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.

It isn’t that the conversations aren’t taking place. If anything, the conversations have grown and flourished perhaps out of proportion with the original authors’ visions. The rise in social networking and the increased interactivity of the new generation of consumer has created a constant and real-time feedback system for conversations of all types. Blogs, tags, texts, and tweets, among other things, have created a system of information distribution that many marketing machines dream of matching. The conversation can carry every triumph and every foible of a company to the far reaches of the globe, and the social networking and “blogosphere” influence has slowly gained a foothold and an ear in traditional media, leaving a company exposed to a virtual wildfire of negative or positive publicity before it has time to formulate a response. But for all the risks of being excluded from this broad market pipeline, companies are still strangely absent, and those who are present are by-and-large still speaking with the same mechanical drone voices that sound hollow and unwelcoming as ever.

 The question that opens before us is this: What is the new market, and what challenges do companies face when joining these conversations? Truthfully, it is both easier and more difficult to join the market conversation as a company today. An infinite variety of avenues is open to you. Do you need a corporate MySpace or Facebook? Do you sign up for Twitter to keep up new product announcements? Do you have Flash games, forums, or maybe a corporate blog for your CEO to talk to your consumers? The barrier of entry is low, making it easier than ever for a company to dive in to the stream. On the other hand, the new generation of consumer is now ‘always on’. They have grown up connected, speaking with each other and sharing in ways previous generations have not. The powerful interactive forces are interwoven into their lifestyle, rather than being viewed as mere tools to utilize for a specific purpose. This generation has lived on the net, and has openly shared its most personal and private moments and thoughts with audacious transparency. It has little fear of repercussion or outside opinion, choosing to form groups and circles of trust that encourage and support them. Ten years ago, the thirsty markets would have responded to a corporate presence that approximated a human voice. Today, those markets demand transparency and reality, they filter hundreds of marketing bullet points every day, and their circles are difficult to penetrate without the right tone. Finding a voice to engage these consumers involves the kind of risk and discomfort that companies have always strived to avoid, but finding that voice is increasingly becoming a necessity.

So how does a company succeed in finding a voice that is both real and relevant?

First, a company must start internally, from the bottom down. As you approach the bottom of the company, you begin to reach the real market. Each day, those employees that come to work and enable your productivity are leaving and becoming potential consumers. It is not usually at the top of a corporate structure that you will find voices and ideas aligned with the every day decisions of your market. Engage your workforce on all levels and encourage the honesty to begin inside. Provide open forums for workers to aggregate and share ideas transparently and with the appropriate people.

A company must also empower its workers to speak with the consumers they serve. Truthfully, these people who already have passion for your products internally are likely having the conversations already, under the anonymous cover the internet provides, in blog posts, forum replies, and comments. Companies must work to legitimize these conversations, so that they can be part of the trust formed when these conversations take place.

Next, a company must reach out to its consumers. It must strive to express its ideas and passions with a market eager to hear the real stories inside the trenches. We are not perfect entities, we are comprised of imperfect people. We will make mistakes, we will misjudge. Companies will put out products that consumers love, and the stories behind them, but they’ll also gather to hear a company honestly discuss its failures. To engage a generation that shares it’s triumphs and tribulations openly, companies must work to find ways to do that same.

Companies must also work to engage communities, often beyond the scope of their core products. The act of running a company often requires many passions and capabilities, which often relate to communities outside of your market. In addition, consumers can come from anywhere, and becoming part of the conversation means becoming part of the community. These communities often share for the sake of doing so, posting free reviews, comments, videos, images, and ideas regarding products and services you offer. Actively becoming part of these communities, for the sake of the community, helps to empower companies to join the conversations that take place without them today. Hosting events, sponsoring conferences and interest groups, and empowering groups to engage their own interests, free of market push or spin, brings the communities to you instead.

Finally, and most importantly, companies must find a real human voice. They must learn to engage beyond the realm of press release and stale ghostwritten blog. They must find a way to navigate the minefield of legal minutiae and corporate correctness and come out on the other side with something that is still transparent and full of life. The word is already awash with the dry corporate blog, which is too often a thin masquerade of marketing pamphlet with a public relations photo tacked on for good measure. At best, these are ignored, at worst, they are publicly derided. Only by creating a real voice can you have a real conversation, engaging your customer and market in ways that you wouldn’t have envisioned.

The concepts presented aren’t new. In many ways, the basis for these concepts is older than the Cluetrain Manifesto which inspired these writings. Being honest and open in your business dealings is one of the oldest tenets in business relations. It is the technologies and capabilities, combined with the changing expectations of consumers old and new, that transforms this topic and creates new relevance in ways that companies have been slow to embrace. The Cluetrain Manifesto laid out a path for communicating with a market that was going to come in a bigger way than could have been imagined, ten years and a bubble too early. On the tenth anniversary of it’s release, the concepts they championed, the concept of transparent interaction with consumers, the concept of information driven not by marketing but by customers, the concepts of getting out of the towers and down in the trenches to engage your market in real conversations about topics that they care about deeply, have become more important and relevant to business than ever. The train may be late, but the train’s destination, and the need for companies to get on-board, is more critical than ever.

July 22nd, 2009 | Marketing, Social Media