and have the effect of greatly reducing the serendipity and interestingness in things like the current Twitter and Facebook interfaces. 

With Buzz, those who (a) have a large number of followers, and (b) post frequently will always bubble up to the top of the stack, crowding out everything else.  Currently, I'm following about 200 people, which (you would think) would give me a great diversity in my stream.  However, the top twenty one spots of my Buzz feed are held by:

• Chris Messina
• Jason Calacanis
• Jason Calacanis
• Josh Druck
• Jason Calacanis
• Francine Hardaway
• Derek Powazek
• Steve Rubel
• Robert Scoble
• Brady Smith
• Robert Scoble
• Robert Scoble
• Michael Elliot
• Rex Hammock
• Josh Druck
• Josh Druck
• Chris Pirillo
• Josh Druck
• Josh Druck
• Josh Druck
• Danny Sullivan

Worse, whenever anyone makes a comment in any of those threads, that thread pops back to the top.

In other words, it appears one can never get past the most chatty threads.  They'll always bounce back to the top.  Those individuals with many connections will almost always have the chattiest threads.  Ergo, the Buzz interface will, in its current incarnation, always be dominated by those with the largest, chattiest networks.

 

Can Google figure out a way to turn off that "always bubble the newest to the top" feature?  Of course they can.  And they need to.  If they don't, Buzz instantly becomes an echo-chamber of the highest-order, and becomes completely unusable.

More here.