Despite being published just over 11 years ago The Cluetrain Manifesto is still provocative, outrageous, and smart – the Cluetrain.com web site went live in April 1999. As Thomas Petzinger, then a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and author of “The New Pioneers: Men and Women Who are Transforming the Workplace”, states in the foreword of the 2000 edition: “I’ve seen the future of business, and it’s The Cluetrain Menifesto.”
The Cluetrain Manifesto was written by Rick Levine (@ricklevine), Christopher Locke (@clockerb), Doc Searls (@dsearls), and David Weinberger (@dweinberger), all well experienced technology users. The book quickly climbed the best-seller lists. But, only now has the Internet matured enough for the books predictions to start ringing true:
The Cluetrain Manefesto - Online Markets
Essentially, The Cluetrain Manifesto is a set of 95 theses, with associated commentaries, predicting how business will be done on the Internet. The 95 theses are a list of declarations aimed at the misconceptions that corporate leaders were applying to customers in the late 90′s, and are put forward as a manifesto, a call to action. Here are the first four:
- Markets are conversations
- Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors
- Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice
- Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, un-contrived
- …
So why should the Cluetrain Manifesto be required reading? Social CRM!
What is Social CRM and why it is so important:
Social Networking sites have seen an unprecedented growth in the number of users in the last few year. Brian Solis (@briansolis, a “prominent thought leader and published author in new media“) estimated (August 2009) that Facebook alone recorded 370 million unique visitors globally. Similarly, Twitter registered 66 million unique visitors worldwide.
So there is a big opportunity for marketers to engage their customers through Social Media channels. Indeed, in the ENGAGEMENTdb Report “The world’s most valuable brands. Who’s most engaged?” by the Wetpaint/Altimeter Group (@charleneli, “a strategy consulting firm that provides companies with a pragmatic approach to disruptive technologies“) it states that they “… have gone beyond surface case studies to measure the true financial value of social media.” That there is ” … value in social engagement on top of social presence — it pays to actively and continually participate and invest in your networks.”
The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools of the 90′s where process driven; operational and tactical – structuring & controlling the data to help manage the relationship more effectively. Whereas, Social CRM is young and difficult to define; but it is about people and not technology. Taking the Cluetrain initiative: it’s the conversation – stupid! It’s a new era for business customer relations. Business are no long in control. With the Internet, with Social Media and Social networks, the consumer has more choice – and, the relationship data is unstructured and much more difficult to categorise. The conversation is not merely business to consumer; but consumer to consumer!
According to Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe, author of “CRM at the Speed of Light, Fourth Edition: Social CRM 2.0 Strategies, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers
For a more detailed attempt at defining Social CRM see Martin Walsh (@martinwalsh, Head of Digital Marketing at IBM – also on LinkedIn) slide show, including Video’s, on Social CRM Definitions … enjoy:
However, there are signals that the Social CRM market is maturing – see, for example, “M&A & CRM: A timeline of the tumult” at CRM.COM. Marketers are spending IT and marketing budgets on tools and technology to engage customers on Social Media channels. For example, Cisco (“the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet“) currently has a team of 7 dedicated staff to manage the companies social media presence – this will rise to 20 to 30 by 2011. Even TechCrunch has named Social CRM as one of the top ten technologies that will “rock 2010!”
Finally, a video discussing the intersection of Social CRM and the enterprise. This was recorded at the Social CRM Summit held by Paul Greenberg, February 2010. In the video industry analysts Michael Fauscette (@mfauscette, IDC “the premier global provider of market intelligence, …“) and Natalie Petouhoff (@drnatalie, Forrester Research “an independent research company“) answer questions by Michael Krigsman (@mkrigsman, CEO of Asuret, Inc., “a consulting company dedicated to reducing technology implementation failures.“) … enjoy:
So, The Cluetrain Manifesto is required reading … and, if you don’t have time to read the Manifesto in full, from cover to cover, at least read the Wikipedia entry at Manifesto …
Notes and further links:
- “Social Media Strategy Before Tactics“ See the blog post by Lee Odden (@leeodden, April 2010), “It’s a debate that’s more common than you might think. Strategy or Tactics first when it comes to social media?”
- For a blog post on the Evolution of the Social CRM Process read Jacob Morgan (@jacobm, “the Principal of Chess Media Group, a social business consultancy.”)
- What’s a Cluetrain? From the Urban Dictionary: to become aware of what’s going on; to “get with the program”
- Theses: there are claims that the 95 Theses are based on the Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, commonly known as The Ninety-Five Theses, written by Martin Luther in 1517 (Wikipedia)
- “Designing social websites”, Christian Crumlish talks to O’Reilly Media about designing social websites (YouTube)
Related Posts:
- Social Business through Social CRM – Video – March 2010
- Social CRM Strategy? – March 2010
- What the hell is Social Media? – Video, March 2010
- Social Media predictions for 2010 – February 2010
- Social Media Policy – February 2010
- Social Media strategy – Video, January 2010
- Dell kicks up a Storm with Social Media – January 2010
