Do it [social].

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual

Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger | 1999

I’m dumbfounded that the Cluetrain Manifesto was written more than 10 years ago. It makes me wonder why we think social communication technology is so revolutionary today.

Maybe it’s because many business corporations wimped out and refused to really change the way they communicate, and by now the “people of the earth” have become so networked and collectively sophisticated that we are really just forcing them to engage in real, jargonless, human conversation.

(“We” are the one’s who “get it” and “they” are the one’s “who don’t” explained Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger years later at a 2009 Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society forum on “Cluetrain at 10: So How’s Utopia Working Out for Ya?“moderated by Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It).

“What is ‘it‘?” you ask. Well, there’s no need for me to try to paraphrase or summarize—it would just be an inferior version of Weinberger’s pithy “Elevator Rap“:

Cluetrain’s thesis about how the ’net is/has transforming/ed the relationship between brands and markets shares a strong characteristic to the relationship between mass media and users.

And I believe it can be explained by a 1974 mass communication theory that refused to be limited by the concept of one-way communication—that is, Blumler and Katz’s Uses and Gratifications theory:

• “Media users play an active role in choosing and using the media.”
• (Markets play an active role in choosing and using brands.)
• “Users take an active part in the communication process and are goal oriented in their media use.”
• (Markets take an active part in the communication process and find purpose in their consumption of goods and services.)
• “A media user seeks out a media source that best fulfills the needs of the user.”
• (Markets seek out brands that best fulfill their needs.)
• “Uses and gratifications assume that the user has alternate choices to satisfy her need.”
• (Markets have a lot of choices, brands are trying to keep up.)

In chapter 6, EZ Answers, Locke and Weinberger ask, “Will the Web become a broadcast medium? Will it become TV?”

No. Just as networked markets won’t buy a phony message marketers have to sell, networked media users won’t put up with broadcast or TV. It’s oppressive and backwards. They’ve experienced much more power to control the time and space content is consumed (TiVo, YouTube, OnDemand, Hulu, Netflix Streaming, mobile phone video and TV streaming, iPad…), why would they ever revert?

Marketeers still drool at the prospect of the Net replicating the top-down broadcast model wherein glitzy “content” is developed at great cost in remote studios and jammed down a one-way pipe into millions of living rooms. TV with a buy button! Wowee!

[...] Today, many large companies offer flashy bread-and-circus entertainments on the Web. These offerings have all the classic earmarks of the mass market come-on: lowest-common-denominator programming developed to package and deliver market segments to mass merchandisers. This is not what most people want, or they would have stuck with television, the Yellow Pages, and 800 numbers. And they don’t have to accept it since the Internet came up with the concept of infinite channel-surfing.—Locke [wrote that in 1999!]

The Cluetrain Manifesto was spot-on 10 years ago with the way the ‘net is widely transforming the conversations between market and workers today. In 1999 there were about 80 million adults in the U.S. who accessed the internet primarily for e-mail and info about hobbies, general news and businesses. That was enough networked communication experienced by Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger to give insight into the impending death of top-down and highly-managed business practices over the next decade.

Cluetrain is passionate. It’s pithy. It’s conversational. And, most importantly, it’s convicting of business-as-usual. Read it.