Llevo varios días con una crisis existencial.

Todo empezó cuando mi amiga Kika (iba a poner compañera, pero amiga la define mejor ) me habló del método Post para social media marketing.

Fue como abrir la caja de Pandora. De  repente me pareció que, leyera lo que leyera, hablaba sobre el mismo tema. Quizá no con ese nombre, pero si con la misma idea de fondo: ¿Estar en la Red es garantía de éxito? ¿Estamos equivocados al recetar la web 2.0 como si fuera una aspirina que vale para todo? (bueno, la aspirina está demodé, digamos paracetamol)

En el fondo, la realidad “analógica” y la “online” no son tan distintas, aunque muchas veces actuamos como si lo fueran:

A (casi) nadie se le ocurriría abrir un negocio sin analizar antes los recursos con los que cuenta, el mercado al que va a dirigirse, la competencia que tendrá, los productos/servicios que ofrecerá….

A (casi) nadie se le ocurriría aconsejar a una empresa que se instalara en una zona en la que no va a tener clientela: si tienes una tienda de golosinas, ponla cerca de un colegio.

Sin embargo, parece que tener una web, abrir un blog, montar un perfil en una red social, crear una cuenta en twitter… es algo que no necesita pensarse. Cualquiera puede hacerlo, pero… ¿Todos van a tener el éxito que esperan? ¿No será como abrir una tienda en un centro comercial de millones de kilómetros cuadrados, llenos de tiendas iguales que la nuestra?

Una de las tesis del manifiesto Cluetrain (la 23) dice “Las compañías que intentan “posicionarse”, necesitan adoptar una posición. Idealmente relacionada con algo que realmente le importe a su mercado.”

En estos nuevos tiempos, en los que el marketing se ha “democratizado” y ya no hay que tener mucho dinero para llegar  a mucha gente, hemos olvidado la primera regla: “Pensar antes de actuar”.

Después de mucho darle vueltas, empiezo a ver la luz al final del túnel. No estamos equivocados cuando afirmamos que hay que tener presencia en la Red. Pero (volviendo a la metáfora de la aspirina/paracetamol) siempre recordando que no existe la panacea universal: hay una medicina para cada cosa.

“-¿Qué significa “domesticar”? -volvió a preguntar el principito.

-Es una cosa ya olvidada -dijo el zorro-, significa “crear lazos… “

-¿Crear lazos?

-Efectivamente, verás -dijo el zorro-. Tú no eres para mí todavía más que un muchachito igual a otros cien mil muchachitos. Y no te necesito. Tampoco tú tienes necesidad de mí. No soy para ti más que un zorro entre otros cien mil zorros semejantes. Pero si me domesticas, entonces tendremos necesidad el uno del otro. Tú serás para mí único en el mundo, yo seré para ti único en el mundo…”

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Casi diez años más tarde, en agosto de 2008, me enteré del Clue Train Manifesto, cuando en mi segundo día como Responsable de Marketing Catálogo de Officenet Staples, me crucé con Leo Piccioli, que relacionó una de mis escasas ideas con la genial declaración de estos 4 visionarios en 1999.
Ellos antes que casi todos. Yo después que casi todos. Ellos con una visión. Yo con alguna intuición.

Me pasa seguido.

Pero si, de algún modo siempre creí en el poder de las relaciones humanas. En el poder de los lazos.
A los 12, me tocó leer – por mandato paterno- El Principito. ( No, no era tan complicado el pedido, teniendo en cuenta que a los 14 tocaba Cien años de soledad. )
Desde ahí que creo firmemente en perder tiempo en lo importante. Desde ahí que reconozco que lo que hace a las personas cercanas es haberse “domesticado”.
Por eso, entre otras cosas, elegí el marketing como profesión cuando leí por primera vez en la UCA a Regis o a Don.

Por eso, desde que lo conozco, el ClueTrain Manifesto también es mi leit motiv..

Diez años tarde. Típico mío. Me queda claro, no soy una early adopter en estos temas.
Como diría mi nuevo amigo, Juan Carlos Lucas, se me va a notar el “acento”… Pero igual quiero abrirme mi nuevo blog antes que lo haga mi hijo Jeremías que con 5 años ya quiere un perfil en facebook.
Ojalá valga la pena.

Here is a slideshare, that will enlighten you folks on the truth about the Cluetrain Manifesto! The 95 theses seem to be very comical, but underlying it are the wittiest lines dismantling the traditional corporate media. And here is the manifestation- filled with facts and figures, studies and testimonials, that’ll certainly remind you about the greatness of the Cluetrain. Happy 10th Birthday!

I Am The Media

And here are the key-points that I’ve picked up (totally similar to Cluetrain’s)

1. Less people are trusting advertisements, mass media isn’t credible nowadays.

2. People trust humans, the market have the best salespersons. We trust our friends, friends of friends, the community of consumers – the market itself.

3. Word of mouth is the most powerful media.

4. The web is paving the way for markets to ‘tell their stories’; companies must let the people tell their stories. Companies should also make the stories fun to share with, something the people really care about, so they could voice it out into the conversations.

5. We are the media. We give meaning to what the companies really deliver to the markets. We are the most credible. We trust ourselves, others trust us, we trust them. Markets are indeed the conversations itself.

Posted by: Uij Dollosa

Weinberger, CM (115): We do not know what the Web is for but we have adopted it faster than any technology since fire.

I didn’t make it to defrag this year…again…but I’m following the memes emanating out of Denver very closely, and there are already some gems.

No big surprise, considering folks like Stowe Boyd, Doc Searls, Chris Locke, and other Web/cluetrain thought leaders are in attendance.

It’s killing me not to hear the “Cluetrain at 10″ convo that will wrap the event tomorrow, but I’ll be keeping an eye on the #defrag hashtag to see what done got said.

And many thanks to those of you in the crowd who have been tweeting and blogging today’s tidings.

I was especially intrigued by Louis Gray’s recap of Stowe Boyd’s talk about search becoming less and less useful in the real-time web.

Boyd’s talk seemed to suggest that social tools are changing the culture, that the information flow is increasingly channeled through people, not algorithms.

Summarizes Gray, “One of the biggest reasons he thinks meaning will replace search is that the initial argument for search engines was trying to find the few documents on the Web that were relevant to your query, and now, practically any search can deliver millions of results.  Search is starting to fail because scarcity has been replaced by infinity.”

Whoa.  Infinity.

Gray continues his synthesis: “We are heading toward a world where all the critical information is available publicly, and breaking news is a few seconds away – at the most. We will switch to instead relying on finding things through our social connections – engines of meaning, and the source of what is important.”

I interpret that to mean that when combining human intelligence with the speed and reaction of human response, there ain’t no algorithm on earth can beat we humans.

Very empowering, and I’m glad to know the machines aren’t completely taking over (including Hal).

So, take Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point fundamentals and unleash the energy of all those mavens and connectors and make them super mavens/connectors via the network?

Because, Gray has Boyd concluding, “We are not sharing space online, we are sharing time.  Our time is increasingly not our own. A shared thread of time will be the norm, and how we will get work done.”

Those moments will replace our static Web pages.  And this new element in today’s social Web could be “the most defining moment of our civilization.”

Hmm.  I thought that defining moment had been when Oprah had Ashton Kutcher on to talk about Twitter.

All joking aside, some interesting memes which may or may not prove to be true are revealing themselves by some of the thought captains of the industry.

I will continue to mull these over as I embark a defrag inspired margarita drinking binge with my friend Syd here shortly.

(Syd will be providing me a show and tell of her new Motorola Droid, won’t you Syd?)

Nice blog post about brand positioning in the post-cluetrain world by Francois Gossieaux over at EmergenceMarketing.

Led me to contribute a rather over-long comment about how we (MotiveQuest LLC) approach brand positioning questions for our clients today.

In the old days we had a product with rational and emotional benefits, and we made up a story and then pounded this story into people’s heads with $$$ (advertising). This worked pretty well until the fragmentation of mass media and the rise of the networked individual.

Today the way to approach this question is to first understand (using MotiveQuest of course – online anthropology) what people care about most. Then examine what they already believe to be true about your brand and your competitors. Finally, you figure out how to connect your brand to what people are passionate about in an authentic (consistent with what they already believe to be true) compelling (relevant to what they are passionate about) and helpful (helps them achieve their goals, not yours) way.

Everyone says that branding is more like politics today, but that is because it’s true. You should always connect to something passionate and true (it’s the economy stupid).

TO’B

It has to be that the sheen of our web 2.0 world is a little faded from in 2007-2008 when I started and withdrew from a similar class. When I first read Shirky in mid-2008, I felt what it must have felt like to read Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999.  His was the kind of theoretical approach to the Brave New World of social media that I was both in awe of and excited to see how the world could change because of this medium that thrived in spite of traditional hinderance of money and resources.  I appreciated the case studies because they were largely around the frame of us, the users of the world, as global underdog that could take down theft safely behind laptops, almost shift the balance of power in entrenched political machines, and take down one of the world’s most powerful religious institutions.  Shirky in explaining the force of the many to many,  pitted us (the aggregate collaborators) versus powerful though narrowly focused institutions.

I wasn’t foolish to think that social media would mean a kind of perpetual digital revolution (Mao by way of Google), or that the kind of global realignment Shirky writes about would happen 15 months after he declared it, but maybe I hoped I was wrong.  The Obama campaign or Graff’s, ‘First Campaign’ may be the culprit in skewing my perception that campaign forced tradition media to wake up and take a gigantic leap forward. Tommaso Sorchiotti’s slideshare presentation aptly and comically depicts this.  The quixotic narrative of 2008 Presidential cycle lifted the resurrection narrative of the power of the web and vice versa.  Both are a bit of mythology of course, I do think that ascendance of the Obama campaign and the side-story of their online strategy made the most compelling argument for the power of social media.  But its 2009 almost 20-10, and I am left with thinking:

What’s Next?

All new media tools herald a new dawn in how we communicate but eventually it falls victim to the tragedy of the commons, right? I guess I thought the villian of this tragedy would be some lone-gunman type and not MSM or the social media tools themselves.   Social media, web 2.0 tools, and their companies are no different. Google, who could do no wrong in my book two years go has become just another company that is doing what it can to bend reality to its own creepy interests.  Twitter just saw its ultimate social potential when it was the go-to medium of reporting Iran elections protests by the US government no less and yet it bothers me that Ashton Kutcher has more followers than NPR.  When AIG has an RSS feed, it makes me want to stock my house with canned goods and wait for the Mayan Prophesy.  I am not saying that social media and web 2.0 tools have jumped the shark, just that we still seem to have made this leap and no one really knows what is next. Web 3.0 and the semantic web is probably years if not a decade away.  We are in this grey area where these tools are being actively adopted by the media institutions like the Washington Post and the New York Times not because it generates revenue, but because it seems the only way to stay above mere relevancy.   Perhaps I thought in a web 2.0 world, Moore’s Law applied to social change as well as computing speed.  And maybe it does, but it doesn’t feel like we’ve culturally reached even a tenth of the journey to critical mass.  Perhaps this still an odd time to look back on the last six to ten years of the web 2.0 social media explosion and study it as you would artifacts.  It’s no longer new, yet we haven’t reached the point in this journey where we are closer to the end than the beginning.  Then again, there is something to Shirky’s notion that technology doesn’t get socially interesting until it becomes technologically boring, and this world of many to many communications isn’t boring yet.

I stumbled upon one of the most favorited ppt presentations on slideshare. Very insightful yet entertaining. I want to spread the word, so please leaf through the slides, which I’m sure you’ll be able to finish till the end.. it says it all, here goes..

See.. it was jam-packed with useful things..

Some pointers:

1. The market (the networked individuals) defines the brand, not the company. We are intuitive and emotional beings. It’s all about gut feel. Kudos to the Cluetrain Manifesto!

2. Trust = Reliability + Delight

3. There must be a bridge between Logic (Left-brain, Strategy) and Magic (Right-Brain, Creativity) to produce charismatic brands.

4. And the 5 key disciplines of branding – Differentiation, Collaboration, Innovation, Validation, and Cultivation.

Readwriteweb gives an interesting breakdown by Bernard Lunn of two web 2.0 giants Twitter and Facebook recent infusion of investment capital.  I recently started keeping track of my own stock portfolio, by way of my brother who handles most of that stuff.  I am actually using the original stock tracker App on the Iphone and it is strange how the day by day fluctuations of stock prices, particularly Apple (my only stock winner) fascinate me to no end.  The money I had initially handed over to my brother to invest is real but the value of the Apple stock has doubled since then so I have ostensibly fake wealth that I can’t directly get to.

If Facebook ever makes an IPO, I want to be there to pick up a share or hundred because it apparently is turning a profit and while the company’s ad revenue is sure to stabilize as it expands into the less lucrative international markets, I agree with Lunn’s accessment that if there is a bubble 2.0, Facebook will like not fall victim to it.  I know it’s a leap, but is strikes me that what has become the Blogger/Twitter model of sticking it out until you get bought out that Ev Williams stumbled into, and that has become the developer wet dream is not unlike the picking a long-term stock for the next big company and hoping that some day the value of the stock will be high enough that someone wants to buy it off you.  The question I have is, in the stock market, people tend to buy stocks with the expectation that the monetary value will increase not the cultural value (i.e. Twitter).  We are entering an age where the ‘cultural capital’ of social media is gaining more clout over of financial capital, but its even detached from the idea of the market articulated in Cluetrain, as what has value is not actual stuff, but digital representations of stuff.  Markets are quite literally conversations, a bazaar of ideas and not items. More to come. -n

Cluetrain’s  95 Theses projected a new world order that in 1999 came eerily close to what we have today.  But why the wink-n-nod to Martin Luther? Can anything be more pretentious than comparing the internet revolution to the Protestant Reformation? I’m trying to convince myself that high-irony is a fine art, but what’s the difference between pretension and high-irony if you still sound like a jackass?  A cursory scan of the 95 dispels that the reference was anything but coincidental.

34. To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities. 35. But first, they  must belong to a community.-Really? That couldn’t be one sentence? ‘Companies must belong to and share the concerns of a community’.

Did the authors really need to dice up their theses to make the magic Martin Luther number? No. But this doesn’t diminish how spot on their 95 Theses are in totality: that the many-to-many conversations the internet and social media trade in is the new paradigm that business must adapt to or likely fail.

Wikipedia’s post on CM breaks it up into eight sections, which to me might be overkill. Also, I don’t agree with its numeric sectioning.  My take:

1. Markets are Conversations (1, 38, 39, 40, 61, 62, 63)
2. Markets Consist of Human Beings (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 33)
3. These new markets are getting smarter (9, 10, 11, 12, 30)
4. The False Construct of Business (13, 14, 15, 59, 60)
5. The Company’s Dilemma (20, 21, 22)
6. Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy (7, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56)
7. The Fallacy of the Corporate ‘Voice’ (16, 17, 18, 19)
8. The Company must speak in a human voice (31, 32)
9. The Company is Talking and Not Listening (23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28)
10. The Company must question their false construct (36, 37, 41, 42)
11. The Company must talk to themselves and to us (8, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48)
12. The Company is there but the new Customer is here (71, 71)
13. The Smart Company Should . . . (57, 58)
14. These New Customers Expect More (64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70)
15. The New Customer Can’t be tamed (74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86)
16. This is what the new Customer wants from the Company (87, 88, 89, 90)
17. Companies need to shape up or customers will find someone who will listen (91, 92, 93, 94, 95)

29-Was omitted (because it’s dumb though it could be clumped with Thesis 7)

The 10th anniversary ‘addition’ brings down some of the high-minded Lutheran references to earth though Locke has managed to have grown more pop-apocalyptic and egotistical in ‘Obedient Poodles for God and Country.’  And the Web did become more than what companies and the media thought it was in 1999, but they also found ways to game the Web (Google Ads, Bing, etc).

P.S. Any significance to number 17? Yes mathematically, culturally, and in sports.  But I came to it arbitrarily. Or did I? -ns

When the Cluetrain Manifesto came out in April of 1999, it was as pretentious as it was visionary.  Released right on the heels of Wachowski Brothers cinematic manifesto, the Matrix, CM probably had more than its share of followers in black leather trenchcoats with Morpheus-like IM handles. Playing to this niche audience is the only explanation I have for opening the 1999 version with Chris Locke’s meandering sometimes unreadable new age discourse (‘Internet Apocalypso’).  If I were in PR then and picked up this book, Locke’s metaphysical dissertation laden with pop-culture and pop-history references, would make me wonder if the patients had taken over the asylum at Perseus Books. That said, if I were reading this online, as it was originally presented, I think I would have told everyone I knew about it, perhaps even wallpapering my dorm walls with the 95 theses (point of order: I may or may not had a black leather trenchcoat in my dorm closet, and I may or may not have been known as Erebus.). Next up: 95 Theses

The Cluetrain Manifesto argues a total of 95 theses, however, the themes can be compressed into six (A-F).

Thesis A (#1-6)

“Markets are conversations [...], consisting of human beings— not demographic sectors—[...]that are conducted in a typically open natural, uncontrived, and [...] recognizable human voice.”  - The Cluetrain Manifesto

These conversations were not possible during the era of mass media, as messages were solely being pushed onto the consumer.  Now, with a medium allowing for instantaneous dissemination of information, relationships have been formed through the Internet as users pull what they need, when they need it.

Thesis B (#7-11, #13)

Concerning hyperlinks:  “hyperlinks subvert hierarchy” as they allow the users to categorize and organize information that they deem important from outside a company, as well as from within.

Now, a point of contention regarding Thesis #12’s statement that there are no secrets: I find fault with the absolutism of this statement.  Yes, the dissemination of information can be instantaneous when a “secret” is revealed from political to entertainment, however to proclaim that there are no secrets is questionable.  The Internet has given the consumer/voter/applicant the tools and resources to make a more informed decision, yet there are still products with hidden risks, candidates with shaky records, and jobs with uncertain futures.  I would edit #12 to read, “The Internet has made it so that secrets are harder to keep.”

…and a comment on #14’s claim that corporations don’t speak with a human voice:  some are better than others

Thesis C (#15-24)

In order for companies to remain viable in the new marketplace, a company must demonstrate a dynamic mission and approach to reaching consumers with an embracement of the Internet’s ability to directly connect them with their consumers.

Thesis D (#25-41)

This connection must be a genuine entry into the community with an open line of communication to increase – and reward – brand loyalty.

Thesis E (#41 – 53)

A community with open communication and organization must be encouraged by corporations from both outside and within on intranets.

Thesis F (#54-#95)

This new community invites companies to be a part of it.  The employees are already a part of it, now the company must choose to engage in the conversation. Social (media) Darwinism will only allow the fittest to survive in the new market where consumers are already engaging in the conversation.

When marketing seems a bit messy, virtual, or removed. When you’re wondering really what’s going on, what you’re doing, imagine this helpful scene:

The first markets were markets. Not bulls, bears, or invisible hands. Not battlefields, targets, or arenas. Not demographics, eyeballs, or seats. Most of all, not consumers.

The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates; they were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, met, and connected. The first markets were places for exchange, where people came to buy what others had to sell — and to talk.

The first markets were filled with talk. Some of it was about goods and products. Some of it was news, opinion, and gossip. Little of it mattered to everyone; all of it engaged someone. There were often conversations about the work of hands: “Feel this knife. See how it fits your palm.” “The cotton in this shirt, where did it come from?” “Taste this apple. We won’t have them next week. If you like it you should take some today.” Some of these conversations ended in a sale, but don’t let that fool you. The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence.

Market leaders were men and women whose hands were worn by the work they did. Their work was their life, and their brands were the names they were known by: Miller, Weaver, Hunter, Skinner, Farmer, Brewer, Fisher, Shoemaker, Smith.

For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.

These were the kinds of conversations people have been having since they started to talk. Social. Based on intersecting interests. Open to many resolutions. Essentially unpredictable. Spoken from the center of the self. “Markets were conversations” doesn’t mean “markets were noisy.” It means markets were places where people met to see and talk about each other’s work.

Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.

Words by Doc Searles and David Weinberger
Markets are conversations, Cluetrain Manifesto, Page 74

Written in 1999, still valid today.

Dice el Manifiesto Cluetrain, del que tanto hemos oído hablar este verano, entre otras cosas, que los mercados son conversaciones.

Cuando los francófonos hablan de “tener una conversación” dicen “avoir une discussion”. Y la Real Academia de la Lengua, dice que discutir es:

Y yo, hecha un lío, he querido saber qué opinan los Monty Python de esto. Y esto es lo que encontré. Espero que lo disfrutéis!!

I am posting a few things have grabbed my attention this last week or so.

Firstly, I wrote a brief review of one of my favourite books in the comments of the Small Business Owner blog. If you’ve never read the Cluetrain Manifesto, you might like to read my review.

I’ve also just finished watching a video of Dave Allen give a talk on his Getting Things Done (GTD) method to staff at Google. Wow! It is about 45 minutes long, but worth watching if, like me, you struggle with juggling all the different things we need to get done in our lives. I’ll be watching it again.

Finally, I’ve changed my theme (its done by NeoEase). Feedback welcome.

I imagine that everyone reading this is familiar with the Cluetrain Manifesto. If by chance you are not then you must go read it now. It will tell you more about how to tweet, follow, friend and blog than all the myriad advice columns combined. This is true despite the fact that it is ten years old and when it was written most of those things didn’t exist or were of little relevance. Incredible really.

Here’s a quote from the very beginning:

“… markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

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. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.”

Ten years later it’s still not obvious how a company accomplishes that. It wants to project an image with a certain consistency and polish. How do they do this while letting the many voices that are the company speak in their “true voice”.

There’s no simple answer other than to convene your various employees, customers, prospects, partners, stockholders, and whoever else and let them talk. One thing you learn from Cluetrain is that you better be part of the conversation.

Cluetrain, the new normal: We built the greatest encyclopedia world wide in our spare time.

Cluetrain, the new normal: Flickr, Google, and so many others have become verbs.

The NYT article on ‘Managing your online reputation‘ talks about the pratice that some merchants use of write their own glowing reviews, it’s called astroturfing. It’s amazing that in this day and age their are businesses which still believe they can get away with this kind of practices.

The energy and effort required to actually pull this off would be much better utilised in simply uping the quality of the products and services you offer. It’s been a decade but I guess some people still have gotten around to reading this.

Cluetrain, the new normal: Creating, watching, rating, recommending, and talking about homemade videos undermines TV.

The NYT on online reputation: Your customers are talking about you – and the whole world is listening; http://tr.im/uHTU