Category: The Customer Journal

Personal vs. Personalized

In Worth The Deal? Groceries Get A Personalized Price, Ashley Gross on NPR says, Heather Kulper is one of those people who really wants to get a good deal. She’s a mom in a suburb north of Seattle who writes a blog about coupon clipping and saving money. On a recent shopping trip to Safeway, Kulper…
Why CRM needs to turn around

This guest post is by Charles Oppenheimer, creator of Prizzm and Mightbuy.it CRM (customer relationship management ) are systems that companies use to track their customers. The hope for most companies that invest in CRM is that their investment will produce happier customers, that loyal customers will produce more profits. To some extent CRM investment has…
Let’s help NBC prep for the 2014 Winter Olympics

The 2012 Summer Olympics are almost over, but not the challenge of a world where more and more customers are looking to watch coverage — especially of the live kind — on devices other than TVs, and through connections other than cable and satellite. This has proved hard for many cable and satellite TV customers…
Craigslist

I’ve been following the Craigslist/PadMapper news. As the situation has unfolded to include 3Taps, Craigslist suing both companies claiming all sorts of legal infractions including the assertion that the User Generated Content on Craigslist is now owned by Craigslist (per the rights claims in the Terms of Use) citing those terms as: “Any access to or use…
A question of intent

The concepts behind Facebook’s rumored “WANT” button are rooted in the idea of the “intention economy” and are generalizable beyond the Facebook ecosystem. Both customers and enterprises, using today’s existing infrastructure and conventions, can create and listen for intention signals using open, lightweight mechanisms, with customers creating those signals and enterprises listening for them. The…
Free vs. Followed

The fight between the free market and the followed market is about to begin. And the way to bet is on the free market, because it’s what we know works best. Also because the followed market is nuts. It only persists because it’s normative at the moment, and an enormous sum of investment is going…
Name the Pink Elephants

There is a pink elephant in the room not a small one either There is a enormous pink elephant on the couch between us and yet we both continue to ignore it… – Sammi When we ‘accept’ terms of service ‘agreements’ we engage in this ceremony, ‘accept’ (as though we have a choice) contract terms…
The Promise of the Personal Cloud

The term “personal cloud” is only about a year old and has a wildly disparate set of meanings. For some, services such as Facebook, Dropbox, and SugarSynch are personal clouds. For others the gold standard is iCloud, which stores data and media and manages your apps from all your devices – as long as they…
Which companies love customers?

Not love to have them, but love interacting with them, knowing them, talking with them, learning from them, involving them in the business, and letting them take the lead sometimes. (And not just by using a “loyalty card” or some other gimmick.) In The Intention Economy, I give two examples, one offline and one on.…
Privacy is personal

In the physical world, we govern privacy with clothes and walls, buttons, zippers, windows and doors. (See Clothing as a privacy system.) We also see privacy as a thing that can be possessed. That’s the framing for statements like, “Give me some privacy, and “Don’t take away my privacy.” On another hand (there can be…