Cluetrain: Seven Years Later (SXSW)

Heavy hitters in the room for the early morning (ok, 10am…) session at SXSW Interactive attempting to perform an exegesis on the Cluetrain Manifesto in order to see what has and hasn’t happened yet in the prophesied triumph of networked individuals over corporate marketing.
Moderator:
- Henry Copeland, founder of BlogAds
On the panel:
- Doc Searls, one of the original authors
- Brian Clark, head of IndieWire and interactive marketer
- Heather Armstrong, blogger from Dooce.com

The theme of this panel was two-fold: a) how interactivity and community continues to be the strongest force behind promotion and branding (viral marketing), and b) the ability for individuals to participate in this trend by building their own strength of voice is the force behind a society that is able to increasingly become independent (both professionally and as consumers in terms of freedom of informed choice).

Background:
- in 1998, Searls, David Weinberger and Chris Locke were upset about the trends of the dotcom boom in that the boom was taking the great space of the internet and turning it into virtual malls online
- casual conversations led to writing down thoughts which led to the creation of Cluetrain 95 Thesis (hey, if it worked for Martin Luther…)

Theme One: Community as Marketing

Henry asks Brian to comment on his thoughts on Cluetrain: Brian has always been “less entranced by the notion of the web as a human-machine interaction”. He talks about fear that still exists in corporate marketing around interactivity and engagement. He talks about the need to promote brands and products via interactivity such as alternate reality gaming but that it still scares marketers. But he tries to sell them on the notion that “the culture of the web values discovery”. Enabling marketing via interactivity helps users find things themselves, which influences minds more than top-down marketing.

Searls: Microsoft (3000 bloggers) and Sun Microsystems are two
companies that deserve credit because they’ve so embraced corporate bloggers. Notes that Robert Scoble is one of the most powerful people at Microsoft even though he’s not high up the corporate ladder at all. (Funny side note: Searls says he can’t believe that he, as a Linux guy who writes for Linux Journal, is doing PR for Microsoft).

Conversation moves into how to measure market buzz. Doc talks about someone he knew from a bra manufacturer who wanted to do a focus group on a new bra and then realized that all of the info they needed was available in the blogosphere. Brian talks about the buzz tracking services (Umbria, Buzzmetrics, BuzzTracker).

Theme Two: Independence

Searls: The next seven years will bring a huge explosion of indenpendent film and TV in a way that neither Hollywood nor any of us can yet comprehend. States that we are still on an overall trend toward independence that started during the
enlightenment (with a brief blip during the Industrial Revolution).

Heather: Agrees with trend toward independence. States that being a mother can be a lonely endeavor but that the web and the networked society has greatly increased communication and is helping women build incredibly strong community and independence.

Brian states that he recently read that the quickest route to financial success in America is to be a self-employed homeowner. He says that this increasingly shows that people are having success building their own businesses around personal and social networks.

Searls: Digg and other web 2.0 companies are representative of the “demand side supplying itself”, which is the notion of open source at its core. We’re going to continue to see a lot more companies like this.

One of Doc’s last discussion points is to note that the most exciting change happening right now is that people more and more will stop going to a corporate site or even subscribing to individual blogs and instead will more and more begin subscribing to subjects. (Example: If you want to know about recent features from Canon cameras you will learn less from two or three blogs than you would by subscribing to the Technorati
tag for “canon“). He says that there are two sides of monetization: you will make money with something or you will make money because of something. And with blogs, there will be far more money made because of blogs than with blogs.

Brian: Isn’t the internet writing all of the product manuals today
anyway? When I have a problem, I don’t call customer service, I search for my specific issue because someone has already had that issue.

Note: As I finish writing this, Craig Newmark from Craigslist is sitting behind me. Someone asks him what he’s up to and he says “dealing with roommate scams…I’m getting too old for this!”, which I guess is a good reminder that with the liberation of independence comes an even greater need for personal responsibility and focus.

Technorati Tags: SXSW, SXSWi, SXSW06, cluetrain

This entry was posted on March 13th, 2006 and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.