For every retail or consumer-products company wondering why its Internet marketing doesn't seem to be working, The Cluetrain Manifesto...offers fresh and sound advice, expressed in entertaining prose.
Its oft-repeated premise--that markets are conversations--should be pounded into the collective brain of corporate executives.
Read the first chapter on the web at the book's companion site Cluetrain.
The Manifesto:
Markets are conversations.
Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
Hyperlinkssubvert hierarchy.
In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.
People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.
There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called "The Company" is the only thing standing between the two.
Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.
In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business -- the sound of mission statements and brochures -- will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.
Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.
Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.
Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation, are missing their best opportunity.
Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.
Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.
Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.
Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.
Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about.
Bombastic boasts -- "We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ" -- do not constitute a position.
Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.
Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.
By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.
Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what's really going on inside the company.
Elvis said it best: "We can't go on together with suspicious minds."
Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable -- and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.
Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"
Smart markets will find suppliers who speak their own language.
Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be "picked up" at some tony conference.
To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.
But first, they must belong to a community.
Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.
If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.
Human communities are based on discourse -- on human speech about human concerns.
The community of discourse is the market.
Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.
Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.
As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company -- and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.
Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right.
Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.
Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked corporate conversation.
A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.
While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to "improve" or control these networked conversations.
When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace.
Org charts worked in an older economy, where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.
Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.
Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.
There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.
In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.
As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets.
These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other's voices.
Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.
If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of IQ, then very few companies have yet wised up.
However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.
This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.
Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false -- and often is.
Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.
De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you.
We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.
We're also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.
As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other?
As markets, as workers, we wonder why you're not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.
The inflated self-important jargon you sling around -- in the press, at your conferences -- what's that got to do with us?
Maybe you're impressing your investors. Maybe you're impressing Wall Street. You're not impressing us.
If you don't impress us, your investors are going to take a bath. Don't they understand this? If they did, they wouldn't let you talk that way.
Your tired notions of "the market" make our eyes glaze over. We don't recognize ourselves in your projections -- perhaps because we know we're already elsewhere.
We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.
You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!
We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.
If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.
We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we'd be willing to pay for. Got a minute?
You're too busy "doing business" to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we'll come back later. Maybe.
You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.
We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party.
Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it's not the only thing on your mind.
Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?
Your product broke. Why? We'd like to ask the guy who made it. Your corporate strategy makes no sense. We'd like to have a chat with your CEO. What do you mean she's not in?
We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.
We know some people from your company. They're pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you're hiding? Can they come out and play?
When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn't have such a tight rein on "your people" maybe they'd be among the people we'd turn to.
When we're not busy being your "target market," many of us are your people. We'd rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar web site. But you tell us speaking to the market is Marketing's job.
We'd like it if you got what's going on here. That'd be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we're holding our breath.
We have better things to do than worry about whether you'll change in time to get our business. Business is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?
We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.
Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we've been seeing.
Our allegiance is to ourselves -- our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that have no part in this world, also have no future.
Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. Why can't they hear this market timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.
We're both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they're really just an annoyance. We know they're coming down. We're going to work from both sides to take them down.
To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.
We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.
Copyright c 1999 Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger.
All rights reserved.
David Gurteen's comments: All marketeers should read the book - it spells out in a provocative and at times downright wicked way - the death of marketing as we know it - all driven of course by the world wide web! Hope you agree and enjoy it! Its certainly a fun read.
Video: Nick Milton on Best Practice
Nick Milton on Best Practice.
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Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation - literally. And 'knowledge workers' are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations.
To have a conversation, you have to be comfortable being human - acknowledging you don't have all the answers, being eager to learn from someone else and to build new ideas together.
You can only have a conversation if you're not afraid of being wrong. Otherwise, you're not conversing, you're just declaiming, speechifying, or reading what's on the PowerPoints. To converse, you have to be willing to be wrong in front of another person.
Conversations occur between equals. The time your boss's boss asked you at a meeting about your project's deadline was not a conversation. The time you sat with your boss for an hour in the Polynesian-themed bar while on a business trip and you really talked, got past the corporate bullshit, told each other the truth about the dangers ahead, and ended up talking about your kids - that maybe was a conversation.
But the real problem with the information being provided to us in our businesses is that, for all the facts and ideas, we still have no idea what we're talking about. We don't understand what's going on in our business, our market, and our world.
In fact, it'd be right to say that we already *know* way too much. KM isn't about helping us to know more. It's about helping us to understand. Knowledge without understanding is like, well, information.”
So, how do we understand things? From the first accidental wiener roast on a prehistoric savannah, we've understood things by telling stories. It's through stories that we understand how the world works.
But the real problem with the information being provided to us in our businesses is that, for all the facts and ideas, we still have no idea what we're talking about.
We don't understand what's going on in our business, our market, and our world.
In fact, it'd be right to say that we already *know* way too much.
KM isn't about helping us to know more.
It's about helping us to understand. Knowledge without understanding is like, well, information.
Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation - literally. And knowledge workers are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations.
Here's a definition of that pesky and borderline elitist phrase, 'knowledge worker'. A knowledge worker is someone whose job entails having really interesting conversations at work.
The characteristics of conversations map to the conditions for genuine knowledge generation and sharing: they're unpredictable interactions among people speaking in their own voice about something they're interested in. The conversants implicitly acknowledge that they don't have all the answers (or else the conversation is really a lecture) and risk being wrong in front of someone else. And conversations overcome the class structure of business, suspending the organization chart at least for a little while.
If you think about the aim of Knowledge Management as enabling better conversations rather than lassoing stray knowledge doggies, you end up focusing on breaking down the physical and class barriers to conversation. And if that's not what Knowledge Management is really about, then you ought to be doing it anyway.
We have been trained throughout our business careers to suppress our individual voice and to sound like a 'professional', that is, to sound like everyone else.
This professional voice is distinctive. And weird.
Taken out of context, it is as mannered as the ritualistic dialogue of the 17th-century French court.
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter -- and getting smarter faster than most companies.
These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.
Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.
But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about "listening to customers." They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.
While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.
However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.
Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.
If you are interested in Knowledge Management, the
Knowledge Café
or the role of conversation in organizational life then you my be interested in this online book I am writing on
Conversational Leadership
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Review - From BusinessWeek: 
The ClueTrain Manifesto (2000) by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine 
, Doc Searls 
Conversation [127 items]
Cluetrain
Christopher Locke Journalist & Author
On knowledge workers and interesting conversations by Christopher Locke Journalist & Author
Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation - literally. And 'knowledge workers' are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations.
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