Personalization matters: three articles speak to the heart of "the era of you"

When I first started talking in 2011 about "the era of you" as one of the big ideas driving our tech and business future,   I wrote:

The era of you: a great idea revolutionized by 21st century technology
Image from the Palm Springs Automobilist Facebook site

"It’s partly about the way the internet and social networks are changing our sense of what a community means. It’s about the increasing ability of end users in enterprises to choose and deploy their own technology solutions. It’s about the flattening of power structures in business and the increasing power of consumers to interact with businesses. But none of these by itself expresses the big idea; each of these trends is a part of the bigger concept:

Technology is enabling individuals to know more, in more places and situations, and have increasingly powerful choices about the way they live and work. We are entering the era of you."

The era of you stakes are getting higher, reshaping business models and business strategy.  Here are recent articles that drive the point home:

--from Fast Company
Why Companies Now Have to Romance the Same Customers They Once Bought


--from cloud integrator Appirio, on Salesforce.com
Salesforce’s shift in message is a recognition that consumers have more power than ever before in a connected world. No longer are they at the mercy of companies that treat them poorly; they have a loud, far-reaching voice with real power in the marketplace.

--from CIO.com
Gartner finds that CIOs now identify Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as their top IT spending priority

Finally, here is my report on what Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" can teach us about the power of technology. It can personalize business relationships and reintroduce the small village metaphor on the stage of the whole world:

We can now use technology to re-introduce highly personalized services that feel like village life in its most idealized form. Who will dream big enough to bring it to us? As Belle said, “there must be more than this provincial life.”