I had first come across the 95 thesis that compose the actual Cluetrain Manifesto back in 2000 at the Cluetrain website – anyone doing any kind of work today, for profit or non-profit, from CEO to self-described McJob slave, should read these points. Not everyone will “get it” and that’s the point, if you don’t get it, then your chances of being successful in the first couple decades of the 21st century are going to be much smaller than if you do “get it”.

What’s great is that you can read the manifesto and the contents of the entire book for free at the website so this is a zero investment for you other than time. I bought a copy of the book (on Amazon) because if something is more than 20 pages long I like to read it on paper, plus I bring all the books I buy into the office in order for my colleagues to borrow them at will.

As I posted last month, when I first began reading the book I (finally) put it together that contributor Christopher Locke is _the_ Christopher Locke I had known from 12 years ago via his Entropy Gradient Reversal website and RageBoy newsletters. Back then, Christopher would kindly respond to questions and comments made in reply to his newsletters and sure enough, within a day of my post he posted a very nice comment to me. He notified me about his new(er) philosphy-driven blog, Mystic Bourgeoisie, and I noticed he has a book out, The Bombast Transcripts, which I will have to check out on short order.

The book version of the Cluetrain Manifesto is composed of the 95 tenets of the new global communication (which should be referred to semi-regularly, like a favorite poem) and a set of 7 supplemental essays that expand upon most if not all of the thesis. Christopher Locke’s 3 contributions reveal him to be the cheerleader for the mental revolution necessary for individuals, organizations, and society to be successful at leveraging this required method of communication. More clearly than anyone in the book, Locke points out the fallacy of continuing to function as if the change in attitude hasn’t happened, as well as urging people and groups to not to attempt to “fake” it – charlatanism is transparent and will be rewarded with failure. His enthusiasm is humorous, urgent, and serious at the same time, truly inspirational.

Rick Levine’s essay, “Talk Is Cheap” is the most technically oriented of the bunch, focusing on how email, networks and chat function, and their intrinsic advantages over “traditional” communication methods. As Levine was the contributor who spent the most time actually putting the book together, he deserves a lot of respect despite the fact that his name appears next to only one of the essays.

The most “prolific” of the collaborators in this collection is David Weinberger (see my summary of his book “Everything Is Miscellaneous”) as he worked on 4 of the essays. My feeling is that Weinberger’s contributions feel the most dated because of his emphasis on the corporate intranet as a machine of change. We know that this didn’t really happen as most corporations saw the intranet as the one piece of the online revolution that they could control. Individuality and group contributions and initiatives on the intranet have roundly been stamped out in the years since the Cluetrain came out. Intranets are dead and the products and services that seek to make a dollar in the space are similarly featureless and dead – look at Microsoft Office Sharepoint as a prime example of this, is there a more brainless zombie experience than navigating through Sharepoint? Everyone can see through the charade of the new term “Enterprise 2.0″ as the corporate co-opting of Web 2.0 technologies: let’s squeeze the life out of something good and forcibly insert it into our systems and wonder why it doesn’t take off.

Weinberger’s references to everything other than intranets are relatively timeless and still resonates so no arguments there. He looks at the history of how people and organizations communicated and points to the Web as a massive opportunity for not just businesses, but the entire world to take a big step forward. His essay with Doc Searls, “Markets Are Conversations” is in the middle of this book because it is the meat of the message. Mass markets and mass communication don’t exist any more, customers, wait, no, _people_ will not take corporate BS anymore. Many of their points, such as “the web is not, and will never be TV”, the one way blast of on-message product-driven content are still valid today as many corporations still don’t seem to understand this and have failed to make the necessary adjustments.

Another primary message of this book is that the lack of control and the fear of this lack of control can only lead to failure. The attitudes that will help a company be successful: openness and honesty are requirements, not “nice to haves”.  These points can serve as a roadmap for new companies but I’m not sure how well they could practically be applied by the companies of yesteryear. True, these companies _need_ to apply themselves to these tenets, set them as short to medium term goals, but my feeling is that a generation of middle and upper managers need to go into retirement or die off before their organizations can attempt these adaptations. The question is, will they still be around to take advantage of that opportunity?

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by David Weinberger

I read this a couple months ago but have now only just had a chance to summarize my reading of it. Dr. Weinberger is a contributor to The Cluetrain Manifesto (I’ve read the manifesto years ago but am reading the group of associated essays) who has a previous book that I’d also like to read: “Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web” – maybe later this year.

Dr. Weinberger’s premise is that the digitization of data points is changing “everything”. Let’s be a little more clear, it’s not just just the digitization of data points, it’s the treatment of any and all information as data points (that are then digitized). The book is dedicated “To the Librarians” and the Dewey Decimal System is one of a dozen or so systems whose histories are examined and compared to current systems. The story of the Dewey Decimal System is amazingly ridiculous – the fact that for decades libraries have been using such a skewed and unworkable system and that the bureaucracy in place won’t let it be updated or adjusted while systems continue to advance around it seems to only ensure the irrelevance of the organizations that use the system. Weinberger does the ultimate comparison of the Dewey vs. Amazon (old vs. new; inefficient vs. scalable; and a system couched in all kinds of bias and prejudice vs. a system based on data and usage metrics; etc.).

It’s easy to grasp Weinberger’s idea that any subject/oject/item/node/mode has a set of data associated with it, a list that is lumped together with other lists or split into separate lists and it’s easy to understand why the organizations and companies he points to as success stories are successful because they have embraced and exploited this idea. What is hard to understand is how the organizations that actually create data are supposed to survive in the world that Weinberger envisions. Smart people who know how to organize and reorganize data, metadata, and the relationships between them can only be successful in a world where the data exists in the first place. Look at the struggle that newspapers are facing today: they are closing up shop one by one, and while there are millions of blogs with writers who opine about the specifics in news articles, the sources for these articles are disappearing. How are sources for data and research to be funded and maintained so that they remain independent entities?

Weinberger doesn’t address this at all – perhaps he’s saving it for his next book? How isn’t everything miscellaneous he asks? Without multiple sources of unbiased and independent data, the admired architects of arrangement will be presenting us with arrays that will have questionable relevance.

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Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin

This is probably the Bible equivalent of Seth Godin’s works, or at least, a tidy book of psalms. At 137 pages this is one of several more compact books by Godin and this is the one that has “taken off” the most, with people in all kinds of roles in all kinds of businesses assessing whether or not their product, service, or company is a Purple Cow or not.

In the new milennium, Godin started writing shorter books composed of several dozen ”chaplets” of no more than 4 pages each. I love this much more digestible format because you know you’re going to be able to get through the book because each “chaplet” is a digestible idea and you know that you can get that idea in your head, close the book, and head off to sleep knowing that you can pick the book up the next day or several days later to get to these other mini topics.

If you’ve ever read the Tao Te Ching then you know the power of saying a lot with the least amount of words. Some folks might argue that some of Godin’s ideas are truly spiritual but I think he would modestly argue that he’s more interested in revealing the truth rather than a pathway for mortal souls. This 2003 book contains some summaries of previous Godin ideas (The TV Industrial Complex, Ideaviruses, Everyone Is A Designer, etc.) and it’s always wise to revisit those.

There are also many case studies that Godin uses to illustrate a particular idea. Sometimes I feel that this is a bit too simplistic and misleading.There was certainly more than 1/2 dozen paragraphs devoted to many of these business and marketing strategies. But really, you should want to know more than what Godin provides – he’s just identifying the idea and informing us about it.

There are many great messages in the book, many of them are “takeaway points” that Godin puts at the end of each chaplet, some of my favorites are:

“If you could build a competitor that had costs that were 30 percent lower than yours, could you do it? If you could, why don’t you?”

“Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in something new.”

“It is useless to advertise to anyone (except interested sneezers with influence).”

“What would happen if you told the truth?”

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Mark Hughes was a marketing executive for PepsiCo, and Pep Boys but he earned his laurels helping make Half.com a success with the now famous marketing move of getting a town called Halfway, Oregon, to change its name to Half.com, Oregon – wow, people really went for that?

Although this book is published in 2005 I found a lot of the examples to be incredibly dated for a book that touts: “Books like The Tipping Point and Purple Cow taught us that every company can thrive by creating buzz. Now Buzzmarketing teaches us HOW to make it happen in the real world with the six secrets of buzzmarketing.” I’m not sure what the book means to teach with some of these examples: Miller Lite, the “1984” Apple commercial, tie-dye, etc. that is applicable to business circa 2005. Between these historical artifacts and the somewhat overwrought recounting of Half.com’s success I was almost ready to put this book down but there are some discussion points that have merit.

The “six secrets” are interesting and makes one wish that this chapter was available as a downloadable PDF. As Hughes describes them, the Six Buttons of Buzz:
- the taboo (sex, lies, bathroom humor)
- the unusual
- the outrageous
- the hilarious
- the remarkable
- the secrets (both kept and revealed)

Each one of these “buttons” can be used to start conversation with potential customers, “the market”, and the press. You can use one or a combination of these buttons to get conversations going and to create “buzz” about your company, product, or service. At this point with my limited intellect, I can’t see using this beyond press releases or attitude when writing website copy, or designing some ads.

The other chapter that was helpful was the description of the five most frequently written news stories:
- the David-and-Goliath story
- the unusual or outrageous story
- the controversy story
- the celebrity story
- what’s already hot in the media

This kind of insight makes it easier to pitch your story to media reps and I have had some success with this since reading the book. It also helps refine your elevator speech with customers if you have a widely understood angle – the specifics can come later. The problem is that these two chapters are the only ones that I felt I benefited from when reading this book. I don’t think that means the whole book is a waste of time to read, after all, if you learn just one thing from a book, then it’s supposed to be worth it, right? I just wish the ratio of value was higher, but at $15 and 240 pages this investment didn’t break the bank.

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I’ve been doing a lot of reading to broaden my mind professionally over the last few months. I’m going to write a mini review for each book I complete because:

- to imprint the primary points of each book in my mind
- to improve my writing
- to help others who might read this blog identify books that they may want to read or avoid

I read a lot of Godin in preparation for a day-long Q&A session with him that I attended the first week of September 2007 in New York City. Permission Marketing frames a favorite Godin rule of current existence: marketing isn’t the way it used to be. Godin describes the history and evolution of mass advertising succinctly and with value. This evolution is referred to in many other Seth Godin books as well as regularly in his blog posts.

Companies can no longer guarantee increased revenues by simply increasing advertising. The ratio is getting too tight and the tipping point where revenues can’t cover increased advertising expense occurs sooner and sooner. Dumping money into marketing won’t solve a problem unless a new currency is recognized.

This new currency is the attention of potential customers. Potential customers are the exclusive holders of this currency – they are in complete control (to a significant extent). Godin illustrates the difference between old/industrial/mass advertising and permission marketing. The old way was “interruption” marketing, like television/radio/print commercials that disrupted the content of those media. After more than a half-century of this kind of advertising, humans have learned to tune out the vast majority of interruption messages so something new must be done.

The meat of the book is Godin’s definition of permission marketing and his explanation of the 5 levels of permission marketing (listed in order of importance):

1. intravenous
2. points
3. personal relationships
4. brand trust
5. situation

In going through these five levels, Godin goes on to describe the concept of permission – it’s value, it’s importance, how it can be abused, and how permission is an ongoing process that can be shut off/cancelled at any time by the customer.

Godin provides us with several examples of web marketing failures as well as a series of case studies. One must bear in mind that this book was published in 1999 – some of the examples of poor web marketing are shocking (”Did companies really expect that to work?”) and similarly, even what were ingenious examples about ten years ago seem a bit dated and simple.

The book closes well with a currently valid permission marketing evaluation self-exam as well as a FAQ, both of which are completely usable to date. Despite the dated case studies, this book is very much worth reading for the definitions of permission and the other sections cited above. Permission Marketing provides a good foundation for more current examples that might be found elsewhere in other texts or even in Seth Godin’s blog archives.

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