Making The Train

Ten year ago, the Cluetrain Manifesto book and website made waves on the net and in the media. In them, the authors envisioned a scenario that dictated a new landscape for consumers and the companies that served them, based around the rise in tools that enabled market conversations. In those days, the nascent tools were mostly underdeveloped and emerging, and represented a slowly swelling promise of a greater tide to come. Instant messaging, blogs, and the vestiges of social networking began to crest the rise and demand attention. The Cluetrain Manifesto surmised that these tools and capabilities would create a new market conversation, as consumers learned to trust the ‘human voices’, both internal and external to the companies, that allowed them to make smarter market choices. Driven by product reviews, blog postings, conversations with fellow users, and interactions with company representatives, customers would be a powerful force in the conversations that drove the way that companies operated, in addition to contributing to the products they produced. Ten years later, the interactive market promise has been fulfilled, the train has arrived, but the company cars are still frustratingly empty. (more…)

July 22nd, 2009 | Marketing, Social Media | No comments