Doc Searls looks back at the last ten years and ahead to the next ten
Doc Searles, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, spoke at an event in New York today. Looking back on how the manifesto came into being he told us that the book came out of conversations about how out of sync marketers were with the changes in the way people connected and communicated with one another.
Articles in Wired Magazine about ‘eyeballs’ and ‘push" were diametrically opposed to what these authors tought the Internet would cause. So they got together and wrote 95 theses that laid out their ideas, put them on the Internet and waited to see if they would resonate with others..And the rest is history.
This event is the first of a series around the country to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto and the premise that markets are conversations. And it’s time for a reality check says Doc.
- Customers are getting smarter faster than corporations. Is this in fact the case?
- Corporate firewalls are built to keep smart employees in and smart customers out. Can this change? What happens if we dismantle the walls?
- People do not want to hear the ‘voice of business’ – they want to speak to people they can relate to. Can corporate America find its human face and join the conversation?
Some companies definitely get it. Jake McKee showed how Lego moved from a strictly old-school company that knew almost nothing about their customers to one that completely embraces and supports their fans and evangelists.
Doc made some predictions about the next ten years:
- Advertising as we know it now will die
- Herding people into walled gardens and guessing what makes them ‘social’ will seem as absurb as it actually is
- We’ll realize that the most important thing to a company is its customers
- The value chain will be replaced by the value constellation
- ‘What’s your business model’ will no longer be the question to ask. It’s not always about making money
- We’ll prosper by maximizing ‘because’ effects – when you make more money because of something rather than with it. Examples are search, twitter, blogging.
This will only happen if we can overcome the consumer versus the vendor mentality. We have to change to customers AND vendors and build relationships.
It’s still early days, says Doc. The Internet has made markets into conversations. It has changed things so radically that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg. The Web gave marketing permission to touch the customer. Now we have to learn to listen to our customers and build real relationships with them.
