Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Reviews
I spent an interesting day at Harvard Law School last week at the invitation of Doc Searls for a conference on the intersection of CRM and VRM, or vendor relationship management. Doc’s involved with the Berkman Center at Harvard, which sponsors research into issues of law and the Internet, among other things.
I feel like social CRM has become a burger joint. “You want fries with that?” is the traditional up-sell question made famous in skits and jokes, but now I feel like we need to ask something akin in social CRM. The revised question: “You got any data to go with that?”
Last week I looked at an interesting downside of social media. Social media makes it possible for anyone with very little effort to start a blog or social group that thrashes a vendor. Generally speaking, the people behind these sites have a gripe that has a fragment of truth in it, and it would be harder for a corporation to fight these annoyances than to simply let them be.
Last week in New York, I began some field research in social CRM that will result in a longer paper later this fall. One of the things that interested me was the level of frustration and, well, anger that some customers have for some of their vendors. It’s a mixed bag, really — some people take great umbrage at Starbucks, others at a social networking site, and still others target their ire at oil companies.
Cloud computing is breaking through to the general public. Unfortunately, it’s only the most watered down version that the public is hearing about. Last week I listened to a program on NPR that briefly discussed the cloud and some “expert” who worked for a general circulation magazine was happily telling the interviewer that cloud computing was all about servers in the sky. That’s it, just servers in the sky.
The new age of sustainability is like a three-legged stool, and over the last couple of weeks I’ve discussed my ideas for the first two legs, including customers and energy or transportation. The third leg involves products, and this idea takes some thinking to fully comprehend. Most of us don’t think a lot about products because they are ubiquitous.
Last time, we explored how we can make IT more sustainable by improving data center energy use. Managing energy use is the most well-understood form of sustainability we have, but it is largely an internal form of sustainability practice. If we intend to make our businesses sustainable, then we also need to consider sustainability in customer-facing business processes.
The most popular concept of sustainability revolves around energy use, and while I have no issues with energy as an issue, I think in business the idea goes further — all the way to products and customers. I will leave the last couple of ideas for another time and concentrate on energy today.
Social media can be wonderful tools for sales and marketing, but so far most companies and most anecdotal evidence that I have seen point to practices that are mired in old-think, with the result that social media is being questioned as a strategy. Here are some ideas that I give my clients when they are trying to figure out an approach involving social media. It’s a new world, so stop treating it like the old world.
There are multiple ideas about the shape of the future competing for primacy in the electronic village. I am pushing on sustainability, but another idea that I really like is called “the subscription economy,” championed most vociferously by Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora. Subscriptions fit well into Tzuo’s company plan, since his company has a billing and payments system for subscription purchases.
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