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28 Nov 07

the cluetrain manifesto

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We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But
we are not waiting.
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.
27 more annotations...
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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?
- You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.
- 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.
- 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 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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect
  for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.
- 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.
- Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market
  might see what's really going on inside the company.
- Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to
  the people with whom they hope to create relationships.
- Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take
  a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their
  market actually cares about.
- Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At
  them.
- 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.
- 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.
- Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
- The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that
  were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
- Online Markets...
  
  Networked markets are beginning to
  self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally
  served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better
  informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from
  most business organizations.
  
  ...People of
  Earth
  
  The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day.
  Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our
  world, our place to be. Whatever you've been told, our flags fly
  free. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth,
  remember.

24 Mar 07

the cluetrain manifesto - chapter seven - Post-Apocalypso

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advertising book business cluetrain consumerism economics internet manifesto marketing social

Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever.

Yeah. Imagine that.
But if you think of yourself as a company, you've got much bigger worries. We strongly suggest you repeat the following mantra as often as possible until you feel better: "I am not a company. I am a human being."
9 more annotations...
- How do you speak in a human voice? First, you get a life. And corporations just can't do that. Corporations are like Pinocchio. Or Frankenstein. Their noses grow longer at the oddest moments, or they start breaking things for no good reason. They want to be human, but gosh, they're not. They want the Formula for Life -- but they want it so they can institutionalize it. The problem, of course, is that life is anti-formulaic, anti-institutional. The most fundamental quality of life is something the corporation can never capture, never possess. Life can't be shrink-wrapped, caged, dissected, analyzed, or owned. Life is free.
- And next time you wonder what you're allowed to say at work, online, downtown at the public library, just say whatever the hell you feel like saying. Anyone asks you, tell 'em it's OK. Tell 'em you read about it in a book.
- The Demonic Paradox
  
  Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or
  
  as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its
  
  philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our
  
  thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The
  
  situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system
  
  but we still carry its genes.
  
  Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist, 1991
- One thing the Net is good for is organizing markets. Especially if you're invisible and powerless, ignorant of how things are supposed to work, ignorant of business-as-usual. Especially if you're intent on end-running the empire.
- So what is the Net really good for? Besides chatting, that is. Well, there's the small matter of coordinating distribution.
- There never was any grand plan on the Internet, and there isn't one today. The Net is just the Net. But it has provided an extraordinarily efficient means of communication to people so long ignored, so long invisible, that they're only now figuring out what to do with it. Funny thing: lawless, planless, management-free, they're figuring out what to do with the Internet much faster than government agencies, academic institutions, media conglomerates, and Fortune-class corporations.
- We will strive to listen in new ways -- to the voices of
  
  quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices
  
  of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices,
  
  and the voices that have despaired of being heard.
  
  Richard M. Nixon, first inaugural address, 1969
- People by the millions are discovering how to negotiate, cooperate, collaborate -- to create, to explore, to enjoy themselves.
- chapter seven
  
  the following is the complete first chapter of
  
  The Cluetrain Manifesto:
  
  The End of Business as Usual

the cluetrain manifesto - chapter one - Internet Apocalypso

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When he said, "in wildness is the preservation of the world," I bet Thoreau wasn't just thinking about old-growth trees. He also wrote a little ditty called On Civil Disobedience. There is a connection.
More important, all of us are finding our voices once again. Learning how to talk to one another. Slowly recovering from a near-fatal brush with zombification after watching Night of the Living Sponsor reruns all our lives.
52 more annotations...
- If you're OK with this, then eat it up. There's a bulimic's dream-feast of killer kontent on the way. But if it already makes you want to puke, get angry. Write it, code it, paint it, play it — rattle the cage however you can. Stay hungry. Stay free. And believe it: win, lose, or draw, we're here to stay. Armed only with imagination, we're gonna rip the fucking lid off.
  
  There's your market.
- The carrier wave has been tuned at huge cost to deliver a single message: you are not free, you desire nothing but the products we produce, you have no world but the world we give you.
- What you'll hear is the sound of passion unhinged, people who have had it up to here with white-bread culture, hooking up to form the biggest goddam garage band the world has ever seen.
- Don't make us feel small. Remind us to be larger. Get a little of that human touch.
- The corporation pretends to speak, but its voice is that of a third-rate actor in a fourth-rate play, uttering lines no one believes in a manner no one respects.
- Consciously or not, millions of us are using the Internet to pass along this unconditional permission to millions of others. When enough people do that, something viral happens.
  > It's not hypothetical, it's happening — when we say what we think, when we feel what we say, when we listen for the music of authentic presence. We are constantly searching each other out, linking, talking, shaking things up. Consciously or not, by the very nature of the permission we give each other, we are working to bring down business-as-usual.
- Consciously or not, millions of us are using the Internet to pass along this unconditional permission to millions of others. When enough people do that, something viral happens.
- The word that's passing like a spark from keyboard to screen, from heart to mind, is the permission we're giving ourselves and each other: to be human and to speak as humans.
- Why has the Internet grown so rapidly? Why did it catch so many businesses off guard? The audience is listening because people are attracted to precisely the difference the Net provides: the sound of human beings talking with one another as human beings — the sound of a million conversations whose primary purpose, for once, is not to sell us something.
- That's how I discovered PR doesn't work and that markets are conversations.
- I couldn't wait to get back to work on Monday morning.
- What I cared about was how technology applied — or didn't — to the world of business and the actual people who worked there.
- I gave myself blanket permission: to be curious, to learn, to speak, to write.
- Who gives us permission to explore our world? The question implies that the world in fact belongs to someone else. Who gives us permission to communicate what we've experienced, what we believe, what we've discovered of that world for ourselves?
- More than any market that's ever existed, the Internet is a collection of unique individuals. I'm one of them.
- In the late eighteenth century, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham imagined a little nightmare he called a "panopticon" — a prison in which the inmates could be seen at all times, but couldn't see their jailers. A few hundred years later, mass media inverted this scenario. The imprisoning TV eye now sees nothing, yet we all watch it for clues to our cultural identity.
- The New Marketplace: Word Gets Around
- Zen master Suzuki Roshi once said, "To control your cow, give it a bigger pasture."
- The question is whether, as a company, you can afford to have more than an advertising-jingle persona. Can you put yourself out there: say what you think in your own voice, present who you really are, show what you really care about? Do you have any genuine passion to share? Can you deal with such honesty? Such exposure? Human beings are often magnificent in this regard, while companies, frankly, tend to suck.
- Sometime soon, companies will have to open up significant portions of their intranets — while still protecting their few genuine secrets — in order to create relationships with their markets rather than barriers against them.
- Sure, data security is necessary and needs to be done well. However, many corporations are desperate for firewalls because they don't want the market to see they have nothing worth stealing inside them. That's not security, it's paranoia. You can't identify best practices without sticking your neck out — but if you don't, you risk premature death. You can't invite customers to contribute design ideas by holding them at bay.
- A new kind of logic is emerging, or needs to. I call it gonzo business management — paradox become paradigm. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto, and we might as well get used to it. There's a huge opportunity here for individuals to keep their day jobs but at the same time to indulge their natural human bent for self-expression.
- Networks greatly facilitate the sharing of relevant knowledge within a community joined by like interests. As a result, the lowest common denominator of informed awareness tends to be much higher online than it ever was in the context of broadcast media. Plus, this informed awareness tends to increase much faster.
- Why the denial? Could it be that companies are afraid the Internet and intranets will make people smarter? While no company would ever admit to it publicly, this is precisely what many fear. In the "good old days," consumers weren't expected to make suggestions or ask for new features. They were simply supposed to buy the product
- In contrast, the Internet invites participation. It is genuinely empowering, well beyond the cliché that word has become. And corporate intranets invite participation in the same way.
- The broadcast mentality isn't dead by any means. It's just become suicidal.
- "Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses —
  
  for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it..."
  
  Herman Melville
- The New Workplace: Breaking the Silence
- Instead, the future business of businesses that have a future will be about subtle differences, not wholesale conformity; about diversity, not homogeneity; about breaking rules, not enforcing them; about pushing the envelope, not punching the clock; about invitation, not protection; about doing it first, not doing it "right"; about making it better, not making it perfect; about telling the truth, not spinning bigger lies; about turning people on, not "packaging" them; and perhaps above all, about building convivial communities and knowledge ecologies, not leveraging demographic sectors.
- The Net represents cheap natural resources (data), cheap transport (the pipe itself), and most important, cheap and efficient access to global know-how.
- In contrast, genuine conversation flourishes only in an atmosphere of free and open exchange.
- Conversations are where intellectual capital gets generated.
- Understanding, learning, exploration, curiosity, collaboration — qualities that had been bred out of workers by industrial management — were now being desperately elicited by the All-New, Culturally Revolutionized Organization.
- Knowledge worthy of the name is highly dynamic. It requires deep understanding, not just rules and algorithms. While machines are lousy at this sort of thing, people are remarkably adaptive and intelligent. People learn. Real expertise is changing too fast today to lend itself to automation.
- Overnight, global competition turned mass markets into thousands of micro markets
- In a classic reversal, what was suddenly good for America was anything but good for General Motors. The auto industry didn't see these changes coming, and as a result lost enormous market share to offshore competitors.
- This was de-skilling of a higher order: design, production, and marketing knowledge began to fractionate, and in some cases, to atrophy.
- Because of its effect on workers' knowledge, de-skilling is a term strongly associated with mass production. And as skill disappeared, so did the unique voice of the craftsman.
- These economies of scale led to enormous profits because they enabled selling a far cheaper product to a far wider market.
- But because of its increasing divorce from the day-to-day concerns of real people, commerce has come to ignore the natural conversation that defines communities as human.
- Markets are conversations. Trade routes pave the storylines. Across the millennia in between, the human voice is the music we have always listened for, and still best understand.
- From Ancient Markets to Global Networks
- And we have something else as well: knowledge. Not the sort of boring, abstract knowledge that "Knowledge Management" wants to manage. No. The real thing. We have knowledge of what we do and how we do it — our craft — and it drives our voices; it's what we most like to talk about.
- This conversation may be irreverent of eternal verities, but it's not all jokes. Whether in the marketplace or at work, people do have genuine, serious concerns.
- The Internet is inherently seditious. It undermines unthinking respect for centralized authority, whether that "authority" is the neatly homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy rhetoric of the corporate annual report.
- But I think the Internet still has a radicalizing effect today, despite all the banner ads and promotional hype and you-may-already-be-a-winner sweepstakes.
  
  The something special is what the Manifesto calls voice.
- As would soon become obvious, the Net was a powerful multiplier for intellectual capital.
- The attraction was in speech, however mediated. In people talking, however slowly. And mostly, the attraction lay in the kinds of things they were saying. Never in history had so many had the chance to know what so many others were thinking on such a wide range of subjects.
- One of those things was that the Internet attracted millions. Many millions. The interesting question to ask is why. In the early 1990s, there was nothing like the Internet we take for granted today. Back then, the Net was primitive, daunting, uninviting. So what did we come for? And the answer is: each other.
- But companies don't like us human. They leverage our longing for their own ends. If we feel inadequate, there's a product that will fill the hole, a bit of fetishistic magic that will make us complete.
- We long for more connection between what we do for a living and what we genuinely care about, for work that's more than clock-watching drudgery.
- "Life is too short," we say, and it is. Too short for office politics, for busywork and pointless paper chases, for jumping through hoops and covering our asses, for trying to please, to not offend, for constantly struggling to achieve some ever-receding definition of success. Too short as well for worrying whether we bought the right suit, the right breakfast cereal, the right laptop computer, the right brand of underarm deodorant.

the cluetrain manifesto - chapter six - EZ Answers

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The Web got built by people who chose to build it. The lesson is: don’t wait for someone to show you how. Learn from your spontaneous mistakes, not from safe prescriptions and cautiously analyzed procedures. Don’t try to keep people from going wrong by repeating the mantra of how to get it right. Getting it right isn’t enough any more. There’s no invention in it. There’s no voice.
14 more annotations...
- We are asked, How are the poor people of the world going to get Internet access? when our hearts want to know how we can connect with the poor of the world, because there isn’t a single person we don’t want to talk with. And once we talk, we know the conversation will make palpable the injustice of today’s economics.
- We’re asked, How can you tell if the person you’re talking with is really the person you’re talking with? when our hearts want to know what people we will really become online and what having a disembodied identity will mean.
- But our hearts have a different set of questions: when we can’t rely on a central authority -- the government, the newspaper, the experts in the witness box -- for our information, what new ways of believing will we find? How will we be smart in a world where it’s easier to look something up than to know it? How will we learn to listen to ideas in context, to information inextricably tied to the voice that’s uttering it? How can we reverse our habit of understanding matters by jumping to further levels of abstraction and instead learn to dig into the concrete, the personal, and the unique, told as stories worthy of our time?
- More questions meant to distract us: How will we know what’s junk on the Web and what’s worth believing? How will we avoid being fooled by anyone with a plausible story and a Web address? What will be the new criteria, the new marks of authenticity? These questions express a longing for someone to take charge of our knowledge. We want experts and authorities, just as we crave censors more than we crave sex and prefer certainty to freedom.
- So, our hearts ask questions, with dread as well as excited curiosity, about the new public world and its relation to the private. What is the relation of our night selves and our day selves, our self behind the company walls and outside of them? Why do we think of our private selves as our real selves? What would privacy be like if it weren’t connected to shame? What is the fierce price we pay for every desire, every whim, every idea we stamp "Secret"? To what degree are shame and embarrassment the expression of the will to control? If we abandon the illusion of controlling private behavior, what type of public-ness will we have? How is the control we yearn to exert over the behavior of others -- at work and beyond -- identical with the white-knuckle control we need to preserve our selves?
- This leads to a funny conclusion. Ironic, actually. We ask questions about the future of the Web because we think there’s a present direction that can be traced into the future. But in fact, the questions we ask aren’t going to predict the future. They will create the future.
- The Web is inherently and intrinsically free. Businesses will perceive this fact as either a blessing or a curse depending on how much they value freedom, a quality of mind and heart not typically underscored in the average corporate mission statement.
- So what, if anything, can businesses do at this juncture? They can begin by searching out people within the organization who understand what’s going on. In almost every case, they’re there. Make friends with them. Make friends with the marketplace again. Start listening. Find your voice. Then start talking as if your life depended on it. It does.
- And increasingly, we value only two qualities:
  
  The engagement and passion-for-quality of genuine craft.
  
  Conversations among recognizably human voices.
- Markets and workers are once again crafting their own conversations, and these conversations are also about craft -- things we do that we actually care about.
- What Quality really meant was: "We changed our minds. Please don’t check your brain at the door."
- Mass production led to mass marketing, which led to (ta-da!) mass media. Broadcast applied the fundamental mass-production brainstorm to marketing communications. This development signaled the dawn of junk mail. Corporate speech became mass produced "messages" jammed into a one-way spam cannon aimed at a dream that hasn’t faded since: interchangeable consumers.
- EZ Answers
  
  Christopher Locke and David Weinberger
  
  
  
  Tell ‘Em What You Told ‘Em
- chapter six
  
  the following is the complete sixth chapter of
  
  The Cluetrain Manifesto:
  
  The End of Business as Usual

the cluetrain manifesto - 95 theses

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the cluetrain manifesto - elevator rap

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advertising book business cluetrain consumerism economics internet manifesto marketing social

Elevator Rap

David Weinberger

when

(Inter)networked

Markets

meet

(Intra)networked

Workers

The connectedness of the Web is transforming what's inside and outside your business — your market and your employees.

Through the Internet, the people in your markets are discovering and inventing new ways to converse. They're talking about your business. They're telling one another the truth, in very human voices.

There's a new conversation

Intranets are enabling your best people to hyperlink themselves together, outside the org chart. They're incredibly productive and innovative. They're telling one another the truth, in very human voices.

between and among your market and your workers. It's making them smarter and it's enabling them to discover their human voices.

You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures.

Or you can join the conversation.
elevator rap

the following is the elevator rap from

The Cluetrain Manifesto:

The End of Business as Usual

the cluetrain manifesto - chapter two - the longing

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And when the thrill of hearing ourselves speak again wears off, we will begin to build a new world.

That is what the Web is for.
Long live customer-support reps who are willing to get as pissed off at their own company as the angry customer is.
13 more annotations...
- The memo is dead. Long live e-mail.
- It is a public place. That is crucial. Having a voice doesn’t mean being able to sing in the shower. It means presenting oneself to others. The Web provides a place like we’ve never seen before.
- It is the granting of a place in which we can be who we are (and even who we aren’t, if that’s the voice we’ve chosen).
- Since you could just as adequately view the Web as a huge reference library, why did home pages seize our imaginations? Because a home page is a place in which we can express who we are and let the world in. Meager though it may be, a home page is a way of having a voice.
- There are many ways to look at what’s drawing us to the Web: access to information, connection to other people, entrance to communities, the ability to broadcast ideas. None of these are wrong perspectives. But they all come back to the promise of voice and thus of authentic self.
- The Longing
  
  We don’t know what the Web is for but we’ve adopted it faster than any technology since fire.
- We are all victims of this assault on voice, the attempt to get us to shut up and listen to the narrowest range of ideas imaginable.
  
  It is only the force of our regret at having lived in this bargain that explains the power of our longing for the Web.
- And yet... we feel resentment. Find someone who likes being managed, who feels fully at home in his or her professional self. Our longing for the Web is rooted in the deep resentment we feel towards being managed.
  >
  
  However much we long for the Web is how much we hate our job.
- How to Hate Your Job
  
  A managed environment requires behavior from us that we accept as inevitable although, of course, it is really mandatory only because it is mandated. We call it "professionalism."
- This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates that something is missing in our lives. What is missing is the sound of the human voice.
  >
  
  The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice.
- The Longing
  
  David Weinberger
  
  
  
  What Is the Web For?
- chapter two
  
  the following is the complete second chapter of
  >
  
  The Cluetrain Manifesto:
  >
  
  The End of Business as Usual
  >
- the following is the complete second chapter of
  
  The Cluetrain Manifesto:
  
  The End of Business as Usual
  
  Copyright © 1999, 2001

the cluetrain manifesto - chapter five - The end of business as usual

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The character of business is becoming the same as the character of the Web -- an explosion reconfigured by the intersection of hearts.
To the outside, the company begins to look like a set of hyperlinked clusters who select themselves based on trust and respect and even their sense of fun. The trust is built through the quality of voice of the participants: that is all that counts in a hyperlinked team.
43 more annotations...
- Every business is dysfunctional because everything human is at least a little bit broken. It’s not an accident. It’s the human condition.
- When the hurdles to membership lower, the boundaries blur.
  > The blurring isn’t occurring only inside of the Fort. Businesses are building extranets to enable their strategic partners to access information.
- Go out and commit a whopper. Then embrace it publicly.
  
  It’s a good feeling. It’s liberating. It’s how you find your voice.
- Mistakes give us something to talk about.
  
  Being wrong is a lot funnier than being right. The right type of laughter -- laughter at what the mistake reveals about our situation rather than laughter aimed at a person who dares to be human -- is enormously liberating. In fact, laughter is the sound that knowledge makes when it’s born.
- Errors are how assumptions become visible. And there is nothing more valuable than a newly discovered assumption, because only then can you see what’s holding you back and what could propel you forward.
  
  There’s too much to know, so all important decisions are, to some extent, random. By being free to make errors, you can try more paths until you stumble on one that takes you somewhere interesting (albeit probably not where you at first thought -- mistakenly -- you should be heading).
- But wrongness has a lot going for it beyond the fact that some things can only be learned through trial and error. For example:
  
  Some people are great at generating ideas but terrible at thinking through their impact. You want them to have as many bad ideas as possible because they will thereby randomly generate more good ideas. (I tell my clients that I try to maintain a 9:1 ratio of bad ideas to good. And, no, I can’t tell which are which. If only.)
- But it’s not just systems that are imperfect. More important, so are we humans. Say it with me: humans are imperfect. I am imperfect.
  
  Feels good, doesn’t it?
- Unlike information, they have a start and a finish. The order counts a lot.
  
  They talk about events, not conditions.
  
  They imply a deep relationship among the events, a relationship characterized overall as "unfolding" as if the end were present in the beginning
- We live in stories. We breathe stories. Most of our best conversations are about stories. Stories are a big step sidewise and up from information:
- We don’t need more information. We don’t need better information. We don’t need automatically filtered and summarized information. We need understanding. We desperately want to understand what’s going on in our business, in our markets. And understanding is not more or higher information.
- (Here’s the instruction manual for a Web browser: if it’s blue and underlined, click on it.)
- The Web succeeded where the Internet failed, in other words, simply by adding a document front-end, and hyperlinking those documents together. The document user interface made it simple for people to get started with the Web.
- Information is built to be managed; the stuff on the Web is the product of the lack of management. Information is stripped down; the content of the Web is rich in its contextuality. These two sets of contrasts go together.
- The Web isn’t about information, however. While it takes a database administrator or data entry specialist to enter data into a database, it takes any idiot with a computer to post something -- from naked pictures of your cat to an overheated manifesto -- on an intranet or on the Web. And it’s only going to get easier.
- So, two outcomes are likely as the work of business increasingly moves online. First, we’ll see more ways of deciding because we’re seeing more ways of associating. Second, an important part of every project will be how you are going to decide.
- wisdom is a property of groups. In most instances, groups are collectively smarter than their individual members and often make more sensible decisions.
- But if everyone has access to information, those on top no longer necessarily have the widest view. Being close to the customer and being in constant interaction with one’s suppliers may bring an equally deep view into the business and its real possibilities.
- This may not sound revolutionary, but consider:
  
  People used to keep their drafts secret for fear of looking like idiots, but now they post them and acknowledge they may be completely wrong.
  
  Work has gone from an individual task to a group task.
  
  The old model of keeping drafts secret until the moment of publication has been broken; ideas are now public from their inception.
  
  Ideas are assumed to be given out freely rather than hoarded.
  
  People are brought in not because they are in a chain of command but because they have necessary skills, share interests, and are fun to work with.
  
  Sober-sided reports that were the mark of professionalism are often replaced by humor-filled interchanges.
- What’s gone wrong here is time. Because we are geared towards heroic presentations, we keep our work under wraps until we go public with it (that is, publish it) at the big meeting. Until that moment, no one is allowed to look at it without our permission. It is secret.
- People wander around in information and learn where to find the stuff that counts, the stuff that’s wrong in enlightening ways, the stuff that’s purposefully off-base, the stuff that’s fun, the stuff that’s ludicrous.
- Information wants to be free, sure. But it wants to be free because it wants to find other ideas, copulate, and spawn whole broods of new ideas.
  
  Controlling information is like trying to control a conversation: it can’t be done and still be genuine.
- And there’s a price to assuming that secrecy is normal, that everything is to be kept secret unless otherwise noted. Not only do you have the expense of keeping the secret, but you lose the value of information. Information by its nature only has value insofar as it’s known. And, when combined with smart people with an impulse to solve problems and exploit opportunities, information increases its value.
- In this environment, making judgments about what counts is a honed skill, one as personal as writing well or having a sense of humor. It is not something we’re willing to delegate to others.
- One more thing: the Web changes time from sequential to random.
- They know better than anyone, in many instances, when the work can realistically be finished. Managing them simply means asking them.
- He managed by holding people to deadlines. I managed by holding people to people.
- We are seeing, then, a realignment of loyalties, from resting comfortably in the assumed paternalism of Fort Business to an aggressive devotion to making life better for customers. The business isn’t a machine anymore, it’s a resource I alone and we together can use to make a customer happy.
- This is a well-known phenomenon in customer support: people would rather find the answers themselves on your Web site than have the answers delivered to them by picking up the phone.
- How could you hope to capture this on an org chart? And how do you compensate people fairly if their value depends upon their participation in a shifting set of hyperlinked associations? How do you hire great hyperlinked people? How could this ever be expressed on a résumé?
  
  Great questions... because there aren’t clear answers yet.
- Increasingly, a useful expert is not someone with (containing) all the answers but someone who knows where to find answers. The new experts have value not by centralizing information and control but by being great "pointers" to other people and to useful, current information.
- This last point is a big shift. Links have value by pointing away from themselves to some other site. All Web pages derive some value from the links on them. (A page with no links is literally a dead end on the Web.)
- And the value of the individual "node" to a large degree depends upon the node’s links.
- Pages -- or "documents" as we sometimes say -- are extraordinarily complex ways of presenting information. Typically, they tell you as much about the author as about their topic, a big change from the pre-Web information environment that aimed at generating faceless data.
- I can take a quick look at a site and come back later without having to find another parking space, go to the end of the line, or pay a second entry fee. The Web puts the control of my time into my hands.
- Conversations subvert hierarchy. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Being a human being among others subverts hierarchy.
- 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 to be wrong.
- To be human is to be imperfect. We die. We make mistakes.
  
  Sometimes we run from our fallibility by being decisive. But doubt is the natural human state, and decisiveness -- more addictive than anything you might shoot into your veins -- is often based on a superstitious belief in the magic of action.
- Sure, businesses are legal entities. But that’s just a piece of paper. In fact, the real business is the set of connections among people.
- Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy
  
  Fort Business’s assumptions are being challenged by a meek little thing: a hyperlink.
- The Web isn’t primarily a medium for information, marketing, or sales. It’s a world in which people meet, talk, build, fight, love, and play. In fact, the Web world is bigger than the business world and is swallowing the business world whole.
- The company works in an office building in order to bring together all of the things I need to get my job done and to avoid distracting me. In fact, more and more of what I need is outside the corporate walls. And when I really want to get something done, I go home.
- The Web, in short, has led every wired person in your organization to expect direct connections not only to information but also to the truth spoken in human voices.
- chapter five
  
  the following is the complete fifth chapter of
  
  The Cluetrain Manifesto:
  
  The End of Business as Usual

the cluetrain manifesto - chapter four - Markets Are Conversations

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What’s happening to the market is precisely what should -- and will -- happen to marketing. Marketing needs to become a craft. Recall that craftworkers listen to the material they’re forming, shaping the pot to the feel of the clay, designing the house to fit with and even reveal the landscape. The stuff of marketing is the market itself. Marketing can’t become a craft until it can hear the new -- the old -- sound of its markets.

By listening, marketing will re-learn how to talk.
Marketing isn’t going to go away. Nor should it. But it needs to evolve, rapidly and thoroughly, for markets have become networked and now know more than business, learn faster than business, are more honest than business, and are a hell of a lot more fun than business.
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- Lessons learned? The party’s already started. You can join or not. If you don’t, your silence will be taken as arrogance, stupidity, meanness, or all three. If you’re going to join, don’t do it as a legal entity or wearing your cloak of officialdom. Join it as a person with a name, a point of view, a sense of humor, and passion.
- For that reason, it’d be good for employees to make every effort to clarify the status of their remarks. No, this does not mean that they should sign their e-mail with the phrase "Does not necessarily represent the views of Management, etc.," -- a common sign of worker alienation. The real aim is to communicate the status, not to introduce still more legalisms.
- Part of listening to a voice is assessing the role of the words and the speaker. The Web is giving us lots of training in that.
- Now those lips have the global megaphone of the Web. In a Webbed world, loose lips float ships.
- Expend your efforts instead on building a company that stands for something worthwhile, so that you can’t wait to unleash every single one of your voices into the wilds of the new global conversation.
- Who Speaks?
  
  But who gets to speak?
- So our advice: speak real words. The new Web conversations are remarkably sensitive to the empty pomposity that has served marketing so well. Until now.
- It’s obvious why we fall into TechnoLatin even if we know better. We sound so smart when we use words no one quite understands. We sound so precise. And we sound like we belong: "distributed platform environment" does for technology marketers what "you know, like, whatever... " does for teenagers.
- Equally vague and common are platform, open, environment, and support when used as a verb. A veterinarian using TechnoLatin might say that a dog serves as a platform for sniffing, is an open environment for fleas, and that it supports barking.
  
  This isn’t language. It’s camouflage.
- TechnoLatin takes perfectly meaningful words and empties them. If language is a living organism, TechnoLatin words are like those pod people in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They look real, but they are not. And like the pod people, TechnoLatin has become the norm. Clarity is the exception when it should be the rule.
- The Wrong Kind of Buzz
  
  English is the perfect language for preachers because it
  
  allows you to talk until you think of what to say.
  
  - Garrison Keillor
- You may be able to win back the trust you’ve blown, but only by speaking in a real voice, and by engaging people rather than delivering messages to them.
- The market will find out who and what you are. Count on it.
- Corporate Voice
  
  Here’s a syllogism. Your company needs to engage in the new market conversations. Conversations occur in human voices. Your voice is the public expression of your authentic identity, of who you really are, of where you really come from. So let’s draw the logical conclusion: on the Net at least, your company can’t engage in the market conversation without its authentic voice.
- Here’s some advice on entering the conversation: Loosen up. Lighten up. And shut up for a while. Listen for a change.
- And if a company is genuinely confused about what it is, there’s an easy way to find out: listen to what your market says you are. If it’s not to your liking, think long and hard before assuming that the market is wrong, composed of a lot of people who just are too dumb or blind to understand the Inner You.
- These indicators have a common theme. Each points to a gap between who your company is and what it says it is. The gap is where inauthenticity lives, and the exposure of the gap constitutes corporate embarrassment.
- There are other clues that a company is having an identity crisis:
  
  Is there a spark of life in its marketing materials? Do they smack of focus groups and the safety of the lowest common denominator, or do they take the risk of being as interesting as its best customers?
  
  Do its marketing programs keep people out or invite them in? Do they help customers and prospects make connections to the relevant employees?
  
  Is the company able to admit a mistake? Can employees admit they disagree with management decisions or the latest marketing mantra? Or must they always explain why everything is perfect in this, the best of all possible companies?
  
  Is the company so jealous of its "image" that it has surgically implanted a lawyer where its sense of humor used to be?
  
  Does it drill its employees on the corporate catechism, or can the workers tell stories that for them capture the essence of what the company is about?
  
  Do the employees routinely sign their e-mail "Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the management"?
- Too bad, because positioning actually is about something much more important, something that gets trivialized by those who reduce it to generating a catchy tagline. Positioning is about discovering who you, as a business, are -- discovering your identity, not inventing a new one willy-nilly. Positioning should help a company become what it is, not something it’s not (no matter how cool it would be).
- Recording companies thought they were originators but instead found they were intermediaries. And the most efficient markets tend to have the fewest intermediaries.
- Soon after eBay took off, some merchants realized that they don’t need a Web storefront of their own; they can just offer their wares at the auction site.
- In fact, in the most exciting new markets developing on the Web, the demand side -- the market -- tells the suppliers just what they’re willing to pay. This is quite literally true at www.priceline.com, where you can let hotels, airlines, mortgage companies, and car dealerships know exactly what your best offer is. They can take your business or leave it. That’s up to them. But the pricing is up to you.
- Your site needs to have a voice, to express a point of view, and to give access to helpful people inside your corporation. Replace the brochures with ways to ignite dialogues. Not only do your customers want to talk with real people inside your organization, but your employees are desperate to talk with real customers. They want to tell them the truth.
- If you want to take your first baby step towards entering the market conversation, torch any brochureware on your site. At best your networked market views it as a speed bump, at worst as an insult.
- Ads may still have hypnotic, subliminal effects, like those tunes we can’t get out of our heads (a legacy of the old advertising industry adage "if you have nothing to say, sing it"),
- What these little voices used to say to a single friend is now accessible to the world.
- "PR types." We all know what that means: they’re the used car salesmen of the corporate world.
- No self-respecting editor would let a source -- least of all a biased one -- write a story. And no editor is in the market for a thinly disguised advertisement, which is the actual content of a press release.
- When Push Comes to Suck
  
  The reluctance of business-as-usual to break out of its set way of thinking was perhaps epitomized best by the Web’s own infatuation with "push technology." This reached its zenith in May, 1997, when Wired, the computer industry’s utopian fashion monthly, boldly declared its wish to supplant the Web with media more suited to advertising.
- Metcalfe’s Law*, a famous axiom of the computer industry, states that the value of a network increases as the square of the number of users connected to it -- connections multiply value exponentially. This is also true for conversations on networked markets. In fact, as the network gets larger it also gets smarter. The Cluetrain Corollary: the level of knowledge on a network increases as the square of the number of users times the volume of conversation.
- Networked Markets
  
  The long silence -- the industrial interruption of the human conversation -- is coming to an end. On the Internet, markets are getting more connected and more powerfully vocal every day. These markets want to talk, just as they did for the thousands of years that passed before market became a verb with us as its object.
- Marketers felt this truth in their bones, and learned to cloak their messages, to disguise them as entertainment, to repackage the content as regularly as business learned to vary this year’s product line. Today, we all know and have come to expect this. We are even disappointed if it’s not well done. Commercials disguise themselves as one-act plays, press releases play the part of important stories, and advertising masquerades as education. Marketing became an elaborate game between business and the consumer, but the outcome remained fixed. As sophisticated as marketing became, it has never overcome the ability of people to smell the BS behind all the marketing perfume.
- That’s the awful truth about marketing. It broadcasts messages to people who don’t want to listen. Every advertisement, press release, publicity stunt, and giveaway engineered by a Marketing department is colored by the fact that it’s going to a public that doesn’t ask to hear it.
- One problem: there is no demand for messages. The customer doesn’t want to hear from business, thank you very much. The message that gets broadcast to you, me, and the rest of the earth’s population has nothing to do with me in particular. It’s worse than noise. It’s an interruption. It’s the Anti-Conversation.
- Delivered locally, shipped globally, repeated inescapably, the business of marketing devoted itself to delivering the message. Unfortunately, the customer never wanted to take delivery.
- In the twentieth century, the rise of mass communications media enhanced industry’s ability to address even larger markets with no loss of shoe leather, and mass marketing truly came into its own.
- "Markets were conversations" doesn’t mean "markets were noisy." It means markets were places where people met to see and talk about each other’s work.
  
  Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.
- Markets Are Conversations
  
  Doc Searls and David Weinberger
- chapter four
  
  the following is the complete fourth chapter of
  
  The Cluetrain Manifesto:
  
  The End of Business as Usual
- The market conversation can spot marketing recitatives within two syllables because the Web thrives on spontaneity. We are all so tuned to the sound of the real human voice that, given a chance to interact, we can’t be fooled... at least not for long.

The Cluetrain Manifesto — Entire Text Index Page

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22 Mar 07

the cluetrain manifesto - foreword

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And why not laughter? It’s one of the signature melodies of human conversation. This book shows how conversation forms the basis of business, how business lost that voice for a while, and how that language is returning to business thanks to a technology that inspires, and in many cases demands, that we speak from the heart.
It will certainly become essential. Why am I so sure? Because like nothing else out there, it shows us how to grasp the human side of business and technology, and being human, try as we might, is the only fate from which we can never escape.

the cluetrain manifesto - introduction

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Millions have flocked to the Net in an incredibly short time, not because it was user-friendly -- it wasn’t -- but because it seemed to offer some intangible quality long missing in action from modern life
Hypertext is inherently nonhierarchical and antibureaucratic. It does not reinforce loyalty and obedience; it encourages idle speculation and loose talk. It encourages stories.
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- The result is not just new things learned but a vastly enhanced ability to learn things. And the pace of this learning is accelerating.