CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
September 2001, Vol. 43, No. 8
When Nolan Lushington speaks, I listen. I have known him as a librarian, consultant, and teacher of librarians for close to twenty-five years. He is always thinking about ways to do things better. A while back, he told me that I should do a column on Paco Underhill's Why We Buy. Apparently, a lot of you also read it because I still run into folks who want to talk about that book. That's Nolan. He makes you think!At the CLA Conference in Waterbury, he grabbed me and told me about a book that was based on a Web site! He said something about 95 theses, like Martin Luther, but posted in cyberspace, not on a church door. The book had a pompous, revolutionary title, like something out of Marx and Engels, or the Sixties. It had to do with marketing, sort of. "Okay Nolan. Write down that title and the authors, and I'll give a look."
The Cluetrain Manifesto is about conversations, thousands of them, millions of them, taking place on the Internet, conversations that, according to the authors, will mean "the end of business as usual." Those conversations will end the age of marketing, and return us to the spirit and dynamics of the original markets, places where people came together to trade goods, news, and ideas. Buyers and sellers knew each other then. Sellers were proud of the produce they had grown or the goods they had crafted. Buyers sampled wares at the invitation of the sellers. Buyers conferred with each other, compared notes, shared likes and dislikes. In that market, buyers were as active as sellers, making choices, comparing prices, bargaining, buying the goods they needed from vendors who they knew and trusted.
How unlike the "marketing" of today. In the words of Cluetrain, we are "interchangeable consumers," made to order for today's impersonal system of industry and commerce. Interchangeable commodities, comprised of interchangeable parts, are produced on assembly lines by interchangeable machines operated by interchangeable workers. We do not converse in our market. We do not speak to the people who make or grow the products we purchase. We are passive consumers, neatly fitted into rigid statistical categories. We are the quarry of campaigns employing one-way "messages" that target us for the sale of products we may not need, made and sold by companies we do not know. Company representatives feed us the "party line" as cleared by the corporate legal department. Our inquiries are answered by professionals in bureaucratic language, not in the words of real human beings.
Along comes the Internet, email, electronic mailing lists, newsgroups, and Web pages. Consumers start using these tools to trade information on what products they like best. They openly discuss problems they have encountered with products or services they have purchased. They share solutions. They spread the word about companies whose products, services, or responses to complaints have been unsatisfactory. People who work for some of these companies join the discussions. They are not officially-designated corporate spokespeople. They just want to help. They happen to know something about the products they make and the organizations for which they work. The authors hear in these long-distance, electronic, keyboarded messages the return of ancient marketplace conversation.
The authors alert us that the days of one-way marketing, of command and control, of top-down management, and of the party-line are over. As industry has evolved into the information economy, knowledge is dispersed throughout all levels of all organizations. No longer can it be assumed that the people at the top of the organizational chart know everything. Nor can they make informed decisions all on their own. Most importantly, communication is no longer exclusively controlled by management and the board of directors. The Internet empowers consumers and liberates workers because it emancipates communication. Anyone within an organization can communicate with anyone else within that organization, and with anyone outside of it. As for traditional advertising, consumers can communicate around it. That is why Web advertising will never succeed. Why listen to the product claims of a manufacturer who pays for space in print media or time on television, radio, or Web sites, when you can converse directly with dozens of people who have already tried the product?
This is heady stuff! Levine, Locke, Searls, and Weinberger tell us that those who head organizations have only two choices. They can continue manning the ramparts of their corporate fortresses against internal and external penetration: erecting firewalls, installing Web-monitoring software, and adopting restrictive email policies. The authors see disaster in that option. In contrast, our leaders can recognize the knowledge, common sense, and good will of the people within their organizational walls, as well as those outside, and join in the conversation. As Nolan suggested, a good place to enter that conversation is at www.cluetrain.com.
Return to Looking at Books Online