Count the number of companies you pay regularly for anything. Add up what you pay for all of them. Then think about the time you spend trying and failing to “manage” any of it—especially when most or all of the management tools are separately held by every outfit’s subscription system, all for their convenience rather… Continue reading Solving Subscriptions
Category: Developments
Putting the R back in CRM
Every customer is familiar with Customer Relationship Management (aka CRM). They meet it when they get personal offers, when they call customer service, or any time they deal with companies that seem to know who they are. Doing this is a huge business, passing $40 billion worldwide in 2018, and expected to be twice that… Continue reading Putting the R back in CRM
Where there’s folk there’s fire
That headline was, far as I know, first uttered by Britt Blaser in a March 2007 blog post titled The people’s law trumps the power law. It was thirteen years ahead of its time. Among many others, Britt was energized by The Cluetrain Manifesto‘s 95 Theses, which David Weinberger, Chris Locke, Rick Levine and I… Continue reading Where there’s folk there’s fire
Privacy is personal. Let’s start there.
The GDPR won’t give us privacy. Nor will ePrivacy or any other regulation. We also won’t get it from the businesses those regulations are aimed at. Because privacy is personal. If it wasn’t we wouldn’t have invented clothing and shelter, or social norms for signaling to each what’s okay and what’s not okay. On the Internet we… Continue reading Privacy is personal. Let’s start there.
How customers help companies comply with the GDPR
That’s what we’re starting this Thursday (26 April) at GDPR Hack Day at MIT. The GDPR‘s “sunrise day” — when the EU can start laying fines on companies for violations of it — is May 25th. We want to be ready for that: with a cookie of our own baking that will get us past the “gauntlet… Continue reading How customers help companies comply with the GDPR
The Only Way Customers Come First
— is by proffering terms of their own. That’s what will happen when sites and services click “accept” to your terms, rather than the reverse. The role you play here is what lawyers call the first party. Sites and services that agree to your terms are second parties. As a first party, you get scale across all the sites and… Continue reading The Only Way Customers Come First
Time for THEM to agree to OUR terms
Try to guess how many times, in the course of your life in the digital world, have “agreed” to terms like these: Hundreds? Thousands? (Feels like) millions? Look at the number of login/password combinations remembered by your browser. That’ll be a fraction of the true total. Now think about what might happen if we could turn these things around.… Continue reading Time for THEM to agree to OUR terms
Giving Customers Scale
Customers need scale. Scale is leverage. A way to get lift. Big business gets scale by aggregating resources, production methods, delivery services — and, especially, customers: you, me and billions of others without whom business would not exist. Big business is heavy by nature. That’s why we use mass as an adjective for much of what big… Continue reading Giving Customers Scale
Privacy is an Inside Job
Start here: clothing and shelter are privacy technologies. We use them to create secluded spaces for ourselves. Spaces we control. Our ancestors have been wearing clothing for at least 170,000 years and building shelters for at least half a million years. So we’ve had some time to work out what privacy means. Yes, it differs among cultures and settings,… Continue reading Privacy is an Inside Job