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Cluetrain Requires Conversation
Cluetrain talks far less about what markets need that about what they are. The first thesis says —
There's nothing conversational about a message. I submit that if a message turns into a conversation, it isn't a message at all. It's a topic. Not many people noticed (including me, until Jakob Nielsen pointed it out) that The Cluetrain Manifesto was written in first and second person plural voices, and was addressed not by marketers to markets, but by markets to marketers. It said —
Many years ago, when I was making a good living as a marketing consultant, my wife and I were talking about the differences between marketing and sales, and the antipathy that often exists within companies between marketing and sales organizations. As a veteran manufacturer and retailer — working both ends of the Value Chain — my wife understood sales, but confessed to mystification about marketing. I explained "strategy" and "positioning" and how marketing is all about "finding" and "influencing" what customers want. After awhile we talked about the difference between sales and marketing roles within companies. Marketing is "strategic," I said, while sales is "tactical." "Why doesn't Marketing talk directly to customers?" she asked. "Because that's what Sales does." "Then I'll tell you what the difference is." "What's that?" "Sales is real. Marketing is bullshit." It stung, but she was right. So was Jakob when he told me Cluetrain's authors had defected from marketing — had crossed over to join markets in their Net-enabled revolt against marketing. I don't want to slam the ideals of marketing. Theodore Levitt was right on when he said the job of marketing is "to give the customer what he wants, no matter what." The problem is, that's not what marketing is usually paid to do. Marketers are in the influence business. Marketing's customers aren't consumers. They're companies that want to influence consumers. But most consumers would rather be customers. They'd rather have a voice. They don't want to reinforce the customer influence machinery we call marketing. Aside from the coupon addicts who justify creepy companies like Gato and Dash (which obtain high click-through rates by serving up promotional discount pop-out teasers to Web surfers who volunteer for the service), most of us don't want to be "targets" for "messages" we never asked for. The Net is a marketplace. It's a convrersational habitat. If companies dwell in that habitat, they'll have to talk. And since companies aren't human, their humans will have to do the talking. The competent talkers will be in far more demand than the incompetent ones. Simple as that. Also messy and almost impossible to manage. That's the rub. Glenn concludes:
What matters is that the Net is ours, and we're still building out its infrastructure — something that can't work unless we build it for each other as well as ourselves. Like Dave used to say, "Ask not what the Web can do for you, ask what you can do for the Web." Worse as things may be, more and more companies are asking what they can do for the Web. They have no choice. That's what works best. A few years ago we were talking about the Economics of Abundance. Now we're barely beginning to learn about the Economics of Altruism — of what we do for us. Not what we do to or get from each other. Not how we control other people and other companies. Now it's time to get real again. Marketing is a good place to start. The question for me is, when you cut out the bullshit, what's left of marketing? Here's another way to look at it: when you cut out the demand for bullshit — by the people now paying for markeing (on the supply side, since there never was any direct funding from the consuming end) — what will marketing be paid to do? Will it still be marketing? Or will it be some form of conversation that obsoletes it? For instance, what we're doing right now? What's a little hustle between friends?  The Magma Group does what it calls peer-to-peer marketing on college campuses. Business 2.0 (no link to the story yet) calls the system a way to aggregate marketing data. In return for a mouse pad and some t-shirts, students round up classmates' signatures on documents that disclose a bunch of personal information to marketers. Why? Young people are more willing to disclose personal information to peers than to adults, the piece says. What's a tsunami between neighboring party animals? Dr. Weinberger points us to one piece of evidence after another of clueholes akin to wormholes in space/time. Resistance Are Futile Michael O'Connor Clarke sent this today. It had to be done, he said. And he are right. Oy, cont'd I just wrote this nice long blog in the only time I had on the only box available -- this old Linux server that sits in my old, now almost empty, office -- and lost everything I had written, for no apparent reason. Anyway, the one thing I still have time to do is point to this interview with Kuro5hin's Rusty Foster. Don't think I'll have time for much more in any case until I'm back in Santa Barbara on Monday.
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