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| Thursday, June 21, 2007 |
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Because I was getting hungry 
Constellations
| | I'm at Supernova2007 in San Francisco. It's been going on for two days already. Those two were very unconference-y. Held at Wharton West, they reminded me of the first BloggerCon at the Harvard Law School. The classroom settings, with semicircular seating, everybody facing the middle (rather than the stage) help a lot. |
| | I really liked Papadopolous' talk. Excellent overview of the playing field and the challenges for building out the Net's infrastructure. Wladawski-Berger's talk was good, but I had trouble following it. First, he started by bragging on being a physicist, which turned me off, Second, because I was multitasking. (My bad, sorry. I'm not going to kid myself about TMA — Transient Minimal Attention, which is epidemic in a place like this, and all but defines my way of relating to What's Happening On Stage, unless it's damn compelling, as Papadopolous' talk was.) Myhrvold used no slides and said nothing that got me to dump my prejudice against him for running what I see as a patent troll factory. Smart guy, but I feel like he's working against The Rest of Us. My mind isn't closed on the matter, but I'm prejudiced against anybody gaming an already screwed up patent system. |
| | Brad Templeton, characteristically, just asked a good question. |
| | Anyway, on the way here I ran into Rodger Desai of Rave Wireless in the revolving door at the front of the hotel. I've consulted Rave in the past, and really like what the company is doing. After catching up over coffee we brainstormed a cool idea for VRM using RSS and some other tech that's already around. Can't wait to talk with Dave and the ProjectVRM crew about it. |
| | Then I ran into Gordon Cook, who has perhaps the best newsletter and mailing list out there on the subject of Net infrastructure and both the technology and economics of build-out. He's planning his first event this coming Fall. When we got to talking, a killer idea came up for guiding build-out from the edge inward. Can't wait to tell ya'll about that one, too. |
| | But first I have to pay full attention to the next panel on stage. Unless, of course, you see me back here. |
| | I'm back. The panel is talking about bad actors (Kevin Werbach: they're economic actors too... good point). All the panelists, with the partial exception of Elliot Noss of Tucows, is taking the point of view that the Net and the Web are about What Vendors Do. I'm more convinced than ever that countless market problems can only be solved from the customer side, not the vendor side. And that the notion that only sellers can solve problems is fundamentally broken and wrong. Give customers better ways of relating to sellers than with money and silo-membership alone. |
| | In a conversation with a honcho from a big retailer a few weeks ago, the guy talked about the Big Retailer Value System, and how important it was for retailers to "capture" and "own" their customers. "We talk about that all the time", he said. I asked him to give me a word that meant "owning" other people. "Slavery", he said. "Exactly", I replied. Then we got to talking about how a lot of what this retailer calls "ownership" and its marketing people call "branding" and "loyalty" is actually something much different. It's love. Their best customers actually love them. They want their customers to love them. They want to do more to deserve the love of their customers. That yearning, that value system, is at odds with the concepts of ownership and slavery. |
| | In Cluetrain we talked about the "axe" in the heads of sellers that divides who they are on the sell side from who they are on the buy side. Specifically, |
| | Every one of us knows that marketers are out to get us, and we all struggle to escape their snares. We channel-surf through commercials; we open our mail over the recycling bin, struggling to discern the junk mail without having to open the envelope; we resent the adhesion of commercial messages to everything from sports uniforms to escalator risers. |
| | We know that the real purpose of marketing is to insinuate the message into our consciousness, to put an axe in our heads without our noticing. Like it or not, they will teach us to sing the jingle and recite the slogan. If the axe finds its mark we toe the line, buy the message, buy the product, and don¹t talk back. For the axe of marketing is also meant to silence us, to make conversation in the market as unnecessary as the ox cart. |
| | Ironically, many of us spend our days wielding axes ourselves. In our private lives we defend ourselves from the marketing messages out to get us, our defenses made stronger for having spent the day at work trying to drive axes into our customers¹ heads. We do both because the axe is already there, the metaphorical embodiment of that wedge Toffler wrote about -- the one that divides our jobs from our lives. On the supply side is the producer; on the demand side is the consumer. In the caste system of industry, it is bad form for the two to exchange more than pleasantries. |
| | Thus the system is quietly maintained, and our silence goes unnoticed beneath the noise of marketing-as-usual. No exchange between seller and buyer, no banter, no conversation. And hold the handshakes. |
| | When you have the combined weight of two hundred years of history and a trillion-dollar tide of marketing pressing down on the axe in your head, you can bet it¹s wedged in there pretty good. What¹s remarkable is that now there¹s a force potent enough to actually start loosening it. |
| | Here¹s the voice of a spokesperson from the world of TV itself, Howard Beale, the anchorman in Paddy Chayefsky¹s Network who announced that he would commit suicide because "I just ran out of bullshit." Of course, he had to go insane before he could at last utter this truth and pull the axe from his own head. |
| | It's eight years since we wrote that. The axe is still there. The System is still insane. As sellers we're still so divided between wanting love and running slave camps that it's as if our corpus colossi have been severed. |
| | We can't dislodge that axe unless we create a better tool for engaging with sellers: for finding what we want from sellers without having to enter and "belong" to their silos — to "relate" to them inside their silos, on their terms alone (no questions asked, click on this box here) defined by their CRM (Customer "Relationship Management) systems. |
| | There's a lot I'd like to say to the panel, rather than "ask the panel a question". So I'm not going to stand in line at the mike. Instead I'll do what I'm doing now, and in email, and on IM, and in texting, and in conversations in "meet space" — a zone within what we used to call "reality". |
| | What I'm doing in reality isn't part of the value chain — a model we see embodied in both in customer slave gardening and in conferences modeled on our industrialized educational systems. The latter were built to deliver curricula from the few to the many, where only questions are allowed, where information only flows from the top down, the customer is only a "consumer", the student is an empty vessel to be filled with "information" from the teacher, and where only the supply side produces. |
| | Customers who produce are part of value constellations to which anybody can contribute. We're all stars here. That's the new system. I'm glad Kevin Werbach (whose brainconf Supernova is) gave us the last two days so we could show how fast the sky fills with light when everybody gets to shine. |
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