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PR Communications: Critiquing The Cluetrain Manifesto

Tags: cluetrain, critiquing on 2008-04-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

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11. 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.
14. 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.
Dell is controlling networked conversations now that the company has developed a process to engage customers with their issues and complaints about the company, in blogs and social media.
48. 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.
54. 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
- One criticism I level at the cluetrain manifesto is that it fails to recognize that without command and control, there's no budget, companies give budgets to departments, campaigns, and disciplines, typically not individuals.
Dell is probably one of the best stories about the use of social media for engaging customers; in July of 2006 the company realized that 50% of comments about the company in their blogging community held a negative sentiment. T
Macromedia was another company that focused its efforts on a few employees, 65, in development and product development when the company launched blogs in 2002. Macromedia has since merged into Adobe and their social media story is not quite as compelling, however, in 2005 Macromedia was using blogging for product development, customer service, sales leads, and higher rankings.
My gut tells me the dedicated approach works better than the open approach in companies. Now there's a dilemma for cluetrainer's. In Thesis 57, the cluetrain states, "Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner." I don't think this is correct, unless those companies that have tried the cluetrain manifesto approach did not really follow the entire theses. In which case is there an example of a company that is actually following the manifesto successfully, used the open approach and had success? If not maybe it is time to reevaluate some of the details of the hypothesis?
"These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other's voices," this is in relation to the conversations happening among customers and employees. I would suggest that most employees are not empowered to converse in the way that cluetrain manifesto suggests, and even if they are employees have as many cultural hang-ups as management.
62. Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

- Do employees actually want to talk to customers?
But don't mistake the current state as an endpoint but rather see it as limited progress. That is why I think it is worth talking about the Cluetrain Manifesto in 2008, 10 years after the team got started on it -- because it is still so early in the transformation of the relationship between companies and their market