Can you understand 'social' if you haven't read The Cluetrain Manifesto?

Of course, you can understand what 'social' means if you haven't read The Cluetrain Manifesto but social makes a whole load more sense if you have.


So, what is the Cluetrain Manifesto?  Here is its introduction:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies. 

These 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. 

While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it. 

However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets. 

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in. 

What follows this introduction are 95 theses, the best well-known of which is probably the first:

1.  Markets are conversations.

Never has a thesis been as abused or as often mis-quoted as this one but when you understand that the sub-heading of Cluetrain is "the end of business as usual", you begin to get some idea what this book is all about. 


If you haven't read it, I urge you to do so because much of what it discusses is really only now emerging fully into the mainstream and you will make much better sense of the new mainstream if you have read Cluetrain.


You might wonder why I mention this now - and why I have quoted so extensively from Cluetrain above.  


As I indicated last week, I spoke at an insurance conference this week on network and cyber risks.  I was on a panel on social media, where I argued that the media part of social media was all about technologies and platforms, which are and will always be in a state of constant change.  This change is interesting and important to follow (I watched the fascinating f8 keynote last night for example) but, while I am interested in technologies and platforms as enablers of conversations, it is the conversations themselves - the social part of social media - which I find truly fascinating because it is conversations that are gradually but genuinely changing everything.  


On Wednesday for example, I tried to show that social was changing the nature of insurance's customers; it is also changing the risks they have and need to transfer.  Beyond that however, I also suggested that the conversation will gradually come to change how customers understand risk, which in turn will have significant implications for how we accept the risks they want to transfer.  


Now, it is not a new experience to be politely told that "I am not sure I completely agree with you"; that wonderfully English and understated way of suggesting I am talking out of my arse.  I think therefore that I coped reasonably well when that was the introduction to a question on Wednesday but what I may have hidden less well was my surprise when, in my reply, I quoted thesis 1. above - and referenced Cluetrain - to a completely universal set of blank stares from the audience.


I accept that Cluetrain is not mainstream reading but I had assumed that, in a room full of insurance people gathered together to discuss social media, at least one person other than me would at least have heard of it and its primary thesis.   
   
Apparently not.  If you have read this far, scroll back up and look at the picture which is part of the Cluetrain introduction.  Need I say more?