Yearly Archive: 2010

Are you VPI ready? Take the test

To help organisations assess their VPI readiness, we’ve developed a free Readiness Test. It only takes 15 minutes to complete. Try it! It will help you set a benchmark to help you monitor your progress towards a world where you...

Patient first – transforming HIV treatment in India

With personal health records from the likes of Google and Microsoft heralding the beginning of a new information enabled era, Janssen (Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical company) has been rethinking how to tackle one of the world’s best known killers: HIV....

A conversation about Twitter with Dell

As part of our research into The Recipe for Successful Customer Engagement we talked to Dell about the apparent success of Dell Outlet on Twitter. If you don’t know the background then Dell’s outlet store was set up by the...

Mitch Kapor on the foundation of social network value

Tweet from Lotus founder and investor Mitch Kapor It’s insight like this that precedes the shift of control to the individual. If he’s right (we think he is, and he usually is) then it can’t stay surreptitious for ever. When...

World’s first personal data store launched

A small but significant step was announced on October 11, Mydex has launched a new project to introduce a step change in the relationship between individuals and the organisations they deal with – the first ever operational Personal Data Store...

Next-Gen Customer Engagement

A number of stars seem to be aligning to transform the role and content of customer touchpoints (wherever and whenever a customer and an organisation ‘touch’ each other). They could be adding up to a strategic revolution for organisations. Behind...

The Customer is Not King

Whenever marketers use the word ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ they bury themselves deep within an organisation-centric view of the world: these terms are seller-centric inventions. The only entities that see ‘customers’ or ‘consumers’ when they look at the world are organisations...

Empowering emotions

I have just written an article for MyCustomer.com (http://bit.ly/csMJvr) about the emotional drivers of consumer empowerment. Here’s the gist: There’s a growing bank of psychological research showing that feeling empowered and in control makes people feel good about themselves (self-esteem,...

Hop-Along Relationship Management

Once upon a time there was a man who preferred to hop rather than walk. It happened because when he was very small he had an unfortunate series of accidents that kept his left leg in a plaster cast. The...

The buyer-centric revolution

Sometimes something is so obvious you don’t need to give it a second thought. It’s obvious for example that the sun orbits the earth and it’s obvious that the marketing is something that’s done by marketers who are employed by...

NHS gets it but will we get it?

Hats off to the NHS, they really seem to have got the data tiger by the tail in their white paper entitled Equity and Excellent: Liberating the NHS. Not only have they understood the importance of releasing the organisational data...

Health records – designed by the state for the state

Some of you may be vaguely following the flip-flopping of the incoming Government over the design and use of patient records. A couple of weeks ago was a seminal report on the “summary care record”, described by the Health Service...

Budgeting for service redesign

Well, the nervously awaited emergency budget has arrived, and a collective sigh of relief is almost audible across the country ‘not as bad as I’d expected’ seems to be the general feel. But I’m afraid the worst is yet to...

Global opt outs don’t work

It’s our job here at Ctrl-Shift HQ to track what marketing and customer service departments are up to but sometimes that does cross over into our personal lives. So this brief post (well rant) is a result of stuff I’ve...

Skunkworks and Asborometers

Today’s announcement that the government is looking to get public input (a sort of crowdsourcing, perhaps?) into the upcoming cuts to public service is further confirmation that there is a seismic shift in the world of public services. The previous...

Demos article: personal data and public services

The following article by William Heath appeared in the new Demos book The long view – new ideas for progressive policy.

Telcos discuss whether there is gold in their customer data

Great day out at an event run by the helpful people at Telco2.0. The key issue under discussion were the future business models for the telco industry and one of the main themes was customer data. The core of that...

More recognition of the control shift

Two more articles explore the on-going control shift. The first article comes from McKinsey and discusses the effects of word-of-mouth on marketing. The article starts off thus: “The sheer volume of information available today has dramatically altered the balance of...

How do we help UK government shift control of personal data to the individual?

Fundamental, radical shift of control over personal data back to the individual is on the agenda whichever main party wins the next election. From the Labour manifesto yesterday: We will explore how to give citizens direct access to the data...

CRM: a worm turns

I’ve nicked the following extracts from a report by Neil Davey at mycustomer.com. Of course we’ve been saying this sort of stuff for years. But it’s good that people like Gartner are finally getting round to recognising it: it shows...

Mapping the control shift

I’ve just written an article for Marketing magazine on the theme of ‘Brands as information services’. It looks at what successful brand strategies might look like over the coming years. ‘Brands as information services’ is one of the six constituent...