Protecting customers in a client-server world | Doc Searls — EP019
Customers taking back power from the centralized metaphor that governs today’s Internet
Our guest today is Doc Searls: journalist, writer, and speaker.
We started off this informative conversation talking with Doc about his background, the emergence of the Internet, and the conceptual flaw that could have avoided a lot of today’s problems — overlaying the concepts of the client-server world and centralized control over what is inherently a peer-to-peer network based on TCP/IP. We went on to talk about privacy, VRM, and CustomerTech; what the consumer world could learn from B2B; implications of GDPR and globalization, and how people can protect their privacy.
This is the first episode of Season 2 of the Influence Marketing Podcast. This podcast was recorded in September, 2017. Recently, we’ve seen a lot more public discussion about Facebook and privacy, but as Doc insightfully points out in this recent article, it’s not just Facebook and Cambridge Onalytica: the same problems are inherent in the entire online advertising industry (and thus all companies that advertise online).
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Links: Episode 019 mp3 file, Influence Marketing Podcast RSS feed
Main Points:
- Customer to business is not necessarily consumer to business. Consumers aren’t necessarily buying something.
- Doc was a very early adopter of Linux and the open source world, and a huge influence on the belief that an e-commerce market is a two-way interaction rather than a one-way push from marketing.
- Social networks today are very intrusive and track us in a way we couldn’t even imagine years ago.
- Doc looks towards a future where customers take charge and play a larger role in marketing and the importance of coming up with solutions from the customer’s perspective.
- B2B in some ways has figured out what we need in C2B. There is an equality of power in which a lot of things get figured out with two parties of equal power. Doc would love to borrow some of that and bring it into the C2B world.
- Ad blocking is a terrific message from demand back into supply.
- Doc touches upon the EU GDPR, fines on illegal data collecting, and how ad tech is different in the United States.
- Doc would choose an Apple over Android due to the privacy protection features.
- No marketing tool or funnel has lead generation down perfectly yet. We are still stuck in an old paradigm, but things are evolving slowly.
About our guest:
Doc is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, by Doc Searles, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society (CITS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an alumnus fellow (2006–2010) of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Mentioned In This Episode:
- Doc Searls Blog; Doc on Medium: Doc Searls; Doc on Twitter: @dsearls
- The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger
- The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, by Doc Searls
- The Searls Group
- Customer Commons
- Zuboff’s Laws
- Lou Montulli
- John on Twitter: @jtroyer
- Kat on Twitter: @dailykat
The Influence Marketing Podcast is a podcast from the Influence Marketing Council, an industry council for B2B brands who innovate in influencer, advocacy, and community marketing. Podcast co-hosts John Mark Troyer and Kathleen Nelson Troyer are also co-founders of the IMC. For more information, go to influencemarketingcouncil.com.
