Customer's New Voice: Extreme Relevancy and Experience through Volunteered Customer Information

CHAPTER 1 New Information Masters

The new Information Masters of this era are not the expected technology-rich business contingent but in relative terms are the new direct consumers. Armed with mobile devices and the infinite network of the world’s Internet infrastructure, the new direct consumer can directly view unbiased, unmediated, and unadulterated information about a business’s products or services relative to any of its competitors in almost any market or geography. The consumer’s view into a business’s world is far more transparent than the business’s view into the customer’s world (i.e., asynchronous transparency). While businesses grapple with leveraging with the exponential increase in the amount of data that consumers unintentionally generate on a day-to-day basis, their lack of relative consumer knowledge is reflected by marketing accuracy of less than one in 10 offers.

In one minute, the new Information Masters produce 694,980 status updates and 522,080 tweets. The new Information Masters collect, share, and manage 300 petabytes of personal data in Facebook alone.¹

Previously people would have an average of 150 friends (past, present, and future) in real life, whereas the new Information Masters can now communicate and engage with an average 245 friends (e.g., Facebook). The ability to have a wider pool and definition of friends is enabled by the new information environment. The new Information Masters have a broader span of intimacy where 82 percent of their ...