Of VRM and Recommendation Engines

In the first "London VRM session" we had a few weeks back, one of the areas we were mulling over was how the "VRM" Social Net would interact with Brands so that the User had control, and were kicking around ideas based on Amazon and eBay systems. Thus this article caught my eye:

Facebook Beacon is an attempt to capitalize on that by using the social graph to make advertising more useful for the customer and more profitable for Facebook.

Unfortunately, they got it wrong. Instead of advertising, they should have focused on recommendations. No one is going to say “please show me more ads based on what my friends like.” But plenty of people will ask a friend to recommend digital cameras or books to them.

This may seem like two sides of the same coin, but there are subtle and important differences. First, there’s the asking. Asking someone for recommendations puts both parties in a position of giving permission. That changes the feel of the transaction.

I think that as well as the "pull" nature of the approach, the writers are right in saying it changes the feel of the transaction - and thus probably the whole feel of the Social Network it is in to one of more trust - and, as study after study of behavioural economics shows, we humans really start to rock online when trust between us is high.

It would also change the way Brands would interact with us - the Dark Arts approaches they clearly are trying will not really work in this world.

Good "passive service" examples are BlogFriends on Facebook, and the various Library display functions on the SocNets that allow me to see what books / blogs my friends are reading.

(Tip of hat to Umair Haque for link)