interests. Now business-as-usual is engaged in a grinding war of attrition with its markets.
No wonder marketing fails.
NETWORKED MARKETS
The long silence - the industrial interruption of the human conversation - is coming to an end. On the Internet, markets are getting more connected and more powerfully vocal every day. These markets want to talk, just as they did for the thousands of years that passed before market became a verb with us as its object.
The Internet is a place. We buy books and tickets on the Web. Not over, through or beside it. To call it a "platform" belies its hospitality. What happens on the Net is more than commerce, more than content, more than push and pull and clicks and traffic and e-anything.
The Internet is a real place where people can go to learn, to talk to each other and to do business together. It is a bazaar where customers look for wares, merchants present goods for display and people gather around topics that interest them. It is a conversation.
In this new place, every product you can name, from fashion to office supplies, can be discussed, argued over, researched and bought as part of a vast conversation among the people interested in it. "I'm in the market for a new computer," someone says, and she's off to the Dell (DELL) site. But she probably won't buy that cool new laptop right away. She'll ask around first - on Web pages, on newsgroups, via e-mail: "What do you think? Is this a good one? Has anybody checked it out? What's the real battery life? How's the customer support? Recommendations? Horror stories?"
These conversations are most often about value, of products and of the businesses that sell them. Not just prices, but the market currencies of reputation, location, position and every other quality that is subject to rising, or falling, opinion.
It's nothing new, in one sense. The only advertising that was ever truly effective was word of mouth, which is nothing more than conversation. Now word of mouth has gone global. The one-to-many scope that technology brought to mass production and then to mass marketing, which producers have enjoyed for 200 years, is now available to customers. And they're eager to make up for lost time.
KAFFEEKLATSCH.COM
More ominous for marketing-as-usual is the fact that the connection of customers in the market doesn't enable them just to learn the truth behind product claims. The very sound of the Web conversation throws into stark relief the monotonous, lifeless, self-centered drone emanating from marketing departments around the world. "Word of Web" offers people the pure sound of the human voice, not the elevated, empty speech of the corporate hierarchy.
Further, these voices are telling one another the truth based on their real experiences, unlike the corporate messages that aim at presenting what we can generously call a best-case scenario. Not only can the market discover the truth in the time it takes to do a search at a discussion archive, but the tinny, self-absorbed voices of business-as-usual sound especially empty in contrast to the rich conversations emanating from the Web.
What's more, networked markets get smart fast. Metcalfe's Law, an axiom of the computer industry, states that the value of a network increases as the square of the number of users connected to it - connections multiply value exponentially. This is also true for conversations on networked markets. In fact, as the network gets larger it also gets smarter.
The Cluetrain Corollary is this: The level of knowledge on a network increases as the square of the number of users times the volume of conversation. So in market conversations it's far easier to learn the truth about the products being pumped, about the promises being made and about the people making those promises. Networked markets are not only smart markets; they're also equipped to get much smarter, much faster, than business-as-usual.
Business-as-usual doesn't realize this because it continues
