 |
 |
 |
|
Remembering
After reading Dave's The Web is a Writing Environemt, in which he says this —
— I went looking for places where I also had something to say about the telephonic nature of the Web. In a content search of my hard drive I found an early draft of an opening section for my chapter of the Cluetrain book. To my surprise, I like it better now than I did when I wrote it, nearly two years ago. Some of it evolved into the book, and some of it showed up here or there on the Web. But a some of it is "new." So I figure, hey, let's put it up. Here ya go.
SEVEN SECONDS. THAT'S THE LIFE EXPECTENCY OF A DETAIL. Phone numbers, names, street signs, the exact words in the last sentence, all gone in seven seconds, give or take. We can trick or train our minds to carry more of the very recent past, but only one fact remains: memory for detail is wickedly, blessedly, short. Decay is the rule. Yet meaning persists. And if it has any value, it grows. Meaning is the valued cargo in our trains of thought. The trains come and go, but their purpose is to leave goods on the platform. That's what we "get" of what the other guy says. That's what we "deliver" when we say our words "carry" meaning. So: what do we mean when we talk about markets? Do we mean populations of consumers we hope will buy our products? Do we mean invisible hands and other animal forces that push stock prices up and down? Do we mean a large drop zone at the end of the value chain? How about when we use market as a verb? Do we mean air support for the sales troops on the ground? Do we mean selling by another name? Do we mean "serving the customer, no matter what," as Theodore Levitt put it? Or do we mean nothing, as Tom Hanks' character in the movie Big suggested when he asked "What's marketing?" and his boss answered "Exactly."? What we mean has nothing to do with what markets were about in the first place, or how they really work. What we mean — without realizing it — is to speak for Business as Usual, not for ourselves. The problem is that Business as Usual has been insulting its real markets for at least two centuries. And we have been insulting ourselves by allowing Business as Usual to call us "consumers," as if our only role in the economy were to absorb products. Business as Usual could get away with those insults as long as markets didn't talk back. But now markets are not so remote and unreal. Thanks to the Net, the demand sides of markets are getting more connected and more powerful every day. Those markets want to talk, just like they did for the thousands of years that passed before market became a verb. But Business as Usual can't see that, because it continues to conceptualize markets as abstractions — as targets, battlefields and animal forces like bulls and bears. No wonder it sees the Net as yet another tube through which marketing can pump out "messages." But the Net isn't a tube, even if you prune it to look like one. The Net is a phone with a screen and a keyboard. The tools on that screen turn every customer into a Rambo with a shopping cart: skilled and equipped like nothing the business world has ever seen. Metcalfe's Law says the value of a network increases as the square of the number of users connected to it. In other words, connections multiply value exponentially. The Cluetrain Corollary says the same thing about markets and customers. The Net, like the phone system, is comprised of countless one-to-one connections that multiply in power and value as their number goes up. And, like the phone system, the Net is not made to serve as a broadcast medium, even if it can be made to work like one. Its real power derives from the meaning that passes across those one-to-one connections. The medium for meaning is conversation. If you want to mean something to your markets you have to talk to them. "Announcing" and "sending messages" is rapidly becoming as formal and archaic as Latin. If we don't talk to our markets — to our customers, suppliers, resellers and everybody else who cares professionally about the same subjects we do — our companies are going to die for lack of meaning. But it is not the nature of an industrial corporation to talk like a human being. Corporations speak with corporate voices, not personal ones. Speech is the job of marketing, investor relations, press relations, advertising and various consultants and agencies, all paid to help companies "craft messages" and "make announcements." Worse, most large companies feel the need to run every word past "Legal," whose job is to minimize risk. It's a rare CEO who feels free to speak his or her mind. But when they do, they are always effective. More often than not, CEOs speak in the form of empty thought-trains assembled from industrial metaphors. But their very emptiness carries a meaning we would do well to despise. Take this example from Lycos CEO Bob Davis, speaking in an interview with PC Week: "We're a media company. We make our money by delivering an audience that people want to pay for." Sounds innocuous enough. But note the two different species here: audience and people. Then look at their qualities. One is "delivered." The other pays. In other words, one is cargo and the other is money. We wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto because "media company" guys like Davis were still thinking inside the tube and channeling crap that was contemptible when its only source was the TV types the movie Network lampooned twenty-five years earlier. The Cluetrain is the light at the end of the tube. It's the light of curiosity, attention, originality and choice, and it comes from every human being on a connected computer. Nearly all of those people still have their televisions; but a growing number of them don't look at the tube the same way any more. Now they want to talk through the thing, to the people at the other end — just like they do on the Web. That's bad behavior for a target. But it's perfect behavior for a market. There are countless markets on the Net, and all of them are conversations. Of course there are many more markets off the Net, and all of them are conversations too. But it is the Net that manifests and magnifies the conversational nature of markets. You can't witness that fact if you're still thinking inside the tube — or worse, if you're thinking the Web is nothing more than a fan of tubes that channels "content" from a few producers to a zillion consumers. When that's your model, you can't leave it without the risk of sounding as insane as Howard Beale, the anchorman in the movie Network who announced that he would commit suicide because "I just ran out of bullshit." With those six words, Beale gave us three truths that were far from self-evident when they were written, in 1975. The first is that television is conceived as a shipping system. The second is that the broadcast industry tends to mistake tolerance for appetite. The third is that you can't fool a real market. But the market — that's us, folks — isn't real enough yet. Even if we don't want to, most of us still think and talk like the guys behind the tube we've been watching for fifty years. We all send out empty rail cars of words. We all still have plenty of bullshit to ship, even if nobody takes delivery. It's time to stop. It's time to remember.
|
