The Doc Searls Weblog : Monday, May 8, 2000

I note with interest that Simplicity is high on the list of books also bought by Cluetrain customers.

That's the thing with clues: they wash in, but they don't wash out. Or so suggests Drew Stotesbury, SR VP & MD with Powder Resort Properties in Whistler, the wonderful Ski village and resort north of Vancouver (where I've never been but desperately want to go someday). He writes:

Weinberger's Corollary: Trade shows are markets, it turns out. Who'd have thunk it? Well, Dr. Weinberger did, and I was right there with him and didn't know until I read it today, in the latest JOHO, which is chock full of other good stuff. Here's some of what he says about trade shows:

And if you like your clues in aural form, tune in to the good doctor's latest NPR commentary, about moral frame jacking and the Napster Thing.

Cell Train clues delivered to President Mugabe: Richard Martin writes in The Standard that the people of Zimbabwe were urged in February to vote No on a bad referendum by six words dialed out to the displays of the country's cell phones: "No fuel. No forex. Vote 'No.'" (Forex is an abreviation of Foreign Exchange.) Context: the group opposed to the referendum was blocked by the corrupt Robert Mugabe regime from expressing their opinions over broadcast and print. So they emailed the phones. Smooth move. It worked, too. Great story.

A Good man he is, yes: Dack Ragus calls Mark Hurst "the Yoda of User Experience." Mark's bio calls him a "champion of the online customer experience." Neither should confuse him with Jakob Nielsen, the user advocate whose own bio page calls him a "guru" (three times), a "czar," and several proximal adjectival phrases:

Somehow modesty doesn't make the list. Neither does charm, which describes both gentlemen.

Anyway, we're here to stroke Mark, who is doing seriously Good Shit with his company, Creative Good. Thanks to the link from Dack, I just visited the CG site and discovered its excellent Weblog, goodexperience.com. How many business sites make a pitch for empathy, fergoshsakes? I can't think of any, including our own. But Mark's does, and it's totally in character.

If you follow the April 6 link in the midst of his empathy talk, you might be surprised to find (as I was, just a moment ago) kind words about The Cluetrain Manifesto and its various authors (including David Weinberger's insightful remarks about geeks). It's fun to discover that Mark even gets the jump on my other intention for bringing all this up, which is to cross-promote our joint appearance at the SOHO Summit in San Diego next month. Other speakers include host Terri Lonier, Jerry Michalski, Andrew Beebe, Jay Conrad Levinson, Peter Lewis and Goeffrey Moore. Should be a great show.

Anyway, this gives me a good excuse to make the defensive remarks I stifled when the Times review came out in March. So here goes. Rob says —

Why "of course?" What makes them "slogans?" Why the rhetorical sneer? Why not "memorable phrases," "aphorisms," "axioms," "principles," "assumptions," "premises," "tropes," "memes," or "theses," which is what we called them in the first place?

It happens that "markets are conversations" is meant as a metaphor, and "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy" is meant as a fact, both of which we unpack at length in the book (see here and here too).

Partly right on the first sentence, mostly wrong on the second. Read the book. We talk about workers and customers. We hate the word "consumers." Cluetrain began with this very rant against the conceptual defaults that characterize customers as anything but:

Hey, a company is a metaphysical construct among other things, none of which we deny. And why not give Dr. Weinberger credit for one of the finest metaphors not only in the book, but in our time: fort business. "Somewhere along the line, we confused going to work with building a fort," he writes (on p. 119). "A fort is, at its heart, a place apart. We report there every morning and spend the next eight, ten or twelve hours inaccessible to the 'real' world. The porticullis drops not only to keep out our enemies, but to separate us from distractions such as our families. As the drawbridge goes up behind us, we become businesspeople, different enough from our normal selves that when we first bring our children into the office they've been known to hide under our desk, crying." Excuse me, but this is great shit.

And we also don't "dismiss" companies so much as inform them that they have a new context: their own markets, which are no longer "targets" and other abstractions that presume distance.

...you, the consumer, can cross-check those companies' claims and ask for or give advice about any product or service. Ultimately, advertising proves futile. ''Word of Web will trump word of hype, every time,'' the authors write.

That, needless to say, is itself hyperbole. So is much of the authors' view of business, which they often express with about as much sophistication as Holden Caulfield.

Okay, maybe not every time. But to deny that the Net gives Demand's voice the power to trump Supply's hype — abundantly, with little effort and often to enormous effect — is to deny the most obvious clue of our time. If a supplier pissed us off twenty years ago, all we could do was call an uncaring 800 number or write to the Better Business Bureau (did that ever work, by the way? can somebody tell me?). Now any customer can run a contrarian Web site that gets more hits than the company it mocks — or an approving Web site that does the same thing for the company it praises.

While we realize that the Holden Caulfield line puts us in good company, it also ignores the fact that Cluetrain contains plenty of stuff that has never been said before about business. Try to find anything before Cluetrain that even suggests the conversational nature of markets, the fortlike nature of business, or the shipping metaphor behind too much of our business vocabulary. Try to find anything that suggests that the real roots of business are in ancient markets, rather than economic abstractions.

A manifesto should be full of hyperbole, and while this one often strains credulity in the particulars, the general thrust is on the mark.

Finally, something nice. Thank you.

What's strange -- but ultimately revealing -- is how the authors frame their broadside. ''Burn down business-as-usual,'' Christopher Locke writes in the opening chapter. ''Bulldoze it. . . . Topple the statues of heroes too long dead into the street. Sound familiar? You bet it does. And the message has been the same all along, from Paris in '68 to the Berlin Wall, from Warsaw to Tiananmen Square: Let the kids rock 'n' roll!'' Whether that was the ultimate message of these events is debatable, but it emphatically is the message that ''The Cluetrain Manifesto,'' and the culture it emerged from, have for society.

Well, there is a subtle issue here, and it frankly wasn't clear to me until a few weeks ago, when Jakob Nielsen told me we were "defectors" from marketing. We changed sides. We went over to markets, and started talking back to marketing. And we are not alone, because customers (again, not consumers) are on the case, big time.

Do we mean to "let the kids rock & roll?" Sure. But there's too much allowing in that word "let." Rob clearly gets what we're talking about, but it's clear that he's still conceiving markets in terms of Supply. But that's okay. He'll come around.

What the Slogan Era's ''business revolution'' is really about is not borrowed from politics; instead, it's a phenomenon that offers middle-aged managers a second chance to sound a barbaric yawp and imagine a new significance to their lives.

Ah, so Rob's got this thing about The Slogan Era. Cool. But even cooler is this "barbaric yawp" thing. The phrase comes from a perfect source: Walt Whitman's Song of Myself —