Corporate & Clueless

Heresy I know, but I have never read The Cluetrain Manifesto from cover to cover. I could almost quote you the 95 theses but never sat down and read the whole lot.

Well I am now. And what an eye-opener! Well .. slap in the face actually.

For those who have not read it, The Cluetrain Manifesto is one of those rare business books that causes definitions to be rewritten. It is (note: I’m not using past tense) a watershed in thinking. Thinking about communication and how it has been impacted by the internet.

The book just makes sense. It talks lots about talk: human conversation. In a delightfully subversive and provocative way it tilts at corporate wind mills and challenges them to engage in a conversation.

At heart it is a lot about heart: being human and humane in how we communicate.

Squirm, Jump, Scratch

It is one of those rare texts that make you squirm: jump up and scratch your head. Well it does for me as a corporate affairs exec with just over two decades in the game. I found myself putting it down and needing to go for a walk to take in the last few pages.

It was written in 1999 but, surprisingly after a decade, it is still fresh and relevant.

It’s hard to find a typical quote. I gave up my usual scribbles of highlighter and pencilled asterisks as each page started to look like a graffiti wall.

For those in corporate PR there are many painful jabs in the ribs. Marketing however cops both barrels at close range: here, like most in PR I suspect, I confess to some schadenfreude.

But please know: this is not anti-business.

I can see that many could take it this way. But for those with an open mind (even just a chink) this book opens new vistas for improving communication – especially for corporations.

I found the first chapter after the theses, titled ‘Internet Apocalypso’, superbly written. The author is Christopher Locke. He is one of the four who wrote the Manifesto.

I leave you with an quote from him (p8) that I trust will spur my fellow corporate PRs to pick it up – or download it for free – and read it:

“The Internet is inherently seditious. It undermines unthinking respect for centralized authority, whether that “authority” is the neatly homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy rhetoric of the corporate annual report.”

[Illustration: Hugh Macleod: Gaping Void]

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Communication, Corporate reputation, Marketing, Media, Online PR, Public Relations, Trust