Oh, Cluetrain Sounding Louder...

by Jason Stewart

I happen to be the leader of the San Francisco Salesforce.com user group, and we had an absolutely fantastic meeting this morning on social network marketing. Clara Shih, author of the forthcoming book The Facebook Era, spoke to a room packed with close to 100 people interested in learning how to use social networks like Facebook or Twitter for business.

I'll try to pull some thoughts together on that and post it to my user group blog, but it reminded me of something my wife shared with me a few weeks back. She was listening to talk radio, and they were talking about marketing and modern business, as well as social networks - and the host kept referring to a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Wikipedia defines The Cluetrain Manifesto as "...a set of 95 theses organized and put forward as a manifesto, or call to action, for all businesses operating within what is suggested to be a newly-connected marketplace." The entire book is available online, for free,  but there are a few of the 95 theses that really stand out in this context...

# 8 - In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

# 9 - These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

#10 - As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

#11 - People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

Did I mention these were all written in 1999? Almost 10 years ago!

Good stuff, and again, the whole book is available for free here.