All Aboard the Cluetrain!

I recently stumbled across the Cluetrain Manifesto, which I first encountered when it was published in 1999.

To put it in some sort of context, at the time the manifesto was written blogging had been around for about 5-7 years, MySpace was four years in the future, as was LinkedIn, Facebook was 5 years in the future and Twitter was 7 years in the future.

Even so, the authors were bold enough to say:

“Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them.”

Just consider how much more networked markets are now, with all the new, whizzy, social media tools available to them!

 

Go read those 95 theses.  Is it just me who finds it sad that they are as relevant today as they were back then?  Has nothing changed?

When I first read it, the Cluetrain Manifesto resonated with something deep inside me.  It just seemed so right.

At that point, I had worked in Sales for about 11 years, both in internal and external positions.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I felt deep down that the received wisdom on the way sales worked wasn’t working for me.  However, I didn’t have enough of the right sort of experience to work out how to make things different.

I didn’t recognise it at the time, and neither did my supposed elders and betters, but the business world was changing.  Clearly, the signs were there for those intelligent enough to recognise them and the Cluetrain Manifesto sprang out of that intelligence.

17. Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.

Isn’t this still the case?  How many of you get bombarded with old-fashioned, one-way, marketing that just says ‘Look how great we are’, ‘Buy our stuff, it’s great’, ‘Did you know that we are a great company with great stuff for sale’?

My current bête noires are PPI claim companies.  “Records indicate that you may be entitled to circa £2650 in compensation from the mis-selling of PPI on credit cards or loans.”  No, I’m not.  Go away you annoying idiots.  I didn’t ask for your stupid text messages or telephone calls from badly trained, desperate, so-called sales people and all they are succeeding in doing is really, REALLY annoying me.

The thinking is that if you sling enough mud at the wall, some of it is bound to stick.  Maybe that worked once but there is now so much mud flying around that most of us have built walls in front of our walls and the mud never even gets to us.

75. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.

Mercifully, some companies did pay attention.  Indeed, a whole industry appears to have sprung up providing ‘content marketing’, with it’s own ‘institute’ and a bunch of events and for that we should be thankful.  At least, when it’s done right we should be!  Sonja and Sharon over at Valuable Content seem to me to have a very good handle on how to do it right.

95. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

And that’s the warning right there.  A few years on I do now recognise that the world has always changed, is currently changing and will always change.  If you aren’t changing with it, you are standing still and if you’re standing still, you’re going backwards.

It would have been easy just to reproduce the 95 theses with very little comment.  However, Neil doesn’t play that way, as I’m sure you have realised by now!  You can see what I think of the Cluetrain Manifesto.  What do you think?  Deep thought or just mumbo-jumbo?  Your call.

Photograph: © Copyright Roger Kidd and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.