gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

Good brain food for the day; many thanks... Milan

When reading the hundreds of thousands or millions of words written about cluefulness and corporations, I'm always reminded of the oft-quoted aphorism ...

"First, we shape our structures, then our structures shape us"

It remains my belief that the majority of corporations will not be able to avoid, eventually, using the interactive communications capabilities afforded by links and *places* on the Web to display and interact with information, opinion, complaints, requests, etc.

As Marc Canter once said .. "it's the people, stupid" .. millions and millions are spent to (supposedly) be responsive to customers, and thousands of books are written about how to focus on custommers or be customer-centric.

It will come to be (I believe), but only when corporations and senior executives learn that *giving up* control of how to interact and actually engaging more fully in that interaction helps grow business more than it reveals vulnerabilities or inadequacies the employees and customers already know are there and are talking about or trying to work around.

As has often been stated here and elsewhere, it's a culture thing .. and a structural thing. As the ways employees and customers interact change because of the infrastructure afforded by links, visible searchable pages and ways to enable voice, so will the structures eventually change.

And if not, the inadequacy of the responses to the new structures will become clearer and clearer.

>> Companies gladly and willingly allowing themselves to be actually changed by The Cluetrain.

Really ? I think most company's assign a PR person to blog and "get real" with the commoners for the PR value and to keep the more rabid and vocal "Internet leaders" in check.

I like the Cluetrain Manifesto and read bits of it often. It's inspiring but I take it for what I believe it is. A lovely pipe dream written by people on the other side of the corporate fence. People who somehow forget that you have to make money somewhere along the line and compete with the "bad guys". I see they need to use controversial language and make the "manifesto" seem larger than life. it's called marketing. Or lies if corporations do it.

Look at the front page of the old cluetrain site.

>> Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies.

So, most corporations are liars. Nice...

>> Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out.

Good thinking to me. Keep your good employees and stick to your known cash cow markets. Leave the researching new markets stuff to the people who believe in the TCManifesto. It's not as if management have much faith in these "anti-capitalists" anyway so budgets and hopefully damage will be limited. If they do something good, we'll send in the real team to turn it into a real product. And the "TCM inspired" employees will retire with their new found wealth and write blogs and incisive commentaries. See, we'll malign them because we have to. But we do reward them.

>> It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down.

I won't go meekly to Chapter 11 while paying my Cluetrain enabled employees redundancy money. You will tear down the walls that defends my company's assets only if you manage to slay all my troops at the gate. And our mercenaries.

>> And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

Yeah, like negotiating with a fanatic with an itchy bomb button finger. Real exciting - you gotta humour them because of the damage they can cause. But if you don't take the fool down now, it's gonna get real ugly sooner or later.

Less dreaming, more reality

Hugh, thanks so much for the "nailed it" compliment (I was the Corante Marketing Hub editor who wrote that post)!! It was the combination of what you wrote in your post and what Johnnie said in his that got me to that place. Once again proving that meaning is quite often made via conversation....!

what comes after the cluetrain?

I know! I know!

clueSpace: a gapingvoid to explore!

I wonder how impatient we all are. Corporations, like politicians tend to follow, not lead, contrary to the conventional wisdom. Maybe it will be small, edgy, micro enterprises who lead the clue train to the next reality (thank you to all of the software engineers who built this galaxy). The evolution of business is just beginning and it includes art and ideas on a major level. Then the corporations and, last and certainly least, the politicians who will follow.

It's all about control - large corporations are not interested in giving that up. Allowing (or gasp encouraging) unpredictable encounters is not high on the list of things they want to do – so progress is slow… Things will ebb and flow and once in a while some significant thing will happen.

What comes after the cluetrain? The cluecaboose, obviously.

Sorry, sorry, I'm soooo sorry....

Maybe in the corporate setting, it's hard to make the conversation go both ways. Maybe that's not so true on the Global Microbrand level.

Yeah, I'm just one guy, with no employees, who's making a lot of his sales through blogging. I have standard design products and custom design products. The custom stuff obviously involves a good deal of interaction and conversation. But the interaction and ideas I get from my customers and readers has led to a few changes in my standard product designs also in the last couple months. Someone wants something specific, and mentions it in a comment or email. Then I think of a way to do it, and it gets done. If it's a really good idea, I add it to the catalog of available options for everyone.

So the question might not be what's after cluetrain, so much as how big can it scale?

On the GMB level, it's not only easy to let readers and customers be my R+D team, it would be stupid not to.

Large Corporations are resisting the Cluetrain changes, but while progress may be slow as another commentor said above, it really is happening. What is coming after The Cluetrain? For one thing, more upfront, clear, conspicuous, complete, and comprehendable disclosure about all aspects of buying information, I hope.

Recently, Verizon's FiOS division made their "unique firmware" wireless router free with installation vs. $64.99 (I have a printed out screen shot of what the FiOS web site used to say).

Blogging about the fact you could not buy that special firmware wireless router anywhere but from Verizon, plus the fact that Verizon verbally said you had to have it in order to guarantee FiOS service, helped bring attention to the fact that these things made it almost a "guaranteed sale" for Verizon.

It is one small success for mankind (and Verizon), but each "listened to" positive response counts.

Hugh: it's just not easy enough yet. That's why tech companies like Microsoft are there, blogging away, but not everyone else is.

Tools for producing and consuming blogs are also not ubiquitous enough, either. Wait 'til blogging concepts are baked into everyone's OS, and everyone's mailing program of choice, out of the box. Then the non-techies will have their eureka moments :)

At least there is some new momentum in this direction via Characters like MIT's Peter Senge 'Presence' who's credentials and presentation may be more palatable for companies than the techy leaning for the cluetrain authors.

With blogging I think perhaps there is a danger in how easily people can get sucked into customised blogging community sites with little in the way of really challenging or stimulating interaction, just more competition for short sighted popularity or profit.

How/what do you think about sites like getafreelancer.com?

What comes after Cluetrain?

Training the Clueless!

I think that there are two main barriers to the adoption of corporate blogging.

The first is "us versus them," the fear of losing spin control and the opening of views into the company that might open up risks of litigation.

The second is "us versus us," because corporations are not single-brained organisms always acting in their own best interests. They are multibrained fiefdoms with competing internal interests, and each vice president is looking over his (or her) shoulder to make sure some other vice president doesn't do to him (or her) what he (or she) is about to do to some other vice president.