Cluetrain Notes by Dr. Selia Karsten

This is an excellent book especially for those who are interested in Marketing and eBusiness - I've given some excerpts from the book, chapter by chapter, to get you (my eCommerce students) excited about it .  I hope you will get your own copy or at least check it out of the library.


The Cluetrain Manifesto: the end of business as usual - RIck Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Perseus Books, Cambridge Mass. 2000 ISBN 0-7382-0244-4

Internet Apocalypso -  Christopher Locke (Ch 1)
"From hopelessly romantic meditations on favorite cats, to screeds so funny you'll blow coffee out your nose, to collective code for alternative operating systems: we're all expressing ourselves in a new way online - a way that was never possible before, never before permitted. And make no mistake, speech once freed is a powerful drug.  Get used to it; it ain't going back in the box.  What does this mean for electronic commerce?  Take a wild guess.  We're not those neatly predictable consumers business remembers from yesterday.  We got a taste of something else, and we like it.  We'll make it ourselves, and defend it with a ferocity that might surprise most businesses.  It you're a business, believe us: it's a surprise you'd just as soon skip.  We're in the market for lots of things, but the market we see ourselves in is more like that ancient marketplace.  Tell us some good stories and capture our interest.  Don't talk to us as if you've forgotten how to speak.  Don't make us feel small.  Remind us to be larger.  Get a little of that human touch." p34

"So the bottom line is:  you can play in the Internet headspace as well as anyone.

There are just three conditions: (1) you have to let your people play for you, since there's really nobody else at home; (2) you have to play, not something more serious and goal-oriented; and (3) related tot eh previous, you have to have at least some tenuous notion of what "headspace" might mean.  It's not in the dictionary.  But you can ask around.  Get a general hang of the thing.  If you figure it our, we'll think you're cool and consume mass qualities of all your wonderful products.  See how easy life can be when you loosen up a little?  You laugh, we laugh with you. Either way, we live." p37



The Longing - David Weinberger (Ch 2)
"We don't know what the Web is for but we've adopted it faster than any technology since fire." p43

 "While the create-a-home-page problem proved too easy to solve to support a software industry, there was something canny about the commercial focus on the creation of home pages. Since you could just as adequately view the Web as a huge reference library, why did home pages seize our imaginations?  Because a home page is a place in which we can express who we are and let the world in.  Meager though it may be, a home page is a way of having a voice." p 43

Talk is Cheap - Rick Levine (Ch. 3)
"Authenticity, honesty and personal voice underlie much of what's successful on the Web.  Its egalitarian nature is engendering a renaissance in personal publishing.  We of genus Homo are wired to respond to each other's noise and commotion, to the rich, multi-modal deluge of data each of us broadcasts as we wade through life.  The Web gives us an opportunity to escape from the bounds imposed by broadcast media's one-to-many notions of publishing.  Nascent Web publishing efforts have their genesis in a burning need to say something, but their ultimate success comes from people wanting to listen, needing to hear each other's voices and answering in kind." - p. 51

"Chat is CB on steroids.  It's immediate and unwashed. If you can't type and think at the same time you're in deep weeds. We can't broadcast, can't message, cant spew corporate pabulum in a chat environment.  If business could successfully integrate chat into its marketing universe, companies would be on their way to shaking off some of the mass media shackles separating them from customers." - p61-2


An e-mail from Kimberly Peterson to cluetrain.com
"I've spent the last two years "bringing fire to the cavemen" in the corporate world (specifically fashion).  They still don't understand the difference between a server, a browser, and content, but they understand that they have to be online.  They think that a computer is just like a  television. That you can just scan some glossy print ads and throw them up on a site.  No one cares about usability.  No one cares about being real.

They're scared that if they don't make the jump to internet marketing/selling that they'll lose their customer loyalty.  They're scared that if they do make the jump to Internet marketing/selling that they'll lose their customer loyalty.  They ask themselves: "Is this really us?  Is technology part of our lifestyle/branding concept? "  They say they don't market to that demographic, but they know deep down inside that if they don't soon they won't have anyone to market to.

Sometimes I just want to scream. "  p 72


Markets are Conversations - Doc Searle (Ch4)

"That's the awful truth about marketing.  It broadcasts messages to people who don't want to listen.  Every advertisement, press release, publicity stunt, and giveaway engineered by a Marketing department is colored by the fact that it's going to a public that doesn't ask to hear about it." p 79


"We know the real purpose of marketing is to insinuate the message into our consciousness, to put an axe in our heads without our noticing.  LIke it of not, they will teach us to sing the jingle and recite the slogan.  If the axe finds its mark we toe the line, buy the product, and don't talk back.  For the axe of marketing is also meant to silence us, to make conversation in the market as unnecessary as the ox cart. ....When you have the combined weight of two hundred years of history and a trillion-dollar tide of marketing pressing down on the axe in your head, you can bet it's wedged in there pretty good.  What's remarkable is that now there's a force potent enough to actually start loosening it." p80-1

"The Cluetrain corollary: the level of knowledge on a network increases as the square of the number of users times the volume of conversation.  So, in market conversations, it is far easier to learn the truth about products being pumped, about the promises being made, and about the people making those promises.  Networked markets are not only smart markets, they're also equipped to get much smarter, much faster, than business as usual."  p 83-4

"If you want to take your first baby step towards entering the market conversation, torch any brochureware on your site.  At best your networked market views it as a speed bump, at worst as an insult.

This doesn't mean that you should put up a site that consists of nothing for the facts expressed in Times Roman text (although useful facts are a great place to start).  Your site needs to have a voice, to express a point of view, and to give access to  helpful people inside your corporation. Replace the brochures with ways to ignite dialogues.  Not only do your customers want to talk with real people inside your organization, but your employees are desperate to talk with real customers.  They want to tell them the truth.

They will in any event, because your wall of brochures is as solid as a line in the sand." p94


The Hyperlinked Organization - David Weinberger - Ch5

"Suppose you removed the table from your conference room and replaced the seats with armchairs.  Suppose you turned it into a living rom  How much would this affect your meetings?  That's how much your meetings are about power, not communication." p 146


"We don't need more information.  We don't need better information.  We don't need automatically filtered and summarized information.  We need understanding.  We desperately want to understand what's going on in our business, in our markets.  And understanding is not more or higher information.  If you want understanding, you have to reenter the human world of stories.  If you don't have a story, you don't have understanding.  From the first accidental wiener roast on a prehistoric savanna, we've understood things by telling stories. I don't mean stories heavy with plot; I mean narratives that string events together in time and show them unfolding." 148-9

"We live in stories. We breathe stories.  Most of our best conversations are short stories.  Stories are a big step sideways and up from information: So Stories are not a lot like information.  But they are the way we understand." p 151

Seven Ways to Tell Stories:
1. Ban the opening joke.  Begin your next Power Point presentation by saying, "Let me tell you a story..."  and then recount what made the market the way it is, what  got your company to come up with such an incredible product, and what obstacles particular customers faced and over came by using your product.
2. Make sure the forms you use to "collect knowledge" have big empty boxes in them so the story can be told.
3. Every meeting with a potential partner, every exciting sales meeting, every important encounter with customers can best be told as a story. Do so.
4. Turn your next white paper into a narrative.
5. Collect the stories of your business and publish them on an intranet site.
6. Reward the tellers of good stories. They're the people everyone's listening to anyway.
7. Rewrite your mission statement as a corporate story.  In fact, wouldn't a narrative version of the annual report help the company more than the usual hearty prose and canned snaps of happy employees? p152

"Errors are how assumptions become visible.  And there is nothing more valuable than a newly discovered assumption, because only then can you see what's holding you back and what could propel you forward." p154

"Being wrong is a lot funnier than being right.  The right type of laughter - laughter at what the mistake reveals about our situation rather than laughter aimed at a person who dares to be human - is enormously liberating.  In fact, laughter is the sound that knowledge makes when it's born." p155


"No one's asking you to decide if you want to run your business using the Web.  It's a done deal.  The Internet has already set expectations for how connections ought to work.  The gulf is there; a gulf caused, ironically, by the abundance of connection.

The Web is the sum of these connections.  It isn't a medium, a new type of intercom, or an invention like really cool wristwatch walkie talkies.  It is a broad, open place that lets everyone touch everyone else and touch every digit of information by twitching a wrist and tapping a single finger.

What connects you to me to everyone else are Web pages and and e-mail and chat and discussions.  These are all artifacts of human voice.  Each is deliberately created and put forward as our public self, the self that is closest to us and paradoxically, least knowable to us. " p158


"Then the Web crept into our offices under false pretenses.  We thought it was a library of information.  Then we thought it was a publishing medium.  Then we thought it was a toy or a dangerous distraction.  But in fact it is a conversation of a new type, free of the need to get permission from Dad and his army buddies.

New types of connections.  The heart flowing into other hearts.  A new rhythm.  A new causality.  A new understanding of power. Conversation that understands that it isn't a distraction from work, it's the real work of business.

The Web is hitting business with the force of a whirlwind because it is a whirlwind.  The closely held, tightly packed, beautifully tooled pieces are being pulled apart.  They are rebinding themselves in patterns determined by the conversations that are occurring in every conceivable tone of voice.

The character of business is becoming the same as the character of the Web - an explosion reconfigured by the intersection of hearts." p 159



EZ Answers by Christopehr Locke and David Weinberger (Ch 6)

"Business is being transformed, but not by technology. The Web is simply liberating an atavistic human desire, the longing for connection through talk.  That's the one constant throughout our evolution, form caves to mud huts to open-air bazaars, city-states to empires, nations, interdependent global powers.  We've always conversed, connecting to the  people of our world in our authentic voices.  We connect to ourselves the same way; that the mystery of voice. " p164


The Cluetrain Hit-One-Outta-the-Park Twelve Step Program for Internet Business Success
1. Relax
2. have a sense of humor
3. Find your voice and use it
4. Tell the truth
5. Don't panic
6. Enjoy yourself
7. Be brave
8. Be curious
9. Play more
10. Dream always
11. Listen up
12 Rap on
p170-1


LINKS
www.cluetrain.com - this is the website and source of more information

Your Customer Isn't An Idiot -  Retail On the Web: Getting it right - Guidelines from the trenches: some lessons we learned on our way to launching www.hatfactory.com.

Other links mentioned in the book.
hyperorg.com
panix.com/~clocke
rageboy.com
mancala.com
personalization.com
www.chrisworth.com
www.hartscientific.com
www.glenns.org


May 8, 2001
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