Google Should Develop A Personal Relationship Manager

Google needs to develop and release to its millions of users a Personal Relationship Manager (PRM).

Because Google has such a large base of contact, email, phone and calendar users, and because the company's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, it seems logical and beneficial for Google to develop (if it has not already done so) and release to its users a PRM (which it hasn't done yet).

A PRM is a subset of the information management tool known most commonly as a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), which is generally used by Sales, Marketing and/or Customer Service employees of for-profit companies. The PRM is used primarily to manage one's personal network of contacts rather than to enhance the profitability of one's employer. A PRM brings your contacts and interactions with them together in one place with a simple-to-use design that enables a short learning curve and quick adoption by millions of people.

PRM benefits for Google include:

1. Increased use of its services
2. Increased ad revenues through a freemium product featuring Google ads
3. Increased subscription revenues through a future PRM Pro (a superuser-PRM or a CRM-like product) available via a paid subscription

PRM benefits for Google users include:

1. More meaningful relationships with people outside your relatively small group of intimate and frequent contacts (5 to 50 people)
2. Easy way to schedule and review all your interactions (emails, phone calls, meetings, etc) with everyone in your personal network (hundreds or even thousands of people)
3. Prevention of embarrassment which results from not being able to easily recall significant information about people with whom you interact infrequently (will be especially useful when wearable computing, such as Google Glass, becomes widespread or ubiquitous)
4. Becoming a more effective manager of your personal network
5. A fantastic tool to effectively manage or develop a network of contacts for activities or projects of high interest to you

The top three competitors for the proposed Google PRM appear to be:

1. Zoho CRM (integrated with Gmail and other relevant online services)
2. LinkedIn Contacts (which began life as Connected and was acquired by LinkedIn)
3. Insightly (a popular freemium model CRM)

None of the above three options for a pseudo-PRM offer a quick enough learning curve to gain adoption by millions of people who would benefit from a relationship manager not focused primarily on business interactions. Additionally, creation of a third-party PRM as an alternative to a native Google product will face a huge problem in trying to gain millions of users.

If Google is interested in developing a PRM, I'd be more than happy to be it's product manager or a member of the development team. Alternatelym, if a group of developers and designers are highly interested in developing a third-party PRM with the goal of being acquired by google and having Google release the PRM to all Google users, I'd love to be a community builder or other team member for that new PRM product.

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