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The Cluetrain Conversation



This is really several years old now, but still good, the Cluetrain Manifesto. It’s from the heyday of the internet and I was revisiting it recently because a lot of it rings true with some of my recent thoughts on marketing. If you’ve never seen it before, these are the first 5 of the 95 points (theses) made in it:

  1. Markets are conversations.
  2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
  3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
  4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
  5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

It’s mainly written from a business perspective, but I think the applications of it are a lot broader, pointing to social trends that have been reinforced in all areas by the emergence of the internet.







4 Reader Responses

  1. Fell Says:
    August 22nd, 2005 at 2:25 pm

    Thanks for throwing that down, Tim. I’m unfamiliar with it but it looks like a good read.

  2. bill Says:
    August 22nd, 2005 at 3:07 pm

    Tim,

    I agree wholeheartedly. You may already know this but I attempted to correlate The Cluetrain Manifesto to church–even got mention from Doc Searls on his blog. Anyway, the first in the series was The Cluetrain for Churches in which I replaced “business” with “church” in the intro they have on the cluetrain.com page. It reads like a wakeup call for churches. But few will listen. Just like many businesses talk the talk but very few walk the walk. Searls agreed, kinda. Unfortunatly oranizations just don’t get it. I’m beginning to wonder whether modern organizational management is even capable. By ‘em books and they just eat the covers off.

  3. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 22nd, 2005 at 6:20 pm

    That’s awesome Bill, I’ll check it out. That’s one of several directions I planned to take this was the old “replace the word” game.

  4. Fell Says:
    August 23rd, 2005 at 4:21 pm

    Yes, this has been very interesting reading. Both The Cluetrain Manifesto and faithCommons has really been adding to a bunch of other stuff I’ve been researching in regards to upcoming commercial paradigms. What an interesting week!



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