Angry Mobs & The Cluetrain Manifesto
By Nick | December 5th, 2009
The Cluetrain Manifesto turned 10 this year. For those of you who missed it in 1999, I suggest you get yourself acquainted with its principles – it is far more relevant today than it was when it was published. The manifesto was a statement of 95 theses that would define the future of commerce. While some companies have moved closer to accepting these theses as their new reality, most are still living in the old world of commerce (and are doing so at their own peril).
The first point in the Cluetrain Manifesto encompasses all of the others. It is so important you should read it over and over again until it truly sinks in.
Markets Are Conversations
Note that it doesn’t say “markets will become conversations” or “markets should be conversations”. They always were, and always will be. Whether it is in the form of an Indian bazaar or an Amazon web server, every transaction is a conversation between buyer and seller. Mass Media has served to obscure this fact over the last few hundred years, but consumers have always found ways to coordinate themselves. Whether it is with the Better Business Bureau, or coworkers at the water-cooler, customers will always try and coordinate themselves to make decisions in a market.
The Cluetrain Manifesto was written in the time before blogs were called “blogs”, when a Face Book was printed and given to college freshmen, and when Google was an unheard-of research project from Stanford. Today, online markets look far more conversational than they did then. Remember: the dominant model for eCommerce in the ’90s was the catalogue. The catalogue itself was born in a time before the telephone, where transactions had to be completed by mail and products took months to arrive. The catalogue model is useless in a world where communication is dirt cheap and instantaneous.
Today, we are getting closer to a world that accepts the ubiquity (and cheapness) of communication, but we are not there yet. Companies have figured out how to harness some of these new tools to talk more directly with consumers. You can see this in the thousands of brands who maintain active Twitter accounts, or keep honest and open company blogs. You can see this in the live chat feature that you can open up on popular retailer’s websites, or the GetSatisfaction forums that streamline customer service. Corporations have found their voice on the web, but I would argue that consumers are actually further behind.
The modern consumer still does not know how much power they wield in 2009. They have had tastes of it: like when American Airlines created the Airline Passenger’s Bill Of Rights because of a campaign from one irate passenger, or when Facebook had to reverse an unpopular change to their terms of service. It is just hard to understand that this kind of collective action will soon be the norm.
We are only at the beginning of this shift. Doc Searls, one of the authors of the manifesto, has spent the last ten years working on a framework to understand these new empowered consumers. It is called Vendor Relationship Management, and it is worth taking a look at. VRM is the inverse of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). It is how purchasing decisions are made when the balance of power shifts in the customers favour. Instead of companies dividing markets by demographics, or geography, consumers will divide providers based on what they can offer. Don’t like the terms of your cell phone plan? Send out a request for proposals to other cell-phone companies and let them compete for your business.
The key to understanding this new world is that customers are no longer alone. Prior to the Internet, there was no reliable way for an ordinary person to complain to an audience of thousands without going through a gatekeeper. Reporters had to be wooed, editors had to consent, advertisers had to be consulted, before a story could be published to the masses. Now, anyone can access thousands of people through just 2 degrees of separation in their Facebook network. Anyone can be a threat to a brand. That means that everyone has more power.
In this new world of amplified word of mouth, companies must learn to listen better than they have been. Customers can be more of an asset, or a threat, than ever before. What they cannot be is ignored. It is too easy for them to join together, now. The communication is too fast. The organization is too easy. The power is too cheap.
Remember, markets are conversations. Conversations are not monologues. If you can’t give your customers what they are looking for, they will join together and find someone who can.
Check in tomorrow for some interesting software that can help you coordinate this listening. Even better: shoot us an email, or give us a call, and tell us about your market’s communication problems. We certainly know how to listen…and we might just be able to help.
Related posts:
- Get rich now! Marketing magic from a certain sultan of selling (part 1)
- Google social media make Murdoch angry, Murdoch smash Google!
- Turning Noise Into Knowledge
Tags: cluetrain, mobs, Social Media, vrm
