Customer Reviews

The Cluetrain Manifesto

5 star:		(79)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

There is one great thought in this book, i.e. that the Web makes it possible for everyone to participate in the "great conversation", and that it is the summing and slicing of these conversations that will drive business in the 21st Century.

The authors are quite correct, and helpful, when they point out that in the aggregate, the combined preferences, insights, and purchasing power of all Web denizens is vastly more valuable and relevant to business decisions about production, quality, and services than any "push" marketing hype or engineering presumptions about what people might need.

Sadly, the authors' neither provide an integrated understanding of the true terrain over which the great conversation takes place, nor do they provide any substantive suggestions for how web content managers might improve our access to the knowledge and desires that are now buried within the web of babel. Their cute "tell a story" and equally cute advice to have big boxes for customer stories in the forms provided for input, simply do not cut it with me.

This book is a 5 for the one great idea, a 2 for beating the idea to death, a 3 for presentation, and a 4 overall because it was just good enough to keep me reading to the last page.

I don't much care for business books. But this one blows away the category. Business is, after all, not about dollars. It is about people. Dollars are simply a way to keep score. And what could be more human than conversations? The notion that markets are really conversations is so old it's new. The Cluetrain Manifesto shows how we humans lost our way accepting the command and control structure and format of modern business. We have been engaged in a one-way conversation, with companies doing all the talking, while most folks tuned out the message.

This book demonstrates how the Internet is bringing people back into the commercial process. Technology has frequently been perceived as dehumanizing our world. That's why it is especially ironic that it took a technological revolution in communication to bring back the human side of commerce. We are seeing a sea change where commerce is moving from a seller's market to a buyer's market.

Read this book. Pass it along to your boss. Give it to your employees and your customers. Buy copies for the heads of your engineering, marketing, manufacturing, corporate development, or whatever group. The brave new world is here, but Big Brother's not in charge. We are.

Over the last several years, I've come to the conclusion that "business-as-usual" had to come to an end--that the world, culture, technology have changed so much that a new business paradigm is not only required but desperately needed. And it can't be simply a change of rules--the entire *game* has to change.

So finding the on-line Cluetrain Manifesto last year was a real pleasure. Here were these four guys with 95 wild-eyed idealistic theses for overthrowing the business world order--and setting up a new paradigm based upon (of all things) human interaction and conversation. I signed right up.

So you can imagine my delight when I found "The Cluetrain Manifesto" book had been published. I bought it in a millisecond.

Inside, you'll find the reflections of the Cluetrain's originators--in more detail, with more reflection than their Website provides. The Manifesto's background and philosophies are brought into a clearer focus--*not* crystal clear, mind you, but clearer than before. And it's a *very* enjoyable and provocative read.

It's not a flawless work. There's redundancy, for example, in the multiple essays within. Some chapters (Chapter 1 especially) are outstanding, others are so-so. One might even be called elementary. But there's always food for thought.

And don't expect to find some kind of "formula" or "strategy" or "plan" to prosper in the brave new world we live in. It's not there. In fact, such a plan, the authors remind us, would be *counter* to the Manifesto's assertion that honest human conversation is the key to success in the future.

But you will be stirred to find your voice and to add it to the voices of the revived marketplace called the Internet. Heck, you might even be inspired enough to try to help your company find *its* honest, human, authentic voice (rather than brochureware and doublespeak). And I think that's what would delight the Cluetrainers most.

This book is one of several that dramatically affected my life and career. I heartily recommend it!

I recently received a letter from a company that sells software for "personalizing" consumers' online shopping experiences that illustrates why the world needs The Cluetrain Manifesto, an extraordinary polemic against the dehumanizing practices of business.

Although I don't have an ecommerce site, the exhibitor's letter began, "By now you have had time to evaluate your Internet sales numbers from last quarter and hopefully you met and beat them." The letter was insulting by violating simple etiquette and unauthentic because it showed total ignorance of my business. The letter began "Dear David." Can't you hear Andy Rooney saying, "Does it ever bother you when people you've never met, and aren't sure you want to know call you by your first name right off the bat?" The letter writer thinks that using first names personalizes a letter. But first names are properly an acknowledgment of personhood. I'm not a person to that letter writer. I'm just a string of 0's and 1's in his database. I'm no more a real person to him than are website visitors analyzed by his company's personalization software. This company doesn't know what personalization is about. Its shtick is depersonalization, a corporate perversity The Cluetrain Manifesto rails against.

Cluetrain is the product of marketing specialists Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searles and David Weinberger who posted 95 theses on the virtual doors of the Internet, indicting the corporate world for exercising unforgivable arrogance in the marketplace, and suddenly were getting thousands of hits daily. Perseus Books quickly came up with a handsome offer for Cluetrain, the book. These putative Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse that will lay flat the walls of the Old Economy declare that business no longer controls the marketplace. Their Sixth Thesis counsels "The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media," then business is warned by the Seventh Thesis: "Hyperlinks destroy hierarchy." Hierarchies rank people and restrict information flow because information access is a function of rank. Hyperlinks democratize information flow, nullifying the main offensive weapon that hierarchies depend on to remain hierarchies.

Most leaders in Old Economy hierarchies see the Internet as just a new product distribution channel. They don't realize that the Internet is a new conversation channel that greatly amplifies the voices in the marketplace. As Cluetrain's First Thesis states, "Markets are conversations."

If you're tenaciously anchored to the Old Economy, the First Thesis's real meaning might not click in at first. But work at it. Make it the opening topic of your next staff meeting. With persistence, you'll see what it means. Suddenly you'll find yourself at the gateway to a much different world, kind of like when Dorothy stood in the ordinariness of her tornado-tossed black and white Kansan house and first beheld the splendiferously colorful glory of Oz.

Cluetrain's authors are not wet-behind-the-ears webheads, but seasoned businessmen who grew tired of mass manipulation of people, and endless trickery, cajolery and even threats to get them to buy mass produced products thrust at them by generals of mass marketing in the "battle for their minds" as Al Reis and Jack Trout characterized marketing in a book called Marketing Warfare.

Here's a military metaphor for the clueless who still define marketing with military metaphors: Cluetrain's book jacket poses a question that penetrates the mind like a smart bomb burrowing into one of Saddam Hussein's subterranean bunkers: "What if the real power of the web lay not in the technology behind it, but in the profound changes it brings to the way people interact with business?"

Wow! There's a hint of Ted Kaczynski in that question, for as a society have we not become too obsessed with technology to see our humanity? Does this blinkered view make it easier for executives and managers to be as unaware of a receptionist's or entry level worker's humanity as the personalization company who wrote me that letter was of my humanity?

Cluetrain is written write with the ink of irony. Its authors aren't looking to start anything - no Naderesque foundation to squabble endlessly with corporations, no legally constituted organism to spread their message. All they want to do is to remind us all of our humanness in such a provocative manner that their lessons stick and grow to envelop the thinking of people who run companies and make marketing decisions.

Cluetrain's authors believe that as people regain an enlivened sense of their humanity through conversations made possible by the Internet, what ever is best that could happen will happen. They abhor the idea of shackling Cluetrain thoughts to a legal incarnation that would soon lose touch with humanity in order to promote itself and its leaders.

The Cluetrain Manifesto is a way of thinking that can lead businesses toward success in the unstructured environments of the Internet. Of course, many Old Economy business leaders want their Internet operations to have palpable structure like their bricks and mortar operations have, but they won't succeed. They are like Archimedes wistfully imagining that if only he had a place to stand he could move the earth. There is no place to stand for leveraging the Internet in ways that will give anyone control over its movements.

Cluetrain portends the end of control strategies in business. The Old Economy ethos of control is being replaced by a New Economy ethos of influence. This means The Cluetrain Manifesto instantly makes whole libraries of books on marketing obsolete because they are all based on an ethos of control and written from a vendor perspective. So empty your book shelves of all the covers you have on marketing and recycle them. That's their only value now. The Cluetrain Manifesto is the only book about markets that matters, because it is the first book on markets written from the consumer perspective. Buy it, read it, and be transformed!

David Wolfe Wolfe Resources Group Reston Virginia

I really wanted to rate this book higher than three stars. In fact, if it were only thirty or forty pages, I would have been trying to rate it at ten stars! It starts out by making bold, mostly clear, sometimes odd statements. All of which are hugely entertaining and frequently provocative. The book does drone on a bit though, and I found it tedious towards the end.

I was surprised at the content, however. To me it was much less about how the Internet is changing the economoy and business, and more about how it is changing how people connect. Far beyond a clinical explanation (this is a Manifesto after all), it postulates about the changes this newfound, hyperlinked communication has made in employee, customer, and vendor expectations.

I happen to agree with almost every message. Down with empty happy-talk and command and control management...long live capability, knowledge, and real, heart-felt communication.

This book would certainly have received full marks from me had it been less repetitive.

Outside, and inside my "day job," I have spent the last three years immersed in cyberspace conversations. The Cluetrain Manifesto accurately reflects the feel of this medium as much as any book could. It reads like a long and intense rap session, and it hits reality again and again in a way that corporate America so far fails to by and large. Trust me, you haven't read a book like this. If you feel as though you do not yet understand cyberspace, this book will immerse you in the culture in an easy to understand yet frequently irreverent way.

The topic of this book comes down primarily to people, conversation, and culture. Not business, and not technology. The common misperception that business and technology form the driving force behind the Internet, reflects a common misperception still very prevalent in society at large. It reflects a misperception that will cost companies billions and billions of dollars if they continue to believe it. Indeed it probably already has.

In a turn of events that will send shudders of terror through corporate America, most of the business-as-usual ways of thinking, acting, and talking, of the last century prove absolutely toxic to the would-be successful corporation doing business in this new medium. In yet another turn that will provide some comfort, most of what you know about life outside your current "day job" will prove more useful than anything you ever could have learned in obtaining a marketing degree. If you hate your job, but you love the rest of your life, you may find yourself far ahead of those overachieving "team players" who love business as usual. Cyberspace changes the rules, and the Cluetrain Manifesto shows us how.

The payoff in understanding this, will prove handsome. Corporate manager types who wonder how to turn their employees "wasted time" on the Internet into money and "market share" now have their answer. The answer, however, means that they must accept that they will never really have control over their employees again. Of course the easiest way to accept this is to realize that they never did.

Like medicine, this book is good for you, despite tasting bad when going down.

Essentially, it's a long, repetitive rant about business, commerce and formalness, making three key points (markets are conversations; genuine word-of-mouth is more effective than advertising; business communication is out-of-touch) over and over again. And again and again. For 200 pages. On and on and on.

Bits of it make you want to punch the air and shout 'YES!', and other bits of it make you want to skip a few pages - and the anecdotal style is so short of examples you get the impression that the authors sat down in a room with some coffee and wrote it in a single session, straight from memory.

As such, it's not much fun to read (you'll get bored quickly, and http://www.cluetrain.com/clues.html contains most of the best content), although that doesn't mean that it's 'bad' - think of it as a forceful guide to a new way of thinking and it works perfectly. entertainment.

Essentially, it's a long, repetitive rant about business, commerce and formalness,

This book is a combination of Steal This Book, Code, and The Prince. We can now converse with each other as we do business with other other. And that drives big corporations crazy! We are now in an one-to-one and many-to-one world. Those who controlled the one-to-many world (mass marketing, media, and education) are doomed to be left behind in the last century's dustheap.

Cluetrain is a snapshot of the every-changing cluetrain web site, and fleshes out the Manifesto in an utterly readable fashion. 95 thumbs up!

The main two points of this book are these:

#1: Any business is for, by, and of people.

#2: The internet re-empowers individuals to take advantage of #1.

The message of this work is awesome and right on. Unfortunately, the book is about 8 times as long as it needs to be. Created as a series of essays by four authors and pundits, this book gets irritatingly repetitive by halfway through. You'll wonder, "How many different ways can these guys think of to say the same thing?" The original 95 theses from their www.cluetrain.com website is too little to get the whole message, but 183 pages is too much. This would have been perfect as a 20 page article.

If you buy this book, read the first chapter. If you "get it", then skip right to the last chapter.

Delightful read. Aided and abetted by a firm resolution not to take oneself too seriously. Conversations .... between two connected individuals ... thats always been the basic building block of the internet. My advice to the CEO of the next eCompany-Wannabe:

1) Resolve to take yourself less seriously 2) Read this book 3) Go home and actually start a conversation online ...(shopping on Amazon.com alone won't carry you for much longer)

Chapters 1 and 5 are keen favourites