Microsoft is leading an unprecedented industry charge to disarm the pernicious Conficker worm, which has resulted in the largest corporate malware outbreak in years.

The worm’s malicious code that is installed on victim machines — totaling up to 12 million worldwide — is programmed to check in daily with about 250 unique domains for further instructions from the command-and-control server. So far, though, the bot controller has not registered any of the domains; therefore, compromised computers have been sitting silently, awaiting the go-ahead to act.

Microsoft and a number of technology, academic and research organizations announced Thursday that they are trying to head off this potential before it leads to the spread of spam or additional malware, or the launch of a destructive denial-of-service attack.

Recently, F-Secure was able to reverse engineer the malware’s code, allowing this newly formed coalition to register the domain names before the bot herders can. The domains under control by the Microsoft-led group — now numbering in the tens of thousands — are being directed to servers that can log and track infected systems, according to Symantec.

“What really spurred this is the sense that, given the large number of infections, this bot network could cause a lot of trouble,” Kevin Haley, director of product management at Symantec, told SCMagazineUS.com. “It’s too dangerous to sit around and just let it be there.”

The move to register the domains before the bot herder can is one that requires coordination among top-level domain operators, such as VeriSign and NeuStar, said Greg Rattray, chief internet security adviser with the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit responsible for allocation of IP space on the internet.

Nine domains were written into the worm’s algorithm, including two “country code” domains — .cn (China) and .ws (Western Samoa) — with whom ICANN does not have an existing relationship because they are country owned, Rattray said. ICANN’s main responsibility was getting these providers on board, as well as assuring existing partners that they were not breaking any rules by allowing the Microsoft-led coalition exclusive rights to the rogue domains.

“In general, the domain name space is supposed to be a free market and you’re not supposed to take the free market out of play,” Rattray told SCMagazineUS.com. “This is treading new ground.”

Even with this new strategy, the drone machines making up the Conficker botnet still can communicate with each other through peer-to-peer functionality, meaning compromised computers on the same local network can exchange instructions, Haley said. But this is a far less effective technique because it relies on the machines to stay infected.

Meanwhile, Microsoft also announced Thursday that it was offering a $250,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the masterminds of Conficker, also known as Downadup.

Jose Nazario, manager of  research at network security firm Arbor Networks, said the collaboration will prevent the malware outbreak from getting worse.

“It hopefully shows attackers that the good guys own DNS (Domain Name System) and the good guys can basically shut you out when needed,” Nazario said.

Nazario said Microsoft is registering many of the domains and was receiving a discount, but it was not immediately clear how much they were paying. A typical domain costs about $15 to register.

The SANS Internet Storm Center on Friday posted a comprehensive list of Conficker resources, such as links to removal tools.

The average company in the United States faces more than 300 lawsuits, and companies with more than $1 billion in revenue face 556 lawsuits. That has increased demands for an automated way to collect, sort, cull, analyze, and present company emails, documents, and other materials to reduce the cost of manually complying with legal and regulatory discovery requirements. Despite that, legal departments and IT departments are not collaborating as much as they should, according to a survey of 250 senior IT managers sponsored by Recommind.

The survey results show that only 21 percent of IT managers who work for companies that average more than 17,000 employees said e-discovery was a “very high” priority. And only 37 percent said their legal and IT are doing a better job of working together than they did a year ago.

Part of the problem, according to Recommind, is who is accountable for these issues. The legal department “owns” e-discovery, according to 73 percent of the surveyed IT managers, as well as records management (47 percent of respondents) and data retention (50 percent of respondents). Yet, 72 percent of the time, it is the IT department that makes the decision on what technology to buy to implement those policies and procedures.

These conflicts are complicated because there aren’t clear technical specifications for e-discovery projects, survey respondents say. Only 29 percent said the IT department clearly understands the technical requirements of e-discovery while only 12 percent felt the legal department understands the requirements. This leads to a lack of confidence that e-discovery will be implemented properly, and a lot of finger pointing when things go wrong. Only 27 percent said IT is “very helpful” during e-discovery projects, and only 16 percent said the same about the legal department.

“This data should serve as a wake-up call to enterprises and industry alike that we have a lot of work ahead of us if we are to create repeatable, accurate and cost-effective e-discovery response systems,” Craig Carpenter, Recommind vice president and general counsel, said in a statement. “If enterprises are to minimize information risk and sustain growth during the economic downturn, IT and legal must communicate regularly, have a complete understanding of their respective roles and collaborate through each step of the e-discovery process, from project scoping to vendor selection to implementation to the actual mechanics of an event.”

Recommind, which sells an Information Risk Management platform used for compliance, email categorization, and e-discovery, is using the survey results to sell its risk management platform and encourage enterprises to take a proactive stance when it comes to meeting the demanding requirements of legal e-discovery and stricter regulation, which are forcing many companies in specific markets to keep corporate documents and emails for longer periods of time. That means more material to store, sort, and analyze.

The vendor is one of hundreds that are pushing to grab a piece of a still-growing market. There are more than 660 vendors in the e-discovery and automated litigation support services and software market, according to the Website of Socha Consulting. The overall e-discovery market was valued at around $2.8 billion in 2007, $3.3 billion last year, and will pass $4 billion this year, according to the Socha-Gelbman e-discovery survey and report.

In the fiercely competitive world of computer security, where providing the most complete protection quickest is the prime bargaining chip, “collaboration” is not a word that always comes easy.

But as attacks continue to increase in sophistication, tapping into the wisdom of the crowds, or at least the computing power of the cloud, might become the best way to stay ahead of the black hats.

Many network security vendors are now adopting the crowdsourcing approach, and it could mean big changes to how security is practiced in an increasingly networked world.

Crowdsourcing is the practice of taking functions once reserved for employees and outsourcing them to a large group of unpaid volunteers.

For some enterprise security vendors, dipping at least their toes into crowdsourced security can be a true business advantage.

As the number of websites continues to skyrocket, for example, the feasibility of paid human site reviewers to determine which are infected with malware, which are pornography and which are safe for work becomes more and more prohibitive.

“There is no way to keep up with rating every site,” said Carrie Oaks , vice president of product and technical marketing at Blue Coat Systems Inc. One of Blue Coat’s competitors has 300 full-time employees whose roles are to identify inappropriate or malicious websites.

By contrast, Blue Coat has only 30, many of whom are focused on checking non-English sites, and instead has deployed a combination of clever AI and a free consumer-use filter, dubbed K9 Web Protection, to help pick up the slack.

Oakes said the K9 service was foremost a public service by the company – giving parents and schools a free, simple way to restrict access to the darker regions of the Web.

But she also said the company derived a large business value out of being able to monitor a wider variety of potential sites that businesses wouldn’t normally check.

“It gives us an ecosystem we wouldn’t already have,” she said.

When users visit sites not in the Blue Coat database, or if they report previously cleared websites as objectionable, that information is sent back to Blue Coat and shared with its central database, improving both the free consumer K9 service as well as enterprise-oriented filtering services.

“With security, you can never block all the risks all the time, it’s all about mitigation,” Oakes said. “The first person to the site will probably get infected, but we can help the other users.”

While not as open as StopBadware.org’s vision, relying on tens of thousands of extra users saves Blue Coat hundreds of man hours every day while considerably expanding the breadth of its protective services.

The defense-by-crowd strategy is catching on more deeply in networks, too. About a year ago, Extreme Networks Inc., for example, introduced “Widget Central,” which allows end users to share security plug-ins, along with other user-created tools.

“Collaboration is more important than ever,” wrote Paul Hooper, Extreme’s chief marketing officer, in an email. “We do see users and vendors like ourselves collaborating more with users and sharing best practices.”

Eventually, proponents hope that crowd-sourcing moves beyond blacklists and into a more nuanced approach that can provide comprehensive, if not perfect, security from a variety of threats.

“One area that has not been explored as much as it could be is really looking at ways of doing real-time reputation tracking of individual websites, email senders, servers, IP addresses — where the reputations are being generated by a collective of users and companies and so on,” StopBadware.org’s Weinstein said.

Instead of having one definitive source, he said, users could see Google’s rankings, McAffee’s rankings and the aggregate votes of hundreds of individual users as well, like a Rotten Tomatoes of malware.

“We’ve got hundreds of millions of people using the Internet, and most of them aren’t bad guys,” he said.

Get those customers through real time web collaboration. With a palette of appropriate tools, you and your team can boost sales. You’ll have satisfied customers who wont hesitate to recommend you to their friends.

Web Collaboration, What Is It All About?

If you attend a meeting, you expect the following:

1. a prepared agenda.
2. presentation of reports.
3. 100% attendance.
4. discussions.
5. proper documentation of the proceedings.

You can expect the same from web collaboration and more. You can use voice and chat features, or whatever is best to facilitate your sales pitch. You can use either the Internet or your telephone system to respond to your customer’s queries.

In spite of this amazing technology that allows talking to clients in different locations on the globe and sharing your graphs or PowerPoint presentations in real time, you still need the old stand-by - teamwork. Good teamwork will ensure that your web collaboration system is the most efficient there is in the corporate neighborhood.

There’s No “I” in Teamwork

You’ve heard of this rallying pitch. True, there is no I in TEAMWORK. A team of workers are unified through collaborative and organized efforts to get things done properly and fast. When there’s a scheduled web collaboration with clients or suppliers, get things going with your team.

When you call the meeting, let everybody put in their two cents’ worth of ideas and discuss the viability of their proposals. Outline the agenda and the objective so all discussions won’t get out of track. When everybody has an idea of what they are supposed to do, when to do it, how to do it, and with whom to coordinate with, the cogs of the wheels will work efficiently.

If you’re the team leader, make sure that you get the team well-motivated. This is the key to a successful endeavor. Being the team leader does not mean that all you have to do is order people around. You’ve got to dirty your hands too. When the team members see this in you, they’ll work even harder, a sign that they recognize your role as a working head of the team.

You have to foster the principle that everybody is good as everybody else. This kind of teamwork environment with the right people at the right tasks is the winning combination that will make any job, big or small, excellently executed.

Everybody in Place for Web Collaboration

Since web collaboration requires the sharing of web pages, your team must be ready with the necessary materials for presentation. You can work on the PowerPoint presentation if you have the know how to manipulate the program to result in a striking and well-balanced showcase.

Somebody good at Excel sheets can prepare the financial report, another who has the expertise of understanding the collaboration software can show the team how it works. The writers in the group can prepare the necessary content and videos for live desktop streaming. You can say that everybody at their post are doing their jobs well.

When the big day arrives to convince the client that your product is superior, affordable, and is exactly what they need, you’ll cinch the sale in real time. Why? Everything has been done the right way, and smartly too. That’s why web collaboration and teamwork should work together.

The Power of Us – Mass collaboration on the internet is shaking up business. This article was found in BusinessWeek of June 20th 2005. This article touches on the use of Skype as collaboration toolbox and a cost saver.
The article also covers various examples from various industries, and how collaboration on the internet changed the way they do business.

Pierre Omidyar on “Connecting People”, eBay’s founder talks about the power of community and his efforts to apply lessons learned from the online giant to other spheres

Open-source software, blogs, file sharing networks, free Internet telephony — they’re each disrupting multibillion-dollar industries and reshaping the landscape of business, politics, and culture. What’s the common thread behind them all? Us.

Sharing is the Net’s Next Big Disruption. New technologies are marshaling the talents, resources, and dollars of millions of people worldwide.
That collective power is shaking up the status quo in many industries

Yale law professor Yochai Benkler points to Google and Skype as examples of a new, Info Age market structure, based on peer production. It is the aspect of sharing economy on the internet.

The Internet isn’t just about e-mail or the Web anymore. Increasingly, people online are taking the power of the Internet back into their own hands. They’re posting opinions on online journals -– Web logs, or blogs. They’re organizing political rallies on MoveOn.org. They’re trading songs on shady file-sharing networks. They’re volunteering articles for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and they’re collaborating with other programmers around the world.

How mass collaboration changes everything can be understood by reading Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams book called Wikinomics . Here it is explained how to prosper in a world where new communications technologies are democratizing the creation of value. For anyone who wants to understand the major forces revolutionizing business today should consider some of these thoughts brought forward in this book.
Tapscott and Williams believes that: “To innovate and succeed the new mass collaboration must become part of every leaders playbook and lexicon. Learning how to engage and co-create with a shifting set of self-organised partners is becoming an essential skill, as important as budgeting, R&D and planning.”

Team collaboration success stories indicate that as far as collaboration goes – all is not well in the workplace. Have you ever found yourself wondering “How can I keep up with all of this?” You have 35 emails to reply to, 12 voice mails and three meetings scheduled for the day. Then a close colleague pops into your office and asks for your urgent help.
There is no denying our society is changing rapidly. One of the most obvious and life-impacting areas is our workplaces and work practices.

A senior manager in the social services lamented to me recently the amount of email he had to deal with each day. I asked him what was the most stressful part, without hesitating he replied that he missed the ‘authentic connection’ with other people.
Team collaboration success stories show that workers feel severely stretched between the three channels, email, phone and face-to-face meetings. These three channels are presently in a three-way struggle for our attention. No matter which channel triumphs we are still frequently left feeling as if we are losing ‘authentic connection’.

Virtualization

Team collaboration success stories demonstrate that the quality and quantity of connection in the work place is shifting rapidly but not necessarily being turned into productivity. But is communication-technology and the associated changes in the workplace really enabling us to be more effective? This process could be referred to as ‘virtualization’. The virtualization of teams and groups is changing the way we achieve our team and individual objectives. It began when we developed language (or earlier), then the emergence of the Guttenberg press, followed by radio, telephone and most recently the internet and email technology.
My definition of ‘team virtualization’ is any process that is introduced or expands to replace more traditional ways of communicating with other people. For example when phone calls replaced some or all face to face conversations, or when teleconferences replaced some or all physical meetings.
Interestingly the challenge of how we connect to each other has inspired the creation of a foundation – the ‘Peer2Peer Foundation’. Created by Michel Bauwens, the P2P Foundation is a meeting place for people interested in exploring peer-to-peer communication alternatives. This foundation is small but growing fast as the challenge of virtualization continues to grow.

Two Kinds of Growth

In his book ‘Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads’ Ervin Laszlo states that our species is changing in how it develops. He claims that we are moving from an era where the three “C’s” of conquest, colonization and consumption are giving way to connection, communication, and consciousness. Laszlo claims that these “C’s” constitute two kinds of growth and that we are presently transitioning between the two. Connection and communication are on the up swing, for sure.
The proliferation of cell phones and internet access is making sure of that. What is not so certain is the shift in consciousness that we also need to make. The question I hear so often in my consulting work is “How can we continue to embrace technological changes and maintain ‘authentic connection’ with both clients and colleagues?
Obviously there isn’t an easy answer to this. However, one of the most useful assumptions we can adopt is that building a highly collaborative work environment is everyone’s job. It’s first an ‘inside job’. But how do we do that? A list of some of my solutions to this tricky question can be found in an article at this Blog.

Below are ten ways to increase collaboration in the workplace:

1. Raise awareness of the importance of shared assumptions. Assumptions cause us to run on ‘autopilot’. Individuals are not the only ones who operate this way; teams do it too.
2. Check your own assumptions before and during the project planning phase. Your own assumptions will effect how you interact with others and deal with the inevitable challenges of working with other people.
3. Intention is the keynote. Just as a team’s attention is important – so is your own. Intentions have an eerie way of manifesting into reality.
4. Encourage team members to find out about each others’ roles. The more they know about each others’ perspectives, the more likely they will empathize with them when the going gets tough.
5. Establish a reward system for innovation and creativity. Ensure that rewards are equally available for ideas and innovations that don’t work as for those that do.
6. Plan to use all of the experience in the team. Think of the years of life experience represented in a room of 15 people with an average age of 35. It represents over 500 years of life experience.
7. Celebrate your successes along the way. Celebration acts to reinforce the progress being made. When it done at the team level it empathizes the importance of the team process in reaching desired objectives.
8. Invest resources in your own learning and when possible encourage others to do the same. Continuous improvement is only possible when individuals and the team as a whole are embracing continuous change with continuous learning..
9. Real change only comes when people change how they behave as well as think. This is just as true for the workplace. Never was it truer that we need to be the change we wish to see.
10. Model what you want to see more of. Providing our colleagues and clients real-life demonstrations of collaboration at work is the strongest incentive and inspiration you can provide to others.

There are things you can do to change the level of collaboration we experience within your team. Team collaboration success stories that there are no ‘silver bullets’ that will create over-night results. However by taking collaborative intelligence as a principle to live by you can change how your team operates. That’s why I say collaboration is (first) an inside job.

Collaboration marketing is a specialized segment of relationship marketing?where, simply put, the relationships that a business has with its customers is developed for long-term sustainability. With the success of Internet businesses, competition for customers is fiercer than ever. Distinguishing your business from others by developing strong relationships with consumers is one strategy for securing clients.

Customer driven collaboration marketing falls under the realm or relationship marketing because it allows you to collaborate with clients to build relationships. The difference here is that customer driven collaboration marketing recognizes how the Internet has changed the relational dynamic between businesses and customers. Customers are more connected than they used to be, automatically making them more empowered and shifting the balance of power from business centered to customer centered. Customers hold more power than ever before.

Currently, computer and technology companies are embracing customer driven collaboration marketing, but the trend is beginning to filter into the mainstream. The companies who make use of customer driven marketing do so by offering customer designed packages and choices. Executed mostly by large companies, the trend for personalized products can also be utilized by smaller companies who embrace this marketing tool. Here are a few ideas to help get you started thinking in terms of customer driven collaboration marketing for your own business.

Collaborative Pricing - Collaborative pricing allows customers to become active participants in defining the prices that they want to pay and adapting prices and services to their changing needs. For instance, if you provide a service, collaborative pricing allows for customer flexibility with using and paying for this monthly service.

Collaborative Segmentation - Collaborative segmentation allows customers to configure offerings to suit their preferences and to self-select into segments that best suit their needs. If you are a manufacturing business, you can offer personalized selection in the building of a product so the customer gets specifically what they want.

Collaborative Communication - Collaborative communication lets companies work with customers to create “just-in-time” marketing communications that are relevant to customers. In this instance, companies contract with outside marketing firms to create contextual messages that are triggered by customer activity. This can also be helpful to get immediate feedback on a new product, allowing businesses to get a sense of the market for a new product at a lower cost, and much more quickly than by traditional means.

Collaborative Support - Collaborative support allows customers to dialogue directly with the company and amongst themselves to solve support and other problems. This allows businesses to reduce support costs while increasing customer satisfaction.

Customer driven collaboration marketing requires businesses to shift their focus from the typical outside-in thinking of company driven marketing to the inside-out thinking about their customers’ needs. This type of marketing focuses on finding products for existing customers and clients, rather than creating a product and seeking to find a market for it.

Most everyone I talk with wants greater success in some (or many) parts of their life. And however independent you may think you are, no one can achieve as much working alone as they can with the collaborative help of others . . . if that collaboration is truly helpful.

You hopefully have experienced times where a group was really clicking; it’s amazing the amount of progress that can be made. However, you’ve likely also experienced times when working together seemed hard and even counter-productive to getting any results.

Here are seven ways to improve collaboration and to make the work of a group more successful in any situation:

Have a common purpose. Too often we get the cart before the horse. We have a group of people assembled to do some work and since we are all busy we dive right into the task, often without a clear sense for why the work is being done or what the perfect end result would be. Without a clear and common purpose – the reason for being together that everyone shares – collaboration will never reach anywhere near the level that is possible.

Develop concrete goals. The common purpose unites the group, and the goals provide focus and energy. If you want the maximum results from any group, make sure you have concrete goals.

Communicate freely. Collaboration requires communication. Effective collaboration requires open and honest communication about ideas, experiences and opinions. In a group where hierarchy is present, realize that the hierarchy can be a barrier to the free flow of communication, and do what you can to counterbalance it.

Combine the best of each person. Each person brings great strengths in terms of perspective, experience, ideas, skills and much more. Collaboration (and results) will be enhanced when the strengths of each team member are recognized, valued and used.

Create open-mindedly. Collaboration is an act of creation. You bring people together to find synergy – the sum being greater than the contribution of each individual. Collaboration will be enhanced when people feel comfortable about sharing their ideas, and worry less about whose idea gets implemented. Not coincidentally, as you master the first four points, this step gets easier.

Circulate accountability. Someone may be the team leader, and that is fine. But greater collaboration will come when everyone feels responsible; when anyone is comfortable and “allowed” to take a leadership role or take the lead in making something happen. The most collaborative groups have a leader, but are filled with people ready to do what it takes to achieve results.

Compete externally. It is hard to collaborate when you feel competition within the group. Competition for power, position, ideas and more all get in the way of collaborative success. With a clear purpose and goals, people can be clear on what they are trying to accomplish and how to do that in service of the team’s success, not their personal (or departmental) success.

Consider these seven items like a checklist. While all are required for the best collaboration, look for the one that a group you are on is doing well (and support that at even greater levels), and recognize one that the group could improve on (and do what you can to help make that happen).

These “Seven C’s” will help you navigate the waters of working with others. The group might be a true working team, or it might be a group gathered for a one-time event to solve a problem or complete a task. In any case the more of these C’s that are working for you, the more enjoyable and successful working with others will be.

Potential Pointer: Being able to be collaborative and to create greater collaboration with a group are two of the most valuable skills you can possess. These Seven C’s will help you create better ideas and greater results, and have more fun doing it!

To maintain a successful business, it is important to develop a strong and integrated marketing strategy. Some small business owners are hesitant to embark on a collaboration marketing strategy however; there are a few points to keep in mind that will make it a strategy with beneficial elements for your business.

Once you have decided to embark on a collaboration marketing strategy, there are challenges to working together, and it’s wise to be aware of these issues before you get started. Below are a few tips to keep in mind when weighing the pros and cons of collaboration marketing, and some challenges that may present themselves once you do begin the process.

Increase your bargaining power. When you collaborate with other small businesses, you may have a stronger base with which to negotiate with various suppliers. If you collaborate to buy products from a particular supplier, the increased volume of products that you will require as part of your collaboration may potentially drive down the price of the products than if you bought each of them separately.

Promote a product line. Creating a collaboration product line initially sounds a bit risky, but if done wisely, it can create a stronger base for each company within the product line. For instance, if you are a small company that makes t-shirts from organic cotton, you may have trouble raising awareness for your product because of a limited customer base. If you collaborate with other designers and clothing manufacturers who are also committed to organic supplies, you can create an “Organic Cotton” parent company product line, with your label and each of the other companies’ labels being sold under a collaboration heading.

Access a diverse customer base. By working with other businesses, you potentially open your customer base to your collaborators, and in return, gain access to the customer base of your partners. In this way you are potentially expanding your client base and the number of people you can reach with your products and services.

Lack of a common mission is a challenge within a collaboration marketing strategy. When forming a collaboration marketing partnership, it is important to be certain that you share common goals and the same mission. Even if you have a common end goal, you may have very different ideas about how to reach these goals. Differences in process are a potential benefit to collaborations because you will be exposed to the ideas and skills of another expert in your field, but these same differences can also be potential landmines for executing a common goal. Be certain you are on the same page with your partners and have a specific plan for your mission before you embark on collaboration.

As with the lack of a common mission, lack of a common commitment will also present it’s own set of challenges. When working with other businesses and forming a collaboration marketing platform, you’ll want to be certain that you partnered with owners who are as committed to hard work and success as you are. It is a common issue to have different levels of commitment among different people. Given this potential pitfall, you’ll want to be sure that you have equally dedicated collaborators, so everyone participates in an equal share of the labor involved in maintaining a successful collaboration.

The Internet has revolutionized the ease with which companies do business, and how they stay connected to other businesses and their clients. Customers are more connected than ever before, which empowers them in a way that didn’t previously exist before the invention of the Internet, creating a shift in the traditional balance of power.

There are many new marketing strategies and techniques that have been adapted to Internet businesses, or have been created as a result of the Internet. Collaboration marketing is one of the most important of these Internet marketing techniques. The traditional type of collaboration marketing refers to collaborating with other similar businesses to widen the net of the marketing capacity for your company by sharing the burden of marketing with other marketers.

Marketing is still about creating value for the customer and capturing value from your businesses marketing activities. However: the Internet is a great vehicle for new ways of marketing your business you can raise awareness for your products and services that simply wasn’t possible twenty years ago. The age of Internet marketing is more customer driven than marketing has ever been before.

What is Customer Driven Marketing?

Customer driven marketing is the process by which smart business owners allow the customer to weigh in and drive a portion of your marketing strategy. This still falls under the realm of collaboration marketing, but it is known as customer driven marketing.

The essence of marketing remains the same it is the process of creating value through exchanges, but the nature of these exchanges has changed dramatically. This shift requires businesses to think differently about how they interact with customers. It has been described as a shift from information asymmetry to information democracy customers have more power and can use this power to shape industry.

Part of this shift towards customer driven marketing is the transfer from transactional exchanges to relational exchanges. Instead of maximizing profit from each transaction, relationship marketing (of which customer driven collaboration marketing is a sub-set) focuses on maximizing profits over several years to a lifetime of a customer’s commitment to your business.

Traditional types of marketing techniques operate under the assumption that businesses create and maintain client relationships and that customers play a passive role. Now, customers play a more active role in the managing of business relationships, and thus value in marketing is no longer something that is created by companies and delivered to customers but rather, customers have become co-creators of marketing value by beginning to participate directly in the marketing process and shaping how companies approach their marketing agendas.

Customer driven collaboration marketing requires you to think about collaborating with customers and making customers an integral part of your company’s marketing activities by building relationships with clients and customers where their opinions and feedback are gathered and reviewed to devise a an effective plan for marketing your business.