I was talking to my friend Jan Wylie earlier this evening. He runs a tremendous research company called Trend Monitor.

His company is about to release a signifinat white paper on CRM and I have invited him to provide an overview here at the Perceptric Forum.

Here are some quotes from the teaser document he sent me while we were talking earlier.

Beyond CRM’s findings are based on the systematic analysis of thousands of key articles over the past five years by the author using his long experience in intelligence gathering, content analysis and taxonomy skills.  All findings are fully-referenced with a unique, classified collection of hundreds of key illustrative quotes that enable you to see what is being said from many useful perspectives.

The need to find more sustainable ways of doing business is becoming more urgent as energy prices climb and consumers face unprecedented levels of debt. These factors are crucial in driving the change towards the buyer-centric business model.

Beyond CRM is essential reading in preparing yourself and your organisation for the changes in the marketplace which buyers and sellers will have to face.

Looking forward to seeing the whole report...

Gotta love the counterintutive....  the thoughts are so easily memorable

I was reading Seth's blog this morning and came across an excellent thought. "new marketing makes it a lot easier to make products for your customers (instead of having to run around finding customers for your products.)"

Yesterday I bumped into Martin Moroney, who is doing a lot of consulting work in Sydney, helping companies re-position their pitch. He told me about a company he had been helping that does office moves for big companies. They were having their lunch eaten by another company in Sydney. He helped them understand that their pitch should not be about moving the client's furniture, but rather about managing and mitigating the risk for the client, in association with critical moments in the proposed move timeline.... Sounds pretty basic but it apparently has worked wonders for the company. Sharpened up their pitch and increased their business by an order of magnitude.

It is all about re-imagining the infrastructure....

The explosion of affordable technologies and devices, together with the curiosity of human beings to explore is creating a new context for consuming media.

We are not so much reading, watching and listening. We are now unpacking media.

With RSS feeds and iPods and the ability to both time shift consumption and for all those who are connected to consume from a global resource bank, the global mind is shifting. That shift is aided and abetted by the fact that people are not only creating the contex in which they consume the information, but are also adding to information themselves.

This is going to be the really interesting convergence play. It is not technology to technology. Its humanity to humanity. The impact comes from the near immediacy of the global community receiving  and then being able to respond to commonly held beliefs.

At a time when traditional media has proven to be wanting. It seems unreliable because of its slavish need to satisfy its sponsors, whether they be advertisers or wealthy publishers. Co-incidentally there was a US court case that was resolved this week that is relevant to this too. A blogger's name was able to be kept secret when criticizing someone in public life.

Are we moving rapidly towards what at one point in time Sci-Fi writers called The Hive Mind? I recall reading about this in the 70's but not who wrote about it.

As we move to this global community of people talking to each other on line, sharing ideas, influencing peers, shaping the thoughts of their neighbors and friends, I marvel at the accelerative impact of our communications environment.

I was talking to my friend Rhett Sampson last week about voip. He is in the business with a startup company called Converged.

He got me to re-examine my ideas about costs of voip which was helpful. He also told me to check this out - which I found interesting because this service, Jajah has a function in it that enables you to record both sides of the conversation and easily post it as a podcast.

Voip looks like it is just going to get more and more interesting over the next year or so...

By the way, have you checked comparatively how much you pay for domestic long distance? We are all getting well and truly screwed by the long distance domestic companies!

At Perceptric we are fascinated with the "What Happens Next?" questions.

What happens next to the way we consume media? What happens next to the way we consume products? What are the influencing factors? And who are the influencers?

One of the drivers in this is the question of what happens next to the economy?

Here are some of the vectors that will influence this at present - and I have to say that we are about to hit a very interesting period in history. And it is one that we would all do well to consider going in to it.

First we have the whole aspect of globalism that means that information is instantly available to all of us, and is becoming more and more commodotized. 

In this global economy, we see the US, with its largest current account defecit in history, about to change the Chairman of the Fed. Historically this has always been something that has ripples associated with it. This time round though, it comes at a time when the impact of increased energy has yet to reach the consumer market. At a time when the cost of rebuilding from the hurricane season has yet to hit. At a time when there is an enormously costly war going on. At a time when the very survival of a company like GM is being questioned. When there is a housing bubble....Lots of inflationary pressures. A new guy at the Fed whose expertise is inflation - but the customary way to deal with inflation is to raise interest rates, I always understood.... and if he does that on top of massive increases in energy costs and massive asset leverage, where does that leave the economy?

Stephen Roach seems to think that it will lead either to interest rate hikes or massive devaluation of the dollar. But he has also pointed out that the Chinese renmimbi valuation is inextricably linked to the dollar because of the reliance the Chinese economy has on the US - with some 45% of its exports going there.

At the same time this macro stuff is happening, we have some other pretty important things happening too...

I heard on the ABC Science Show last week (I get the podcast) in an interview with an eminent scientist, that global warming will mean the displacement of 200 million people on the coastlines of India and China in the next few decades.

At the same time all that is taking place, we are going to see ongoing disintermediation. Concepts like skype are going to change radically the way we consume our personal communications.

I could go on and on.... what other key vectors are going to have major impact on us next year?

I have been watching with great interest the attention given to the Judy Miller Plamegate investigation.

Not only because of the political ramifications of whether there is an indictment and whom, but more because it represents another tipping point in the growing up of blogs. During the last few years the role of the traditional media has changed markedly. And during the same time the blogospere has been growing up.

It has been growing just the same as the internet did. Remember when there used to be discussion about the digital divide. Now there is a further divide between those who are blog-aware and those who are not.

Blogging is what really draws together the communal aspect of the medium. It also is causing there to be a real change in the way events of state are reported. Will the emergence of the extremely deep but very narrow niches of political opinion be able to be woven into the existing political process?

And how will legislation be able to wrap itself around this?

Technology allows personalization. This is the era where everyone wants their own thing. So now, emachineshop.com  allows consumers to design a product online. Software translates the consumer vision then the company prices it, and makes it. It's part of the tend towards consumers being creators.  What some call generation C. It happened first with content like music, video; TShirts; retail; now it's industrial products.

Warner Home video has been increasing sales and market share over the last few years. Yesterday they fired the leader and the team who achieved that progress. Instead, they turned to a man who will lead a massive restructuring that sees the studio repositioning its entire portfolio of home video, online, wireless, games and anti-piracy and emerging technologies operations under one umbrella unit. Effectively, Warner merged content and distribution into one pipeline.

Clearly, just because today you are making money is not enough. Now, studios are signalling that a) tomorrow is just as important and b) distribution and content can't be seperated. Why? Because the consumer consumes products differntly now, and their options are changing the way the game is played.

Instant messaging is great. We can't live without it. Kids have thirty conversations going all over the world. But, in a corporate environment do you know who you're talking to. Something about IM says this is secure. The other person is logged on, right? But are they?

Yesterday, we witnessed an entertaining conversation via IM with one side (the 12 yr old) completely fooling the other into thinking he was a corporate colleague. (up until the emoticons started flowing and the 12 yr old humor hit the screen) Nothing lost really. Except. It could have been a more intimate or vital corporate conversation where details were revealed, or discussed, that made a big difference. 

How do you guarantee, without seeing, that the person you IM is the person you want? It's part of the identity problem we all face in the digital wired world. Given that we are all IMing a lot more these days, it's a problem set to grow.