Entries tagged with “reputation” from O'Reilly Radar
Mon
Oct 26
2009
What sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity
by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 4
I just finished Erving Goffman's classic sociological text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. A friend told me to read this for an exploration into what "identity" means online, and I did find that the book offers some useful frameworks.
I have to admit, to start with, that it's a rather distasteful work: personally, I don't see my entire life as a performance and everyone around me as an audience. That seems to be just what Goffmn wants me to do. (He calls this attitude his "dramaturgical perspective.")
Furthermore, the book was published in 1959, just before the social revolution of the 1960s exploded the expectations of formality it documents--all the assumptions about proper behavior, social distinctions, making a good impression, and so forth. These distinctions remain, of course, but people tend to behave in ways that consciously disavow differences in class and status instead of highlighting them (at least in the United States).
Goffman's underlying framework is still valid, though, and it casts a useful light on some of the dilemmas of going online.
tags: Erving Goffman, identity, privacy, reputation, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, trust
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Wed
Oct 14
2009
Vendor Relationship Management workshop
by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 4Nobody knows you as well as you do. Or do they? Let's run a test. Do you know what percentage of your food bill went to processed products? Or what type of coupons (store coupons, newspaper coupons, etc.) is most likely to get you to switch brands? I bet someone out there knows.
This kind of data mining is the modern companion to Customer Relations Management, which is the science of understanding customers and trying to get repeat business. CRM can offer many valuable benefits, but ultimately the control lies with the vendor, not the customer.
This bothers long-time marketing maverick and Cluetrain Manifesto coauthor Doc Searls. Several years ago he thought up an alternative that would put the data and the control back in the hands of customers, and called it Vendor Relationship Management. He's been pursuing that dream for two years as a Berkman Center fellow at Harvard, and this week he ran the second workshop hosted by Harvard on the topic.
I dropped in and out for a few hours and picked up some ideas, annotating them (as always) with ideas of my own.
tags: Berkman Center, commerce, CRM, customers, Doc Searls, economics, identity, P2P, peer-to-peer, privacy, reputation, trust, Vendor Relationship Management, VRM
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