Book Review: The Cluetrain Manifesto

Book Review: The Cluetrain Manifesto

In The Cluetrain Manifesto, authors Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger create and support a manifesto made of 95 theses that call to task businesses that have been slow to authentically engage their customer base. Like the theses that were nailed to the Castle Church door by Martin Luther, the 95 Cluetrain theses are a challenge to established corporate order and it’s methods of product development, support and feedback created during the Henry Ford era of mass production. Levine states that most companies have never had to engage their customer beyond a one way stream of sales because the structure for an unfettered corporate-customer conversation did not exist until the Internet. Like giants looking out over the trees, large corporations have only focused on each other, largely unaware of the thousands of small niche companies nibbling at their base. With the low cost of entry into the market provided by the Internet, small niche companies who truly listen and interact with their customers are slowly eroding the power structures of large corporations. Written in 1999, The Cluetrain Manifesto must have made some shock waves among large industries that had never thought beyond tag-lines and demographic research. Throughout the manifesto, one major theme is repeated again and again: in order for a company to thrive, innovate and be loved by it’s customers it must engage customers in a real voice and not treat them like idiots. Companies must not have a voice made up from demographic research or through cleverly thought out tag-lines and slogans, but a voice that can be trusted to listen to its customer’s ideas and complaints.

This book was intended for the large tech companies of the early 90’s: SUN Microsystems, Adobe, AOL, Yahoo, as well as more traditional companies such as Saturn and Nike. In the early 1990’s this manifesto would have been much more relevant due to the relatively new emergence of a graphic/browser based Internet, and the opportunities it presented for companies to engage their customer’s in a tailored and authentic way. Now in 2007, most people take it for granted that a company will have multiple forms of on-line communication available to the customer such as email, chat, forums, FAQ’s and so on. In the present day this book is good for people who want to see what the corporate mindset was like in the early days of a newly ubiquitous Internet, and how the ideas in The Cluetrain Manifesto were generally adopted as a ‘best practice’ by many major companies as is evidenced by the signatories of the manifesto listed on the official Cluetrain website.
Each contributing author to The Cluetrain Manifesto is an expert in their field, making this book very credible indeed. Rick Levine is president of Mancala, a net start up in Colorado focusing on communication between merchants and their customers. Before Mancala, Levine worked with SUN Microsystems for 13 years creating SUN’s first on-line help section. Christopher Locke is the editor/publisher of a webzine as well as the president of a web consulting firm in Colorado. Locke has bee listed in The Financial Times’ list of the top 50 business thinkers worldwide. Doc Searls is the senior editor for Linux Journal and has been writing about technology for most of his life. Finally, we have David Weinberger who is the editor of the Journal of Hyperlinked Organizations as well as a regular contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered.

The Cluetrain Manifesto is organized into eight major sections. The first section is a list of the 95 Cluetrain theses. These theses address ideas such as: Markets are really conversations; hyperlinks subvert hierarchy; the same technology that is allowing people to connect outside of corporations can also allow people inside corporations to connect; the onus to enter the marketplace conversation is now on the corporation; Intranets will impact corporate organization and control; new markets will have new expectations. The remaining seven sections discuss the 95 theses,creating easily digestible chunks of Cluetrain theory blending real life customer experiences and corporate case studies with a ‘new age’ influenced philosophy of human-corporate interaction and mutual fulfillment.

The book is one sided in the sense that it sees itself as a revolution against ‘business as usual,’ with humanistic ideas and common sense as its evidence. The Cluetrain Manifesto is named after the idea that a train carrying ‘clues’ has been stopping by many corporations for years without the corporation really ‘getting it’ and taking delivery of the clue. This could be seen as an assumption, as corporations may have complex reasons for not changing in the way that seems to be common sense in the Cluetrain world. Companies such as WalMart have done fairly well by not engaging their customer base through the Internet in the form of a conversation, in an attempt to tightly control criticism. Some writers such as PC Magazine’s John Dvorak see the fervent views of The Cluetrain Manifesto to be akin to religious ramblings by the kind of people that frequent Burning Man every year. In my view this book’s only shortcoming is that it may have been a bit over optimistic in what could be accomplished by open conversations between producer and consumer.

We still have too many choices, we still have poor feedback systems, and the Internet is still very confusing and choked with ’spam.’ However, things do seem to be going in the direction that is pointed to by The Cluetrain Manifesto and ultimately this book will remain a very important resource far into the future. The Cluetrain Manifesto, however optimistic and ‘new-agey’ it may seem, provides a powerful vision as to what the Internet can do to bring us all back to the raw energy and vitality of the earliest marketplace, where business was literally a conversation between two people using authentic human voices.