Featured Review: The Cluetrain Manifesto

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual

Review by Mark McLaren

The Cluetrain Manifesto started in 1999 as a set of 95 theses written in collaboration by four men who can rightfully be called Pioneers of Web 2.0: David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Christopher Locke and Rick Levine. The work was originally put together online and was later published as a book in 2000. You can read the book for free online: http://www.cluetrain.com

The Cluetrain’s theses were written in the style of theologian Martin Luther’s radical work, The Ninety-Five Theses, which launched the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses called for a break from the Catholic Church because, as he saw it, the Church had created an artificial barrier between man and God in order to increase its own wealth and power.

In 1999, the Cluetrain Manifesto authors saw the Internet as the source of a similar radical transformation. They believed that new methods of communication made possible by the Internet would break down a number of metaphorical and literal walls: walls between the corporation and its customers, between corporate leaders and their employees, and between groups of employees.

The name “Cluetrain” comes from a quote in the book that refers to a Fortune 500 company whose leaders could not see that it was heading in the wrong direction even though “the cluetrain stopped there” all the time (i.e., the signs were obvious to others).

The 95 theses section of the book opens with this statement: “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. (…) 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.”

According to the authors, the Industrial Revolution brought the advantages of mass production, especially economies of scale, but along with these came mass media and mass marketing, and the idea that employees were just cogs in the machine. Consumers were also treated as cogs – having no unique qualities. As long as they bought the stuff rolling off the production lines, business leaders were happy – and enriched.

Marketing to consumers meant broadcasting, from one to many, in a single direction: newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Consumers were told what to buy (exactly what others like them were buying). They had no way of expressing their individual preferences. As the saying goes, they could have any color they wanted as long as it was black.

People within companies fared no better. They were told what to think. They were told to maintain the wall between the company and the consumer. In this view, public relations is designed to present only that which the company wants to reveal, a kind of Leave It To Beaver image for public consumption. But the Internet changes everything. It is “enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.” People are once again finding their true, human “voice”, and they are sharing information in all sorts of new ways. Consumers “know more than companies do about their own products,” and they are talking about it online.

The Manifesto’s authors saw and articulated in 1999 everything today’s social media marketer takes as a starting point:

· The market is a conversation.
· The Web is not hierarchical: with hyperlinks, anyone can link to anything, including negative reviews and ranting bloggers.
· There is no one central authority on the Web. Power has shifted, or will shift, to the masses. The Web is democratic.
· The Web is open: people can post anything they want!
· Although there is a lot of junk, there is also a lot of good information on the Web, and it will continue to grow.
· Like people, the Web has flaws. The Web is more “real” than mass media, and people like that.
· There are no borders, or at least borders are breaking down.
· On the Web, people can smell a sales pitch. Being transparent and being yourself works best.

All this is in the Manifesto. It’s what Chris Brogan, Mitch Joel, and all the other social media gurus have built their careers on.

In the Manifesto, most of it is in extremely colorful language. The tone sometimes reminds me of my high school’s underground newspaper: self-righteous, sophomoric, bucking the system. Still, the message is dead on: In the twentieth century, “Corporate speech became mass produced ‘messages’ jammed into a one-way spam cannon aimed at a dream that hasn’t faded since: interchangeable consumers.”

There are plenty of political overtones. This is not a book written for business people or marketers. As Weinberger says, “the Web world is bigger than the business world.” As the authors see it, the freedom of the Internet will make businesses “come out and play.”

The bottom line for the authors is that the Internet will usher in an era of liberation and renewed conversation. “Conversing” means connecting on a “human” level rather than as part of a corporate, profit-driven power structure.

In the Manifesto, one clear symbol of corporate structure and method is data analysis. For David Weinberger, analytics is man’s attempt to control something that can’t really be controlled. In a sense, it’s dehumanizing, and it’s what the new world of Web relationships will necessarily overcome, because “The world is more like a huge set of messy hyperlinks than like a really big table of data.”

Today we can see businesses working day and night to quantify social networking interactions, to put “the conversation” into a spread sheet. Marketers have accepted the truths expressed by the Cluetrain authors, and they are intent on creating new ways to harness them. They still need to reach consumers, many of whom have discovered that their online “voice” carries a bit further than it did ten years ago. The loudest voices are the Influencers, people marketers really want to reach. Marketers can sometimes get their message out if they connect with the right influencers. It’s not broadcasting, but it usually works.

The Cluetrain Manifesto Authors

David Weinberger
http://twitter.com/dweinberger
http://www.johotheblog.com/

Doc Searls
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/

Christopher Locke
http://www.rageboy.com/blogger.html

Rick Levine
http://www.cluetrain.com/rick.html

Mark McLaren is an online marketing consultant and owner of McBuzz Communications. McBuzz specializes in search engine optimization, social media marketing and WordPress websites.
http://www.mcbuzz.com
http://twitter.com/mcbuzz

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