The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual

The Cluetrain Manifesto began as a Web site (www.cluetrain.com) in 1999 when the authors, who have worked variously at IBM, Sun Microsystems, the Linux Journal, and NPR, posted 95 theses that pronounced what they felt was the new reality of the networked marketplace. For example, thesis no. 2: "Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors"; thesis no. 20: "Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them"; thesis no. 62: "Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall"; thesis no. 74: "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it." The book enlarges on these themes through seven essays filled with dozens of stories and observations about how business gets done in America and how the Internet will change it all. While Cluetrain will strike many as loud and over the top, the message itself remains quite relevant and unique. This book is for anyone interested in the Internet and e-commerce, and is especially important for those businesses struggling to navigate the topography of the wired marketplace. All aboard! --Harry C. Edwards

Product Description
From four of the liveliest personalities on the Web comes a provocative, outrageous, and wickedly smart account of what it will take to prosper in the fast-forward world on the wire. This nationally acclaimed best seller is a spirited, original, and wonderfully irreverent conversation that will challenge, provoke, and forever change your outlook on the digital economy. A rich tapestry of anecdotes, object lessons, parodies, insights, and predictions, The Cluetrain Manifesto illustrates how the Internet has radically reframed the seemingly immutable laws of business--and what business needs to know to weather the seismic aftershocks.

"An earnest plea for a new kind of language and new expectations for the Web.... While others work on turning the Internet into the perfect medium for reaching traditional business goals, these four Net-philes hope cyberspace will give commerce a 'human voice.'" -Harvard Business Review

"For every retail or consumer-products company wondering why its Internet marketing doesn't seem to be working, The Cluetrain Manifesto...offers fresh and sound advice, expressed in entertaining prose. Its oft-repeated premise--that markets are conversations--should be pounded into the collective brain of corporate executives." -Business Week

This book demonstrates how the Internet is bringing people back into the commercial process. Technology has frequently been perceived as dehumanizing our world. That's why it is especially ironic that it took a technological revolution in communication to bring back the human side of commerce. We are seeing a sea change where commerce is moving from a seller's market to a buyer's market.

Read this book. Pass it along to your boss. Give it to your employees and your customers. Buy copies for the heads of your engineering, marketing, manufacturing, corporate development, or whatever group. The brave new world is here, but Big Brother's not in charge. We are.


Take a delivery from this Cluetrain--before it's too late!   February 8, 2000
David E. Rogers (Los Angeles, CA USA)
42 out of 45 found this review helpful

Over the last several years, I've come to the conclusion that "business-as-usual" had to come to an end--that the world, culture, technology have changed so much that a new business paradigm is not only required but desperately needed. And it can't be simply a change of rules--the entire *game* has to change.

So finding the on-line Cluetrain Manifesto last year was a real pleasure. Here were these four guys with 95 wild-eyed idealistic theses for overthrowing the business world order--and setting up a new paradigm based upon (of all things) human interaction and conversation. I signed right up.

So you can imagine my delight when I found "The Cluetrain Manifesto" book had been published. I bought it in a millisecond.

Inside, you'll find the reflections of the Cluetrain's originators--in more detail, with more reflection than their Website provides. The Manifesto's background and philosophies are brought into a clearer focus--*not* crystal clear, mind you, but clearer than before. And it's a *very* enjoyable and provocative read.

It's not a flawless work. There's redundancy, for example, in the multiple essays within. Some chapters (Chapter 1 especially) are outstanding, others are so-so. One might even be called elementary. But there's always food for thought.

And don't expect to find some kind of "formula" or "strategy" or "plan" to prosper in the brave new world we live in. It's not there. In fact, such a plan, the authors remind us, would be *counter* to the Manifesto's assertion that honest human conversation is the key to success in the future.

But you will be stirred to find your voice and to add it to the voices of the revived marketplace called the Internet. Heck, you might even be inspired enough to try to help your company find *its* honest, human, authentic voice (rather than brochureware and doublespeak). And I think that's what would delight the Cluetrainers most.

This book is one of several that dramatically affected my life and career. I heartily recommend it!


Cluetrain is Here! Recycle All Your Other Marketing Books   January 28, 2000
David B. Wolfe (Reston, VA USA)
64 out of 71 found this review helpful

I recently received a letter from a company that sells software for "personalizing" consumers' online shopping experiences that illustrates why the world needs The Cluetrain Manifesto, an extraordinary polemic against the dehumanizing practices of business.

Although I don't have an ecommerce site, the exhibitor's letter began, "By now you have had time to evaluate your Internet sales numbers from last quarter and hopefully you met and beat them." The letter was insulting by violating simple etiquette and unauthentic because it showed total ignorance of my business. The letter began "Dear David." Can't you hear Andy Rooney saying, "Does it ever bother you when people you've never met, and aren't sure you want to know call you by your first name right off the bat?" The letter writer thinks that using first names personalizes a letter. But first names are properly an acknowledgment of personhood. I'm not a person to that letter writer. I'm just a string of 0's and 1's in his database. I'm no more a real person to him than are website visitors analyzed by his company's personalization software. This company doesn't know what personalization is about. Its shtick is depersonalization, a corporate perversity The Cluetrain Manifesto rails against.

Cluetrain is the product of marketing specialists Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searles and David Weinberger who posted 95 theses on the virtual doors of the Internet, indicting the corporate world for exercising unforgivable arrogance in the marketplace, and suddenly were getting thousands of hits daily. Perseus Books quickly came up with a handsome offer for Cluetrain, the book. These putative Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse that will lay flat the walls of the Old Economy declare that business no longer controls the marketplace. Their Sixth Thesis counsels "The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media," then business is warned by the Seventh Thesis: "Hyperlinks destroy hierarchy." Hierarchies rank people and restrict information flow because information access is a function of rank. Hyperlinks democratize information flow, nullifying the main offensive weapon that hierarchies depend on to remain hierarchies.

Most leaders in Old Economy hierarchies see the Internet as just a new product distribution channel. They don't realize that the Internet is a new conversation channel that greatly amplifies the voices in the marketplace. As Cluetrain's First Thesis states, "Markets are conversations."

If you're tenaciously anchored to the Old Economy, the First Thesis's real meaning might not click in at first. But work at it. Make it the opening topic of your next staff meeting. With persistence, you'll see what it means. Suddenly you'll find yourself at the gateway to a much different world, kind of like when Dorothy stood in the ordinariness of her tornado-tossed black and white Kansan house and first beheld the splendiferously colorful glory of Oz.

Cluetrain's authors are not wet-behind-the-ears webheads, but seasoned businessmen who grew tired of mass manipulation of people, and endless trickery, cajolery and even threats to get them to buy mass produced products thrust at them by generals of mass marketing in the "battle for their minds" as Al Reis and Jack Trout characterized marketing in a book called Marketing Warfare.

Here's a military metaphor for the clueless who still define marketing with military metaphors: Cluetrain's book jacket poses a question that penetrates the mind like a smart bomb burrowing into one of Saddam Hussein's subterranean bunkers: "What if the real power of the web lay not in the technology behind it, but in the profound changes it brings to the way people interact with business?"

Wow! There's a hint of Ted Kaczynski in that question, for as a society have we not become too obsessed with technology to see our humanity? Does this blinkered view make it easier for executives and managers to be as unaware of a receptionist's or entry level worker's humanity as the personalization company who wrote me that letter was of my humanity?

Cluetrain is written write with the ink of irony. Its authors aren't looking to start anything - no Naderesque foundation to squabble endlessly with corporations, no legally constituted organism to spread their message. All they want to do is to remind us all of our humanness in such a provocative manner that their lessons stick and grow to envelop the thinking of people who run companies and make marketing decisions.

Cluetrain's authors believe that as people regain an enlivened sense of their humanity through conversations made possible by the Internet, what ever is best that could happen will happen. They abhor the idea of shackling Cluetrain thoughts to a legal incarnation that would soon lose touch with humanity in order to promote itself and its leaders.

The Cluetrain Manifesto is a way of thinking that can lead businesses toward success in the unstructured environments of the Internet. Of course, many Old Economy business leaders want their Internet operations to have palpable structure like their bricks and mortar operations have, but they won't succeed. They are like Archimedes wistfully imagining that if only he had a place to stand he could move the earth. There is no place to stand for leveraging the Internet in ways that will give anyone control over its movements.

Cluetrain portends the end of control strategies in business. The Old Economy ethos of control is being replaced by a New Economy ethos of influence. This means The Cluetrain Manifesto instantly makes whole libraries of books on marketing obsolete because they are all based on an ethos of control and written from a vendor perspective. So empty your book shelves of all the covers you have on marketing and recycle them. That's their only value now. The Cluetrain Manifesto is the only book about markets that matters, because it is the first book on markets written from the consumer perspective. Buy it, read it, and be transformed!

David Wolfe Wolfe Resources Group Reston Virginia


The Last Chance to get a Clue -- before it's too late!   January 18, 2000
Jake Sapiens
21 out of 21 found this review helpful

Outside, and inside my "day job," I have spent the last three years immersed in cyberspace conversations. The Cluetrain Manifesto accurately reflects the feel of this medium as much as any book could. It reads like a long and intense rap session, and it hits reality again and again in a way that corporate America so far fails to by and large. Trust me, you haven't read a book like this. If you feel as though you do not yet understand cyberspace, this book will immerse you in the culture in an easy to understand yet frequently irreverent way.

The topic of this book comes down primarily to people, conversation, and culture. Not business, and not technology. The common misperception that business and technology form the driving force behind the Internet, reflects a common misperception still very prevalent in society at large. It reflects a misperception that will cost companies billions and billions of dollars if they continue to believe it. Indeed it probably already has.

In a turn of events that will send shudders of terror through corporate America, most of the business-as-usual ways of thinking, acting, and talking, of the last century prove absolutely toxic to the would-be successful corporation doing business in this new medium. In yet another turn that will provide some comfort, most of what you know about life outside your current "day job" will prove more useful than anything you ever could have learned in obtaining a marketing degree. If you hate your job, but you love the rest of your life, you may find yourself far ahead of those overachieving "team players" who love business as usual. Cyberspace changes the rules, and the Cluetrain Manifesto shows us how.

The payoff in understanding this, will prove handsome. Corporate manager types who wonder how to turn their employees "wasted time" on the Internet into money and "market share" now have their answer. The answer, however, means that they must accept that they will never really have control over their employees again. Of course the easiest way to accept this is to realize that they never did.


It's not your father's internet anymore.   January 4, 2000
Evan Canter (Chicago)
22 out of 24 found this review helpful

This book is a combination of Steal This Book, Code, and The Prince. We can now converse with each other as we do business with other other. And that drives big corporations crazy! We are now in an one-to-one and many-to-one world. Those who controlled the one-to-many world (mass marketing, media, and education) are doomed to be left behind in the last century's dustheap.

Cluetrain is a snapshot of the every-changing cluetrain web site, and fleshes out the Manifesto in an utterly readable fashion. 95 thumbs up!