Are Free Customers Better Than Captive Ones? |
|
| Event | Interactive 2012 |
| Format | Solo |
| Organizer | Doc Searls – ProjectVRM |
| Speakers |
|
| Description | It is standard in business to talk about "acquiring," "capturing," "locking in," "owning" and "managing" customers as if they were slaves or cattle. Yet as customers we yearn to be free. Choices between captors are better than monopolies, but does "Your choice of captor" describe a truly free market? Shouldn't we be free to set our own terms, control our own data ... and even state the prices we are ready to pay -- outside of any company's silo or walled garden? And hasn't that been a promise of the Internet all along? Doc Searls, author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge -- due out in January 2011 from Harvard Business Publishing -- makes the case in favor of free customers, and customer liberation in general. He has also been working since 2006 with developers on creating tools for customers to provide that freedom, through ProjectVRM at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Some of those tools are now coming to market, and are featured at SXSW. But will they prove out? Will capturing customers remain a default motivation, even for "interactive," "social" and "conversational" businesses? These are still open questions. Bets on free and captive futures are invited. |
| Questions Answered |
|
| Level | Beginner |
| Supporting Material | http://projectvrm.org, http://doc.searls.com |
| Category | Business / Startups / Funding |
| Tags | freedom, liberation, vrm |