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28 Nov 07

the cluetrain manifesto

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book business cluetrain consumerism corporate-culture e-commerce economics internet marketing manifesto marketing

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.

18 Nov 07

Wired 15.04: The See-Through CEO

www.wired.com/...wired40_ceo.html - Preview

blogging business corporate-blogging corporate-culture radical-transparency

"You can't hide anything anymore," Don Tapscott says. Coauthor of The Naked Corporation, a book about corporate transparency, and Wikinomics, Tapscott is explaining a core truth of the see-through age: If you engage in corporate flimflam, people will find out.
Secrecy is dying. It's probably already dead.
6 more annotations...
- Being "liked" sounds awfully touchy-feely - yet it's central to this flowering of glasnost.
- By seeming "basically like a normal human," a company can quickly generate a surge of goodwill.
- The new breed of naked executives also discover that once people are interested in you, they're interested in helping you out - by offering ideas, critiques, and extra brain cycles. Customers become working partners.
- Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system.
- But here's the interesting paradox: The reputation economy creates an incentive to be more open, not less. Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation
- But if you've got hundreds or thousands of sites linking to you and commenting on you, the law of averages takes over, and odds are the opinion will be accurate: The cranks will be outweighed by cooler heads. Again, the Net rewards the transparent

01 Oct 07

The Anarchist's Cookbook

www.fastcompany.com/...wholefoods.html - Preview

business corporate-culture

01 May 07

Can A Big Company Really Blog? at The Blog Herald

www.blogherald.com/...can-a-big-company-really-blog - Preview

blogging corporate-blogging corporate-culture

There’s an interesting article in The Economist about CEOs attending the Davos World Economic Forum being encouraged to blog (the theme this year is “The Shifting Power Equation”).
The notion of CEOs blogging grew out of the world of small business, in particular the online start-up, where having a blog is now as obligatory as having a an AJAX-laden homepage and a domain name that is either a misspelling or a made-up word. In the start-up context, a CEO blogging makes all the sense in the world, because the CEO and the other handful of team members ARE the company.
4 more annotations...
- In his rant the other day about the slow evolution of PR, Stowe Boyd said:
  
  The whole point is that the people formerly known at the audience — the edglings, as I call us — are participating in the blogosphere, and if individuals within companies want to, they can participate: as individuals. Companies don’t blog, or converse: people do.
- People blog, that’s absolutely right, but a corporate blogger needs to balance being an “individual” with being a representative of the company.
- It all comes back to control.
- The Economist cites a blog post from Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, to demonstrate that even CEO’s who are earnestly trying to blog “authentically” are still completely hamstrung:

25 Apr 07

Sun's Jonathan Schwartz's aapologizes to Matt Mullenweg Weblog : Weblog

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blogging corporate-culture jonathan-schwartz sun

28 Mar 07

The Long Tail: The Microsoft Memo: Some choose radical transparency, some have it thrust upon them

www.longtail.com/...the_microsoft_m.html - Preview

blogging corporate-culture microsoft transparency

Today the company has more than 3,500 bloggers and its corporate messaging has gone from mostly press releases and scripted executive speeches to more of an authentic conversation in public between rank-and-file employees and customers. It's a fascinating shift in culture for a company that was once known for being fanatically obsessed with trying to control its image and messaging.

24 Mar 07

the cluetrain manifesto - chapter one - Internet Apocalypso

cluetrain.com/...apocalypso.html - Preview

book business cluetrain consumerism corporate-culture economics marketing

"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.
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.
52 more annotations...
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- As would soon become obvious, the Net was a powerful multiplier for intellectual capital.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- From Ancient Markets to Global Networks
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- These economies of scale led to enormous profits because they enabled selling a far cheaper product to a far wider market.
- 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.
- In contrast, genuine conversation flourishes only in an atmosphere of free and open exchange.

22 Mar 07

the cluetrain manifesto - foreword

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book business cluetrain consumerism corporate-culture economics marketing

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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book business cluetrain consumerism corporate-culture economics marketing

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.
1 more annotations...
- The result is not just new things learned but a vastly enhanced ability to learn things. And the pace of this learning is accelerating.