Summary: Finally a thoughtful, hype free book worth reading about digital marketing, the relationships we have with vendors and a vision for a better future where we have greater control of our personal data
I read Doc Searls excellent book The Intention Economy while traveling last week. Searls was one of the authors in 1999 of the highly influential Cluetrain Manifesto, collaborating with Rick Levine, Christopher Locke and David Weinberger at the height of the dot com boom. The Cluetrains 95 visionary theses focused on the gestalt of the new digital era.
In essence,
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarterand getting smarter faster than most companies.
Cluetrain captured the best ideas of the boom era and through the painful dot com crash helped people sort out the value from all the bum info floated by the pump and dumpers before the 2000 collapse of the economy. Fast forward twelve years and were in a remarkably similar situation: while the digital economy fundamentals are much more stable than the last crash there has been a tsunami of noisy nonsense around social media (enabled ironically by mediums being the message) which will peak this year with Facebooks ipo (a single point of failure by Searls reckoning).
I normally steer clear of utopian futurism, which Searls freely admits he is practicing in The Intention Manifesto, but given the track record and respect Cluetrain has, along with my familiarity with Searls and colleagues great work around Vendor Relationship Management over the last five years this book deserves to be taken seriously.
Cluetrain author Chris Locke commented on my The Groundswell of Social Media Backlash post here in May of 2009, which lamented the quality of clumsy social media marketing
I wrote a goodly chunk of The Cluetrain Manifesto and I hate seeing it invoked to hawk the same old crap the same old way.
The Intention Economy gets perspectives back on track with a credible vision of a world where you are in complete control of your digital persona and grant permission for vendors to access it on your terms and pitch bids for products or services you are interested in buying - essentially you publish a Request For Proposal (RFP) for what you are looking for. Digital agents applications work for you to signal your needs which vendors then respond to, scrabbling to compete for your business.
Its a vision which is heavily weighted towards individual rights and quality of service - an area the rapidly growing and mutating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) marketcurrently serves and which isvalued at eighteen billion dollars in 2012. Where CRM often seeks to lock in and own you, flipping over to a VRM model would empower you and give you greater control over your relationships and choices. Caveat venditor - let the seller beware says the book blurb.
View original post here:
The Intention Economy
Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith
