Vendor Relationship Management

I have to admit that I am very selective about reading business books as most are one idea stretched out over 200+ pages. I have a couple unfinished books on my nightstand which I use for putting myself to sleep.

Last weekend I was re-arranging our library (well mini-collection) at home and there was a copy of a business book which caught my attention. It was the Cluetrain Manifesto written in 1999. I opened it up again and nearly a decade later, the words ring true today. The book was written as a reaction to industry terms like ‘eyeballs’, ‘stickiness’ and ‘push’ (remember PointCast) where consumers are seen as entities to be trapped and fed information.

What the manifesto was saying is that we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp.I went back to the cluetrain homepage which has been suspended in time by the authors and lazily cut the following:

“However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in. “

That’s exactly what we are saying now – but these guys said it years ago. With my interest piqued I decided to see what the Cluetrain team is up to now.

Chris Locke is still banging out some amazing writing as Rageboy while Doc Searles is extending the Cluetrain thinking into a concept he calls Vendor Relationship Management where we can turn the tables on CRM and manage vendors as well as they manage us.

An example would be a disaggregated market where I can announce my intention to hire a car of a certain type in a certain city and get offers in from the rental companies. Lending Tree comes to mind as someone with the basis for this sort of model. This reverse eBay is just one of the illustrations of a future where the markets are free and open and controlled by customers.

This is a long way off unfortunately It seems that we haven’t learnt the lessons from the dotcom boom. The ‘real’ success in web 2.0 and social media are applications like Facebook which are essentially social engineering in a walled garden. And the owners expect revenue to follow eyeballs. Much like 1999 expectations seem way ahead of reality.

Hopefully, Doc Searles will be right again because it means an exciting future for business and our role in bringing companies and consumers together in a meaningful way..