MARKETING
About a year ago, Boulder, Colorado, Internet pioneer Christopher Locke (formerly president of MecklerWeb) and three colleagues got fed up with companies that were clueless about how to communicate effectively with customers and employees in the Net age. In response, Locke & Co. produced the Cluetrain Manifesto (www.cluetrain.com), a screed urging businesses to make their corporate communication more honest, open, and engaging. "We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers," the manifesto declares. "We are human beings - and our reach exceeds our grasp. Deal with it." The document created a buzz in marketing circles and sparked a nascent Cluetrain movement, with hundreds signing the manifesto in support of its message. (It even inspired a parody site, the Gluetrain Manifesto.)
Now, in the just-released The Cluetrain Manifesto (Perseus Books), Locke and coauthors David Weinberger, Doc Searls, and Rick Levine expand on their Net-savvy marketing primer. Locke explains how companies can hop aboard the Cluetrain.
Wired: What do you mean when you say that markets in the digital age are essentially conversations?
Locke: Conversations have always been central to the notion of a marketplace, like a commons at the heart of a community. The Internet brings something that looks more like an ancient market into the 21st century. The conversations may have nothing to do with commerce per se, but the fact that people are networked and communicating directly has tremendous impact on corporate marketing assumptions.
You also say broadcast won't work in this new environment. Why, then, are Web companies spending so much on broadcast advertising?
Broadcast is not going to go away. Net companies are using broadcast to get "eyeballs" to their sites today, and that's probably effective as far as it goes, which isn't very far. The cost of acquisition is huge and carries no guarantee that people will stay once they discover the site is just more bullshit ad banners and sticky, upbeat "kontent." The effective means is human conversation, interaction, and unfiltered, unsterilized communication. That's the nature of the Net.
How might a corporation employ the Cluetrain philosophy?
I don't see why customers couldn't someday help an auto company design a car on the Web by choosing colors, styles, and options. The Web offers an opportunity for a far more participatory environment, where people outside the company can contribute to the creation of products and services - and where, inside the corporation, more divisions, departments, and individuals can talk with one another.
Are corporations really going to buy into having this kind of open conversations with their customers and employees?
Anyone who needs a blueprint for what it means to be human and to speak with a human voice is in very deep shit indeed. Will companies buy it? The shoe is really on the other foot. If we don't buy their boring pitches, they're sunk.
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