The Cluetrain Manifesto

Time 2020-09-26 18:04:23

Web Name: The Cluetrain Manifesto

WebSite: http://cluetrain.com

ID:60706

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"The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery." Veteran of a firm now free-falling out of the Fortune 500 "...companies so lobotomized that they can't speak in a recognizably human voice build sites that smell like death." "Fear and Loathing on the Web" The Industry Standard and CNN Interactive 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.Networked markets are beginning toself-organize faster than the companies that have traditionallyserved them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming betterinformed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing frommost business organizations.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 ourworld, our place to be. Whatever you've been told, our flags flyfree. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth, remember.Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissentingarguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open,natural, uncontrived.The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings thatwere simply not possible in the era of mass media. In both internetworked markets and amongintranetworked employees, people are speaking to eachother in a powerful new way.These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms ofsocial organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, moreorganized. Participation in a networked market changes peoplefundamentally.People in networked markets have figured out that they get farbetter information and support from one another than fromvendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value tocommoditized products.There are no secrets. The networked market knows more thancompanies do about their own products. And whether the news isgood or bad, they tell everyone.What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. Ametaphysical construct called "The Company" is the only thingstanding between the two.Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these newnetworked conversations. To their intended online audiences,companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" ofbusiness the sound of mission statements andbrochures will seem as contrived and artificial as thelanguage of the 18th century French court.Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, thedog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.Companies that assume online markets are the same markets thatused to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.Companies that don't realize their markets are now networkedperson-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joinedin conversation are missing their best opportunity.Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. Ifthey blow it, it could be their last chance.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 thecorporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a littlehumility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to takea position. Optimally, it should relate to something theirmarket actually cares about.Bombastic boasts "We are positioned to become thepreeminent provider of XYZ" do not constitute a position.Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk tothe people with whom they hope to create relationships.Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies aredeeply 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 marketmight see what's really going on inside the company.Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but thebreakup is inevitable and coming fast. Because they arenetworked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationshipswith blinding speed.Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networkedknowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own"downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty?What's that?"Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. Itcan't be "picked up" at some tony conference.Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a redherring. Most are protecting less against competitors thanagainst their own market and workforce.As with networked markets, people are also talking to each otherdirectly inside the company and not just about rulesand regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines. Such conversations are taking place today on corporateintranets. But only when the conditions are right.Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HRpolicies and other corporate information that workers are doingtheir best to ignore. Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best arebuilt bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to constructsomething far more valuable: an intranetworked corporateconversation.A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings ofthe word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of anyunion.While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily onopen intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. Theyneed to resist the urge to "improve" or control these networkedconversations.When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear andlegalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage soundsremarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace.Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fullyunderstood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed workorders could be handed down from on high.Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respectfor hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.Command-and-control management styles both derive from andreinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture ofparanoia.Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of openconversation kills companies.In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almostinvariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsoletenotions of command and control.As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they arebroken. Command and control are met with hostility byintranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust ininternetworked markets.These two conversations want to talk to each other. Theyare speaking the same language. They recognize each other'svoices.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 onlineperceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions thatare actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talkto is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, oflanguage that rings false and often is.Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want toparticipate in the conversations going on behind the corporatefirewall.We want access to your corporate information, to your plans andstrategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We willnot settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-blockwith eye candy but lacking any substance.We're also the workers who make your companies go. We want totalk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudeswritten into a script. As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of gettingour information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annualreports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us toeach other?As markets, as workers, we wonder why you're not listening. Youseem to be speaking a different language.The inflated self-important jargon you sling around in thepress, at your conferences what's that got to do with us?Maybe you're impressing your investors. Maybe you're impressingWall 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 letyou talk that way.Your tired notions of "the market" make our eyes glaze over. Wedon't recognize ourselves in your projections perhapsbecause we know we're already elsewhere.You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at thedoor. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make itsomething interesting for a change.We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, somebetter 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 want you to drop your trip, come out of your neuroticself-involvement, join the party. Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it'snot the only thing on your mind.Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind ofone-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 chatwith your CEO. What do you mean she's not in?Research in the field of medicine. Now it is easy to buy viagra online for men.We know some people from your company. They're pretty coolonline. Do you have any more like that you're hiding? Can theycome out and play?When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If youdidn't have such a tight rein on "your people" maybe they'd beamong the people we'd turn to.When we're not busy being your "target market," many of usare your people. We'd rather be talking to friends onlinethan watching the clock. That would get your name around betterthan your entire million dollar web site. But you tell us speakingto the market is Marketing's job.We'd like it if you got what's going on here. That'd be realnice. But it would be a big mistake to think we're holding ourbreath.We have better things to do than worry about whether you'llchange in time to get our business. Business is only a part ofour 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 thelight, 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 interestingthan most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, andcertainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we'vebeen seeing.Our allegiance is to ourselves our friends, our new alliesand acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies thathave no part in this world, also have no future.Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. Why can't theyhear this market timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.We're both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries thatseparate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, butthey'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 appearconfused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster thanthey are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slowus down.We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. Butwe are not waiting.However, world rights granted for non-commercial useon condition that this page remains intact.Rip it, steal it, web it, mail it, post it. This message wants to MOVE!The Cluetrain Manifesto (cluetrain.com/index.html) by Levine,Locke,Searls,Weinberger is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License [Added 2015]

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