Chatalas Shrugged

The Cluetrain Manifesto, The End of Business as Usual. Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searles, David Weinberger. Perseus Books Group, 1999. 190 pages.

A popular business mantra is that the customer is always right. After all, gaining and retaining consumers is an essential element of a company’s success. The Cluetrain Manifesto not only asserts that the customers are indeed correct, but also that too often companies actually dismiss this valued asset. In the several essays that make up this book, Locke, Levine, Searles and Weinberger argue that in the age of the Internet, the failure of businesses to communicate well and engage people will negatively impact a company’s reputation and its bottom line.

The Internet has changed the ways in which society interacts, accesses information, works, and makes economic decisions. The Cluetrain Manifesto aims squarely at corporate America, and its ham-handed approach to adapting the inherent benefits of the web. The authors decry top-down business hierarchies, insisting that companies are ignoring their best assets in the wired world: word of mouth of customers and employees.

The authors, all veterans of the technology and communications industries, aggressively challenge business-as-usual. The book is based on a website created in 1999, Cluetrain.com, and 95 theses addressing business in the web era. Among them: “Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors”; “The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products”; “Maybe you’re impressing investors and Wall Street. You’re not impressing us”; and “You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.”

At the heart of the book is the contention that the market is a conversation, and that the web gives us a voice and personality. The use of e-mail, mail lists, newsgroups, chat rooms, and web pages are all cited as examples of how the market communicates today. But all too often this conversation is ignored. When corporations fine-tune and dilute their communication, it loses the person-to-person appeal that consumers so cherish. Businesses see the Internet as just another method for broadcasting marketing messages in a hypodermic, one-way conversation, rather than a dialogue with a network of knowledgeable stakeholders. The authors believe that via the Internet, markets can rise from conversations that are independent of time-worn institutions like business, government and education.

The authors insist that consumers and employees see through the marketing pablum; that people want honest dialogue, and hype and spin are insulting. The book deconstructs how the usual marketing tools are not effective in the Internet era. Public relations flacks are “the used car salesmen of the corporate world”, and merely promulgate stale talking points. Ad campaigns don’t work via the web; nobody looks at banner ads, and the Internet makes it easy to discern advertising exaggeration. Corporate websites are just brochures, and communications departments spend far too much time hiding what’s really going on within an organization.

The authors do, though, offer advice on how companies can best enter the new market conversation. Among the suggestions: be authentic; talk like real people; get rid of buzzwords and overly technical terms; have fun and laugh. Moreover, they say, marketing isn’t going away, but it needs to evolve and listen.

The book also invades the corporate castle, mocking the internal processes companies grasp to maintain subordination. The amusing anecdotes of business practices surely ring familiar to us all. The company intranet with policies nobody reads; deadlines used as a form of control; organizational charts that show no opportunity for career growth; the secrecy surrounding reports and the subsequent dramatic presentation; employees treated as cogs rather than crucial communicators. The authors note that used properly, the web will turn inflexible corporate systems into collections of many pieces loosely joining themselves to make a greater good.

The Cluetrain Manifesto is an entertaining take on how companies should adapt to the Internet era. The essays border on revolutionary in terms of their radical approach and their willingness to so skewer the status quo. The authors also practice what they preach: the book is a conversation and exchange of ideas. It presents many voices commenting and making independent yet similar points. Its style is irreverent and relevant. It’s anti-establishment, but in the spirit of creating a better establishment.

The Manifesto excellently captures the essence of out-dated corporate practices. We as a society do see through the marketing puffery and internal pep-talks. We desire the truth, and the opportunity to be involved and engaged. We don’t like being treated as a target market, defined by Wall Street experts and focus-group studies.

The book is dead on in its appeal for companies to drop the buzzwords and tech talk. We should not visit a business website only to become confused about what the company does. Talk to us in regular words that we can understand. Similarly, the authors capture well a typical business reaction to critics: if a company doesn’t like what the market is saying, it tries to change the market’s perception rather than changing itself.

That said, the Manifesto does seem to overlook the fact that many companies are conducting business differently in the Internet era. We have seen plenty of businesses with refreshing approaches in the years following the dot-com bust. Companies clearly have used the creativity of their customers and employees to build successful business models. This disconnect may be because the book was originally penned in the late ‘90s,

Also, while the book puts forth ideals, they may not be altogether realistic or practical. At some point there has to be some sort of message control, and the fear of legal ramifications from casual remarks is legitimate.

The book exudes an attitude befitting a manifesto: self-assured, backed up with astute observations and solid recommendations. The writing isn’t always concise, and it digresses at times, but the passion flows from the pages. The authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto have done more than write a book, they’ve created a movement. And in doing so, they’re utilizing the Internet to affect change… just as they are exhorting businesses to do.