The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual – Chapter 4

Credit where credit is due. As I get this new blog going I want to make sure that I pay my respects — I borrowed my original idea for the title of this blog from chapter 4 of this book.

When you think of the Internet, don’t think of Mack
trucks full of widgets destined for distributorships,
whizzing by countless billboards.

Think of a table for two.

~ @man

If you have not heard of ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto‘ by now, then by all means make it over to their site and spend some time familiarizing yourself with their concepts. The authors are Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and they were many years ahead of their time when they wrote the book. Now, many of these ideas are slowly becoming part of every business’s new marketing strategy (or at least it’s being heatedly discussed now versus being ignored). I realize this is old news to those of us who’ve been working in this area, but for the vast majority of my new clients all these ideas are brand spanking new.

The more I thought about the authors’ original insights and looked at the various social media and social networking systems I’ve installed in the last 5 years, I find more and more value in their wisdom. I make it a point of having every intern who works for Tom Parish Inc. carefully read the entire book. However, I’m starting to see that the younger interns coming out of college are already ‘in the groove’ with the concepts, given their ‘digital native’ origins – meaning they grew up on MySpace, Facebook, blogging, Flickr and so forth, and they already experience in their life and know the value of input from others on the Internet to improve the quality of their life. My generation built the Internet; my kid’s generation are those who will truly live in an ‘always on’ Internet.

So with much respect, I’m officially launching www.MarketsofConversation.com, a result of repeatedly reading Chapter 4 of The Cluetrain Manifesto.  I hope to bring forward the best of my ideas and hard-earned experiences from working with process control systems for Honeywell, an MIT spin-off in artificial intelligence in the ’80s, in IT for 12 years at Motorola Semiconductor, and a SEO consultant for 3 years. And now, having worked 4 years as a social media/social networking consultant, I intend to bring the best of my experiences with the insights of The Cluetrain Manifesto to help others be successful on the Internet. It’s exiting for me to think of markets as opportunities for ‘conversation’ because it puts your business more in sync with your prospects and customers, and doing that right brings you more opportunity for growing your business.

Tom