On January 6th (as reported by Leena Rao in TechCrunch) an “under the radar” start-up, and owner of the URL, Personal.com received over $7 million in funding from a group of investors led by Grotech Funding and Steve Case’s Revolution LLC. As the date for our 3C-Conversational Commerce Conference approaches it is nice to see some attention (and VC largesse) gravitating toward the customers’ side of the e-commerce equation.

As the big date for 3C-Conversational Commerce Conference approaches, I’ve been noting stepped up interest in firms like Personal.com. In this case it provides its subscribers with an online or mobile platform “that allows individuals to organize, control and directly benefit from their digital data.” The service is in the middle of an invitation-only “beta” test and its exact features, functions and benefits are subject to speculation. Marketing literature and quotes from its principles indicate that it provides its users, at a minimum, with the ability to keep companies from tracking their activities without explicit permission and, then, to be compensated for providing personal information to marketing companies “even if they do so anonymously.”

Proponents of vendor relationship management (VRM) might recognize (or project upon Personal.com based on this vague description) the status of a “personal data service” (PDS) which, as Drummond Reed explains here, is a key component an emerging “personal data ecosystem” that will become foundational to user control personal data during the cource of conversational commerce.

As we will discuss or expose at 3C, the world of CRM, including “social CRM,” is pre-occupied with providing better customer service by encompassing a “360 degree” view of each customer. By monitoring, tracking, storing and analyzing activities companies believe they can do better at anticipating (some would say “influencing), future behavior. I personally believe that the better way for customers to gather information on customers and prospects is to get directly from them, with their permission. In July 2010, Julian Gay depicted the relationship between CRM, Social CRM and VRM in a graphic embedded in a post entitled “Beyond Social CRM”.

In the closing paragraph of his post, Gay provided a list of companies that were starting to incorporate certain “VRM dynamics” into their service offerings. It included Bynamite, with its ability to control what advertisers can see about you; Needium, which provides businesses with a platform for observing expressed needs; Foursquare and its cohort of social platforms (like Gowalla, Yelp!, Twitter, FB) which let users enter checkins, reviews and status; and a couple of others. Today we could add companies like About.me with the ability to manage “profile information” (though, in a telephone conversation, Julian Gay and I concluded that aggregating profile data probably won’t live up to its hype) and Groupon (and the dozens of companies in the “group buying” or “deal-a-day business), as well as Personal.com.

In the same phone conversation with Orange’s Gay, he noted that VRM doesn’t fully exist yet. The companies we see today offer precursor services, features and functions. Many of these early implementations are fraught with internal contradictions. Blocking cookies, for instance, will provide privacy, but it’s users will forfeit the benefits of any serendipitous interactions that might arise from being tracked. Facebook, which is arguably the world’s largest Personal Data Store, in that it houses scads of personal info, photos, activities and provides some control over how it and with whom it can be shared, has a big disadvantage because it is stuck “inside Facebook” and can only be exported under certain conditions.

In the best case future VRM services or platforms will interact with and augment existing CRM and social CRM platforms. How, when, where and by whom is subject to debate today and, then future partnerships, collaborations and joint offerings. In all those cases, it starts with conversations among executives in diverse businesses or functional areas that don’t naturally interact with one another. That’s why I believe C3 is so timely and why I urge this blog’s readers to learn more about the speakers and agenda.

The register today.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Contact Center, CRM, VRM, SCRM, Conferences, conversational commerce