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Ideas, tips and techniques for new generation selling and customer support.
2009
It’s the Cluetrain’s tenth birthday. Are you on board?
Ten years ago this month, Cluetrain.com declared the impact the internet was having on communication among us, and declared the death of corporations’ ability to control conversations. It contained 95 theses. Excerpts from the first few:
- Markets are conversations … Markets consist of human beings. … Conversations among human beings sound human.
- These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
- Markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized.
- People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors.
- There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
Think about how visionary that was. (Ten years ago!) In January 2001 it became a book, The Cluetrain Manifesto. The entire text is now available free online. Here’s the elevator speech version, which of course they called the “elevator rap”:
The point of all this is that there’s no longer anywhere to hide if you’re trying to get away with being schlocky or low-rent. If people want to tell on you or “vote you up” on some consumer ratings web site, they no longer need to go through controlled channels.
Thesis #7 has become real: Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. You don’t have to go through channels to get anywhere else, like a rat that’s forced to backtrack through tunnels. Hyperlinks let you jump to anywhere else. In social terms, it means you can exchange messages with anyone
you want, presuming they’re interested too. No one can stop us. You just need to be interesting to the other person.
Larry Bohn, then CEO of 
NetGenesis, was one signer of the Cluetrain theses, saying “Beware or be roadkill!” To this day, this image appears on the Cluetrain web site.
Can there be any clearer indication that in a Cluetrain world, good customer service is a really good idea? Some clues:
- Be good to your customers.
- Listen, hear, and get in the game.
- And when someone wants to do business with you, remove all obstacles.
One way to do that is to offer self-service appointment scheduling or reservations on the Web, as restaurants, Sprint, Apple, Best Buy, Target Portraits, JCPenney Portraits, and airlines do. Doctors are finally getting a clue, too.
Waiting in line stinks; “no lines no waiting” rocks. Waiting on hold stinks; self-service rocks.
It’s been ten years. Get on the train: give people plenty of reason to say good things about you.
8 Comments
Laura McBride
Posted April 30, 2009 at 11:42 am | Permalink
Dave I really enjoy your blogs!
Great job!
Laura
No Insurance Club Chad Harris
Posted April 30, 2009 at 1:08 pm | Permalink
Kudos. Long Live the Clue Train Manifesto! It was written on cheap paper, wrapped in a cheaper cover, but the worlds inside that book are priceless. Thanks for the update and bringing back old memories of that wonderful book that changed my thinking.
Dave deBronkart
Posted April 30, 2009 at 1:15 pm | Permalink
So, how DID it change your thinking? How did it play out in reality?
Chad
Posted April 30, 2009 at 2:46 pm | Permalink
I was trying to help a company that had an incredible patented product years ago license it out to the world. They had one big problem however and I was not able to articulate the problem until I read the Clue Train Manifesto. They had a corporate firewall between the employees and their market that made the great Wall of China look like a tinker toy! They hired an in-bred corporate white collar hack that came from a Fortune 500 background and thought he was smarter than the market because he was trained that way. Long story short, they went bankrupt and the market proved once again you better ride the C Train or get out of the way.
David Weinberger
Posted April 30, 2009 at 5:10 pm | Permalink
Dave, thanks so much for this! We thought (and still think) we were saying what everyone on the Web already knew. But it’s great to be remembered lo these many years later.
Thanks again.
David Weinberger
(one of the 4 co-authors)
Dave deBronkart
Posted May 1, 2009 at 9:16 am | Permalink
So, David, obviously not everyone does know it. (Those would be the clue-free.) We will see companies fighting or fearing employee participation in social media, and even in the CluetrainPlus10 project most of the theses about intranets did not get mentioned about. What’s up with that, do you think?
Example: #56 – “These two conversations [inside the company, and conversation with the market] want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other’s voices.”
TimeTrade just developed its first policy for social media use. It’s pretty open. Think it’s fodder for discussion (on this blog or elsewhere), or is that old news? Why *is* this aspect of Cluetrain so “un-adopted”?
(Interestingly, we developed the policy at the request of an employee who does have a clue!)
David Weinberger
Posted May 1, 2009 at 9:54 am | Permalink
I should have been more precise: We thought we were saying what was obvious to users of the Web, those who were doing the building, exploring, and linking. The prompt for the book was the fact that most businesses and the media did _not_ understand what was going on. They viewed the Web as a publishing medium or simply as a place to sell stuff. The clue-free ones amongst us.
The marketing chapter of Cluetrain certainly has been the one most identified with the book/site. In part I think that’s because of the power of Doc’s “markets are conversations” formulation. But the mass public nature of marketing also makes successes and failures there more visible (and frequently more hilarious) than successes and failures in the internal structure and culture of an organization. But it’s a good question for which I’ve never come up with a fully satisfying answer. I’m open to hypotheses…
Ed Mallen
Posted May 5, 2009 at 9:42 am | Permalink
I think the reason nobody picked up the intranet-centric theses is that most companies and marketing departments fear the dialogue with customers, so they still keep their cards close to the vest, instead of baring their humanity. In rereading Chapter Four yesterday I was struck by the clarity of the conversations in the market. Behind company walls there is always the cost justification of the next “campaign” versus the immeasurable cost of missing the next conversation.
My observation is that there is a fear factor preventing conversation. What I have observed in the past is an internal conversation that asks:
1. Do we really want to know that we designed the wrong thing? “uh, oh, the dogs don’t like the dog food!”
2. Do we have the capacity to give people what they really want? “OMG, who is going to build what they ask for, are we already committed to projects building things people don’t need?”
3. Are the people talking to us smart enough to tell us what they really need? “Idiots!”
4. Are we speaking to people who only represent the fringe? “Mikey, he likes it, he likes it!”
I believe that people are motivated to get what they want and they will tell you in the most direct conversations. Across the web now the direct conversation of the market has its greatest influence. People want to see material “gain” from their conversations, just as buyers in the market wanted a different color, texture, finish to a product, then would buy lots of it. I think it has been very hard to find the one person, or a small sample, that represents the wisdom of the many. It takes a lot of conversations to get enough information to get a product right.
And so companies are still, ten years later, scared of getting into these conversations. And nobody wants to even talk about it.