The first Conversational Commerce Conference (C3) is history. I’m grateful to all attendees and panelists for engaging in a series of thoughtful and thought-provoking (ahem) conversations. For a very good summary (including a pointer to the Chirpstory site featuring a stream of tweets with the #C32011 hastag), read this post by TheSocialCustomer’s Lou DuBois.

Here are my major take-aways.

1) Conversational Commerce shatters silos that separate PR and Marketing from Customer Care, Sales, Product Management and even Development. This creates the opportunity to build closed circle or virtuous cycle whereby companies foster loyalty by being truly responsive to the needs of their customers. Conversely, customers become promoters or advocates because they find the companies to be responsive.

2) The move to Conversational Commerce is transformational, disruptive and embryonic. That makes it formless, shapeless, malleable and so very, very full of potential. Because we humans tend to map concepts to the things we already understand, we’ve more than once characterized the combination of CRM and Social CRM as “CRM on steroids.” It is that locked-down, back-end database with access to metadata generated by people in the course of their online and offline activity. CRM systems now know a person’s location, recent activities (uploads to Facebook, check-ins on FourSquare, or search histories from Google), AND THEY’RE NOT AFRAID TO USE IT.

Adding VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) to the picture adds a more “user-centric” set of possibilities. Each person who generates all this metadata is also given adequate means to control release of the data or to attach terms and conditions governing how and to whom the information can be released. That’s where companies like Sing.ly and its closely related Locker Project come into play.

3) Point 2 suggests that there are two distinct perspectives on Conversational Commerce: Centralized, locked down CRM under the control of CRM systems, credit bureaus and other 3rd parties in contrast to the decentralized, user controlled “personal data repositories” that make up a personal data ecosystem (PDE), which are under control of individuals and their agents. The PDE is one of the precursors to true Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), the concept originated by Doc Searls to capture the idea that individuals (be the searchers, browsers, prospects, shoppers or customers) will be able to engage with companies according to their own terms and conditions. At C3 we definitively determined that CRM and VRM benefit from one another. It is not an “either/or” situation. Rather we all benefit by a “both/and” approach.

I found the last panel at C3 to be inspirational and energizing. It featured Drummond Reed, whose personal data management start-up is soon to come out of “stealth” mode; Anders Jones of RapLeaf, a company with a working business model for aggregating and managing personal data; Alisa Leonard, who, in addition to working for iCrossing, is the Communications Chair for the DataPortability Project; Mark Plakias, VP Strategy at Orange-SF; and Tatyana Kanzaveli, CEO of Social CRM World. There were definite differences of opinion surrounding the role of 3rd parties [no mention of “4th parties”… yet] in handling or controlling personal data and metadata,

A chain of observations emerged from the panel: “Users are basically passive,” when it comes to taking charge of their own data (as well as profile info). Tatyana Kanzaveli noted that customers should be fed up with receivingirrelevant offers from merchants use faulty targeting assumptions based on inaccurate data. Anders Jones responded by saying that business model can be built on aggregating personal data and making its management transparent for the folks that actively or passively generate it. Alisa Leonard asserted that, even with transparency a good deal of education will be required. At this point, Drummond Reed explained that education hasn’t worked and that we need something very “engaging” to make it worth their while. In his words, “It’s not going to happen to preserve privacy, it’s going to happen based on providing value.”

The answer, ultimately, will be to bring some game-like qualities (as well as perceived value) into the PDE (personal data ecosystem). As Mark Plakias also asserted: “If people can do Farmville, they should be able to do their own personal cloud.” That’s why we’re treating C3 as the starting point for some very important thought leadership. Lest, quoting Mark Plakias once more, “we see our success recede farther into the future.”

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