"You're Just the Owner"
I once built a custom house in Colorado. My
contractor - a highly skilled carpenter - seemed to care about the
project as much as I did, with definite opinions as to how we should
proceed. When I
jokingly accused him of being as much a lobbyist as a carpenter, he
said, "You don't understand. It's my house, you're just the owner."
Compare his justifiable sense of entitlement to the dialogue
over at Save the Merc:
The
owners of the Mercury News are not only those with a controlling
interest in its shares; the owners are also all of us, citizens of the
Silicon Valley, who, over many years, have seen "our" newspaper serve
the public good. The Mercury News shone a light on our valley's needs,
especially helping us remember those who were left behind when our
valley's economy rocketed.
Tom Campbell
Dean, U.C. Berkeley
Haas School of Business
We need a new way to describe people who, like my carpenter
and the readers of the San
Jose Mercury News, are so engaged by an enterprise or a
service or a product that they feel a sense of entitlement to its
destiny, and therefore to a role so proactive that it mystifies the
nominal owners of the enterprise or service or product.
I've been thinking a lot about membership as a
palpable driving force in our economy, ever since Doc and Jan Searls
and I broke crema together in San Diego during Etech. Doc challenged
Jan and me to come up with a compelling description of our ORGware
initiative, and it flashed into my mind: Member Relationship Management
– MRM.
Sure, it's a riff on CRM
(which I consider a perfect scam by consultants hustling companies too
big to know better), but MRM
justifies itself because it must, by definition, facilitate
relationships among the members, by the members and for the members.
And Doc liked the meme, so I figure it can't be too far off.
Consumers to Customers to Members: Up the Value Chain with
Gun & Camera
Our favorite trainers
have been cluing us for six years now, telling us we we are no longer
passive consumers, but customers
deserving customized treatment. It's not clear that enterprises share
that conceit, but at least the dialogue has started. I'd like to
suggest that there is life after Customerism, and I call it
Membership.
How do you describe a member
of a company? Like my carpenter, it's anyone who so identifies with an
enterprise's products and services and future that they understand,
more deeply and probably more expertly than the employees, the
implications of a company's actions and missteps. There are some
industry niches or products or services with the right combination of
utility and complexity that they attract members as much as customers.
Blogging is such a phenomenon: We use various products and services
and, in doing so, assume a sense of deep entitlement in the processes
and artifacts of blogging. Operating systems and dog breeds and
colleges and sports cars have the power to turn stakeholders into
members. Hamburger chains and PC manufacturers and rental car companies
and most politicans do not (though some do).
Obviously, the San
Jose Mercury News has the same power over many of its
readers. More accurately, I should say that its readers hold the same
power over the San Jose
Mercury News.
I'd like to develop mechanisms explicitly designed to empower
people to act as members of enterprises that would rather not have
members. I believe there is a finite set of tools that will so expose
and amplify the collective voice of these newly-discovered and, likely,
unwelcome members of such enterprises that they exert a force undreamed
of prior to the blogosphere and Web 2.0.
Membership is a disruptor that's as unwelcome as it is overdue.
12:23:33 AM 
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