Doc Searls, The Cluetrain Manifesto, 10 Years Later

This is the mother of all conversations, to borrow from a title to a post Doc Searls wrote, which I link to down below. He's among my personal heroes for thinking about the buyer's side - and doing something about it. Something hopefully radical and, if you're paying attention, really important.

He writes about independence, and about providing tools for individuals to manage relationships with organizations. Personal tools for people to collect their own data, control it, share it selectively, assert their own terms of service (TOS), and give them means to express their own demand in the open market.

In the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto he writes about these points and says: base relationship-managing tools on open standards, open APIs (application program interfaces), and open code. It's what he calls the Intention Economy.

His project, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), is about improving how buyers and sellers relate. With all that he's working on, I'm beyond thrilled that he'd find the time to have a conversation with us here.

________

You've been a hero of mine as co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. I own the souvenir, the actual book. Stories and the facts that anchor them were my daily diet for my degree in Liberal Arts from the University of Bologna. I loved Dante Alighieri's version of things. Probably primed by this context, the image you conjured with your friend's story: "the cluetrain stopped there four times a day for ten years and no one ever took delivery" stuck with me over the years.

Ten years after the fact, what would you change if you were writing the Cluetrain Manifesto today?

Doc: I think we answered that question with the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which we wrote about a year ago. In my case I wanted to shift readers' interest from conversation to relationship, and from marketing to markets -- from the verb to the noun form of "market."

It's important to remember that Cluetrain in the first place was an expression of rebellion against marketing, and a declaration of liberation from it. Note the voice in "We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it." We were not speaking there as marketers, or as "the audience," or as "consumers," but as ordinary people.

Cluetrain was a commentary on the Net, more than one on marketing. We just happened to be pissed more at marketing than at other professions that were just as deserving of rebuke (if not more -- such as venture capitalists). We were telling companies -- and marketers especially -- to wake up and recognize that the Net was a place where buyers were at least as important as sellers, and not just as "targets" for "messages."

Most of the opportunities opened by the Net are still overlooked, because nearly everybody in business still thinks only about improving what they're already doing on the sell side. Better sales, marketing, data collection and so on. They can't stop pushing long enough to recognize that there's room for improvement on the buy side too. They don't yet see how equipping demand to drive supply changes and improves the whole game.

While buyers need cars, sellers are still building passenger trains. Worse, all the trains are different and run on their own tracks. Every company's loyalty program is a private customer railway system.

In the CM you famously described markets as conversations, which is the cornerstone of what I write about at Conversation Agent. Many companies have started talking, but are the people in them actually listening?

Doc: Most of the time I don't think so. A call center is not a listening instrument. It's a way of controlling conversation rather than of listening.

But the problem isn't with call centers, or even with companies. It's with the absence of relationship tools on the customers' side. These tools should provide customers with ways that make it easy for customers to deal with multiple sellers in consistent ways, and on the customers' own terms. In the absence of those, every company says "we have ways of making you talk." And those ways are all different.

What sparked this interview was my notice that you've placed me on a Twitter list called Postcluetrainians. What does this term mean?

Doc: I was just goofing around with names for lists not long after Twitter came out with them. I chose to use "ian" at the end of each list name (not sure why), and I didn't want to say "Cluetrainians," because that looked like the name of a religion. (Or so I recall.) As it turns out, you can't change the names of lists once you've made them. Not as far as I know anyway.

Part of my job is public relations, and I smile as I write this as I read your good rant about PR. You put your finger on the real role of PR... yet it's not the only culprit in the "check the box" category. Or is it? Many company Web sites work very hard at maximizing lack of conversation. It looks like the automation people are still bringing in more business conversions than the conversation people - or else we would have more dynamic, people-centric tools by now. Forrester's projection for Internet advertising was also off - it grew only to $8.75 billion in 2004. Which goes to show that things move more slowly than we think.

What's your take on all this?

Doc: My take is that it's early. Very early. The Net and the Web as we know them are only about fifteen years old, yet the Net may prove to be as world-changing in our day than the invention of movable type was in Gutenberg's. You don't change a world overnight. Or even over a decade or two.

Perspective... The Industrial Age is nearly two centuries old, and isn't ending. Over that time we have become very good at selling. The flywheels in the selling machine are huge. So far the Net has offered to sellers countless ways to improve what they're already doing. That's why "the automation people" appear to be more successful than "the conversation people." They've been at it longer, and the Net gives them more ways to get better at what they already do.

The "conversation people" also have two problems. One is that they work for the sell side. This subordinates their work to sell-side systems, imperatives and defaults. The other is that their tools are inadequate. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and pretty much everything we call "social" are good, but don't cut it for everybody. Most ordinary citizens don't read blogs, much less write them. They also don't have a Facebook account or use Twitter. Even if they did, those tools aren't built for any of the things we need, that I list in my "Markets are Relationships" chapter in the 10th Anniversary edition of Cluetrain.

I list those again here: The Father of All Business Models

This piece should also be helpful: Where Markets are Not Conversations

If you were to share one word of advice with us, what would it be?

Doc: Persevere.

I'm a highly spontaneous person, it's probably crazy I ended up in marketing communications. It's my hope that I've learned some of your lessons and those of my mentors and continue to focus on my craft to help businesses listen and relearn how to talk.

Doc: I don't think any learning is required. There's a music teacher I know who says nobody who knows how to walk lacks a sense of rhythm.

Unfortunately, what we need are tools that do not yet exist. I'm working on some, and so are a few others in the larger VRM community. But it's going to take awhile.

Thank you so much for your time.

Doc: Yours too!

[image by eszter. cc attribution http://www.flickr.com/photos/eszter/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

***

Do take the time to read both of his posts linked above. Do you see the issues as clearly as I do? In a response to a comment in the second post, Doc writes:

VRM is about fixing the means by which each of us relate to companies. We should have simple and common means of relating to multiple companies. We should be the points of integration for our own data, and the points of origination about what we do with that data. We should have our own terms of engagement and service, which companies that we deal with can accept or not. We should not have to remember a zillion different logins and passwords in order to deal with companies or other entities. The absence of those abilities is what needs to be fixed. If “the market” gets fixed along with that, cool.

The problem in the meantime is that we keep looking to the big companies to fix these problems for us. They’re not going to do it. In fact, they can’t — any more than AOL could fix email, or Yahoo could fix instant messaging. All these companies tend to do is make what they already do for themselves work better. Thus a free market becomes “your choice of silo.”

We won’t get a truly free market until we equip individuals with tools of engagement that are independent of any one “provider.” We have to provide for ourselves.

From the first one, I learned that Doc is working on a book titled The Intention Economy: What Happens When Customers Get Real Power. And he's looking for helpful scholarship, research and stories for the book. So if you have any, send them his way.

Spend time with these ideas and think about how they'd work in your business. We won't have a two-way conversation until we both - customers and service providers - hold the tools to develop those relationships in terms we both want, not just we can live with.

As Doc says, the money - and demand - is with the buyer.

Comments

[Tom Gable]

Great post. I posted some excerpts from Cluetrain last year as part of a series on jargon.

http://www.gablepr.com/blog/2009/04/07/cluetrain-manifesto-wisdom-from-1999/

The wisdom from the first edition still holds true. The new edition embellishes.

[Stuart Foster]

I've never read this book. Per your recommendation?

I just ordered via the Amazon link. Hoping it teaches me a lot :)

[James Ball]

After writing a post about Jake McKee and LEGO, I took a much closer look at The Cluetrain Manifesto. I appreciate the questions and answers in your interview. After all this time, I really feel like The Cluetrain Manifesto deserves a new and longer look. Good to know Doc is still active and that the book still stands as is...not needing a thing to remain relevant and important. I’m telling everyone I can about it!
My LEGO/Cluetrain post can be seen here: http://noteasytoforget.com/2009/12/learning-social-media-from-lego/

[Eric Williamson]

Really great post.

I enjoyed the interview and the thought of simple & connected tools being the catalyst to improving the conversation is great. Big fan of CM and will now be going to see what is new in the 10th.

Love your blog, and check it every day. Thanks for your hard work.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Tom - thank you for the link. Conversations on jargon always peak my interest.

@Stuart - I don't use affiliate links, which I would disclose. My hard copy is well worn. good choice.

@James - indeed! I recall Jake's involvement there. Now thrilled to have your post to look forward to.

@Eric - thank you for reading, I do appreciate your time enormously. Clarity is a beautiful thing and he has it in spades.

[Peter]

"Spend time with these ideas and think about how they'd work in your business. We won't have a two-way conversation until we both - customers and service providers - hold the tools to develop those relationships in terms we both want, not just we can live with"

I'm still doing my time thinking after 10 years (your post reminded me that I was one of those signatories to it.)

Where I've got to:

The buy side is broken - but not because consumer lack tools. I think the "problem" is that "we" have littke understanding of what it means to be a good consumer or a good customer.

The sell side of capitalism is driven by an industry of knowledge, expertise and continual learning. However, by and large, the same cannot be said for the buy side. Consumption is largely an amateur pursuit notwistanding that in Western Society its perhaps becoming our life long profession.

I'm all for better tools for consumers but these must include tools for thinking about what it means to be a good if not great consumer/customer.

For me this begins with the appreciation of the minor miracle that is the sell side. Money and demand just means a long que if there is limited supply.

However the lasting impression of Clue Train was that it spoke with a human voice. For me, it legitimised the idea of plain and honest speaking in business ( something you hear clearly in your conversation). Unfortunately, no sooner had the voice been liberated than it began to be commodified by those who saw a way to "sell" this voice to the sell side. For me, Clue Trail marked the steady commodification of the best of the human spirit (but more on that some other time) - .

Finally, persistance is a lovely virtue ( provided its mindful). Personnaly, I'm a fan of the concept of saying someting 1000 times before its heard (a view at odds with social media and its appetite for newness - (as an aside - I've noticed that human nature is such that only lesser ideas tend to be stolen - the really good ones are more likely to be ignored or derided))

Thanks for your post and sharing.

Peter

[Valeria Maltoni]

Peter -

I knew this conversation would resonate with you. In fact, I was hoping you'd be able to give us your take, which I appreciate immensely.

To me, a conversation is also about holding many points of view in consideration and appreciation, seeing the people who bring them forth as humans, and moving our own thinking or being moved to evolve it of our own choosing.

We're terrible customers and we bring that attitude in organizations as sellers.

On the ideas front, good food for thought.

[Peter]

"We're terrible customers and we bring that attitude in organizations as sellers."

I know that we are bad at selling - I'm just not sure how bad it is. I've been trying to work out how much of what we tell companies is wrong with them is motivated by "our" need to have something to sell to them.

For example, I've been thinking about marketing. To what extent are marketing ideas motivated by self preservation. There seems no other profession where the required tools, knowledge and skill are so aligned with ensuring the professions continued popularity and relevance. I'm not saying it's intentional but that marketers may be hopelessly compromised by their own discipline.

To put it another way, marketers create the demand for their own services (regardless of the need - afterall need is seldom a pre-condition of a sale).

I'm not saying this is bad, I just wonder to what extent we need to discount their claims when analysing just how bad companies are.

"To me, a conversation is also about holding many points of view in consideration and appreciation, seeing the people who bring them forth as humans, and moving our own thinking or being moved to evolve it of our own choosing."

Yes - but does this extends to corporations also. Should we hold corporations to the standard of humanity or super humanity (as was kind of suggested a couple of days ago ). By the way, I don't know how much choice we have over the timing of the penny dropping - both as humans and as part of corporations.

A pleasure to stop by.

Peter

[Valeria Maltoni]

In reading your thoughts on marketing and preservation and need I'm also thinking about many lawyers - the ambulance chasers come to mind - who do quite the same thing. And MBA graduates, and HR people...

To me there are types of people who create a crisis to then be seen (photo/career opp) solving it. I've encountered quite a few in my career.

Yes, if it's true that many people are going nowhere, that holds true for many corporations as well.

Indeed a pleasure.

[Peter (with apologies)]

Valeria,

A darkish thought - have corporations been hijacked by certain professions and transformed into vehicles for their continued relevance ?

How is it then, that despite these "corrupting influences" by and large corporations still have healthy momentum, direction and pay their bills. Perhaps the 20th century love affair with marketing has blinded us to undiscovered forces at play - corporations are wonderful mystery - a lightish thought.

As an aside,is there etiquette on posting multiple comments ?

Peter

[Jon Buscall]

Thanks for taking the time to put this together. Chasing interviews down always takes time. I've been a fan of Doc for a long time and appreciated reading this.

I like the fact he stresses how new this all is. A lot of people involved in the marketing space are talking about best practice and established methods that work. It's useful to remember that this is still new territory with emerging technologies, uses and strategies.

[Steven Woods]

Valeria,
Great post and interview - it's hard to envision where this transition ends up. The marketing evolution towards understanding buyer intentions (within the spaces where this can be understood), and then responding to them is definitely under way. However, it's not just tools, but depth of perspective that needs to be thought about in the buyer/seller dynamic; sellers usually have a much deeper sense of what it will take to succeed with the solution they are selling.

However, both bias (they need to sell) and skills (subject matter experts are less involved in the conversation than sales people or marketers) will have to be dealt with before we have a profound change in the model.
Thanks for posting,
Steve

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Peter - interesting turn in the conversation. Could it be that until now, we have not had the tools to become organized to seek alternative forms of work? We still need to think about infrastructure and services, which would come online faster with more collaboration. In other words, we've come to believe the story and continue building it up. Thinking out loud here.

@Jon - humbling, isn't it? Given that many of us are barely scratching the surface. Good reminder.

@Steven - the membrane and relationship s being negotiated as we speak. I've been thinking about what you said here on sellers being more sophisticated than buyers in terms of the solution or product, what it helps do, what it compares to, etc. Subject matter experts do need to be more involved,that's why we eat up blogs and content that shares that kind of information. As Doc says, early days.