Read/Write Web has covered off quite a lot of the
early ground here on Vendor Relationship Management or VRM (it intersects a lot with the older C2B models by the way). I quite liked this piece:
The irresistible force is personalization. This is the key to productivity. Personalization technology cuts through the clutter and saves time. The firm that delivers personalized content sits at the top of the attention economy food chain; all other content is “drive-by commodity”. Personalization leads to relevancy in advertising; and loyal customers.
The immovable force is privacy. You cannot do personalization effectively without knowing an awful lot of information about an enormous number of people. The privacy backlash is building. Today it is only techies who are aware of the issue and where it is headed, but when mainstream users get spooked by a few more high profile cases, we will see consumer backlash and then, with politicians on the bandwagon, more regulation.
We have been banging on about this (privacy) for some time, however (based on quite a lot of client work over the last two years) the VRM bit is non-trivial. Aggregating demand of many disparate people with different agendas is hard, never mind all the issue that instantly pop up around suspicions of just why a service would want to anonymise/aggregate its users (we have had "aids money laundering", "fraud abetting" etc etc thrown at us more than once).
Doc Searls has been
putting some thoughts together on what a VRM service can look like, abetted by a number of people on the discussion list (we are on it, natch), but this article is a reasonable intro to the Story So Far.
The obvious area of work is how to integrate it with emerging Enterprise 2.0 thinking (and systems) - in Olde Times, car manufacturers for example handed customers a lot of personalisation options so the cars could be built to spec - but of course it relies on modular car design and aggregating a large volume of orders to achive any scale economy benefits.
Clearly, anyone who became a trusted C2B aggregator (which is in all likelihood what initial VRM implementations will be as well, I think anarchic/dispersed systems will be far harder to run with) would wield enormous influence over many current value chains. Its interesting to think about whether they will be generic ("BuySpace") or sector specific ("MySports"). In Web 1.0 the thinking was that this area would by and large be handled by Exchanges (remember VerticalNet anyone), but there was very little thought given on how to utilise social networks (though there was a lot of thought given to using behavioural data mining, which may turn out to be much the same thing).
One wonders also where the first players will come from - startups, eBay offshoots, Comparison sites or potentially existing Social Nets
