Tom Guarriello explains Vendor Relationship Management, where customers control relationships with vendors instead of the other way around. He's attending Harvard's Berkman Center conference and plans to share video updates from the event.
Well, hi, it's Tom. Very quick one this morning, getting ready to head up to Boston to the Project VRM conference, which is— Project VRM is a project of the Berkman Center of the Harvard Law School run by Doc Searles, and it's about vendor relationship management. What's vendor relationship management? Well, you know, we live in a time when the information disparity that used to exist between what companies know about products and services and so on and what customers know about those same products and services is decreasing rapidly so that now we're in a position as customers to be able to establish any kind of relationships we want with companies enabling them to essentially bid on our business. You know, we're a long ways away from doing that, but we are much closer than we've ever been to setting up conversations between customers and companies and conversations in which the customer gets to manage their relationships and manage the information that exists in that relationship. So for example, if I'm interested in buying a new video camera, I could essentially put out a proposal a request for proposals from camera vendors and let them know what I'm looking for, something about what my price points might be, and something about my timeframe. And, you know, to give those vendors then the opportunity to bid on my business. We're getting very close to a time when the power will be shifting from the marketer push marketing to essentially the customer saying, "I'm interested in these things. You guys tell me what you're gonna be able to do for me." So it should be an exciting couple of days. Small conference, but good people. I've been on this mailing list now for a couple of months as this thing has all come into being, and I'm real excited about it. So look forward to maybe making some video up there to let you guys know what's going on. So take care and see you soon. Bye-bye.
