THE CLUETRAIN MANIFESTO.

In April, four Web enthusiasts--variously described as "provacateurs," "marketing gurus," and "troublemakers"--posted a document on the Web called The Cluetrain Manifesto (www.cluetrain.com). The Manifesto argues that the Internet has created "a powerful global conversation" among networked customers, who talk to each other "in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny, and often shocking."

Most corporations, the Manifesto's authors add, haven't yet caught the cluetrain and instead continue to "crank out sterile happytalk." (By an exquisite coincidence, the Cluetrain Manifesto appeared the same week as Bill Gates' mind-numbingly bland Business @ the Speed of Thought.) Corporate-speak may have worked when companies relied on resellers and professional marketers to be their public voices, but the old channels have been overwhelmed by millions of e-mail messages and thousands of customer-direct Web sites. "It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down," say the Cluetrain Four, "but the result will be a new kind of conversation--the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in."

The Manifesto's authors (Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger) are all professional writers and commentators, so it's hardly surprising that they understand the defining power of language and conversation. More surprising is how fast word of the Manifesto has spread through the Internet and the traditional press. Clearly, the Cluetrain message has touched a sensitive nerve.

We recently asked Cluetrain co-author David Weinberger--a marketing consultant and commentator who edits the wonderfully eccentric Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO)--to discuss some of the concepts behind the Manifesto:

David, the Cluetrain Manifesto begins by announcing that "markets are conversations." What kind of conversation do you mean?

"People talking. We mean it quite literally. The idea that markets are conversations originated with Doc Searls, one of the four Cluetrain authors, and it reflects the fact that the real work of business occurs through talk. A real conversation, in the ordinary sense of the term, is an interchange among two people treating one another as equals. The conversation is based on a mutual interest. Both sides are aiming at advancing their understanding, not at selling a product or at winning a point. And, each side is open to being wrong; conversations are predicated on the acceptance of human fallibility. It may sound rather grand, but those are the conditions for an everyday conversation around a dinner table or on a plane."

Why is this such a radical concept? People in sales have conversations with customers all the time, sometimes even over dinner.

"Sales encounters only involve a few people, a few conversations. At the heart of the Cluetrain Manifesto is the observation that new networked markets let many more people talk with one another about products and topics they care about. At the same time, intranets enable workers to hold conversations that subvert the hierarchical org chart: They're now in direct, unmediated touch with one another. These two conversations-- networked markets and intranetworked workers--desperately want to join. Your customers want to talk with your employees and vice versa because they have tremendous shared interests in the very stuff of your business."

If everybody talks to customers, what happens to the traditional job of the marketing department?

"So far, marketing departments don't see themselves as facilitators of this new conversation. Marketers see themselves as a bulwark against it, preventing the customers from breaching the walls of Fort Business for fear that they might learn the truth."

And what's the awful truth that marketers are hiding?

"That companies are composed of fallible human beings. We are desperate to maintain the facade that all our products work perfectly, that each product is the best ever, that our product design processes never take a wrong turn, that we never have a moment of doubt about our direction.

"In fact, every company is the same. We all dither. We all head down wrong tracks at least occasionally. We all go off schedule. But we erect a wall of glossy brochures to keep people from finding out what they already know."

Is that what customers hear when they talk directly to a company's employees?

"Nope--the customers figured it out all by themselves. Let's say you want to buy a new disk utility. You go to a software company's Web site and blow through the expensive brochureware because it's just a bunch of bushwa. You navigate down to a spec sheet and get some actual information. Then you go onto Usenet or find some enthusiast home pages and you listen in on the conversation among actual users. You find out that the compression stats aren't accurate in the real world. You find out that the company won't honor its guarantee if you run a competitor's antivirus program. The market conversation has given the lie to the marketing department's attempt to maintain the wall."

So how do companies regain control of their marketing messages?

"They don't. We have to drop the notion that the job of the marketing department is to `deliver' messages. That's the old broadcast model, which not accidentally mirrors the industrial model of delivering interchangeable products from interchangeable workers to interchangeable consumers. Uh uh. No one wants to hear marketing messages. We resist them at every turn. That's why marketeers slip into war metaphors all the time--`launching campaigns,' `targeting consumers.' Marketing feels like war because customers are hostile to what the marketeers are delivering. Instead, we have to learn how to talk again, how to have an honest conversation."

How so?

"First, we have to give up the stilted, weird language that populates our marketing literature, press releases, annual reports. We wrap ourselves in verbiage that literally means nothing. It's not the way people talk and everyone knows it.

"Second, and far harder, we have to open up the floodgates. We currently have a communications hierarchy that maps roughly to the power hierarchy in the company, with only a few official orifices. Employees are warned not to talk with customers. Can you believe it? What could be better than having your employees out on Usenet, building their own Web pages, personally answering e-mail? Hell, they're going to do it anyway. You can't keep the two conversations apart.

"Third, we have to learn now to speak in a natural, real human voice again. People can tell immediately if you're spouting a corporate line or speaking from your heart. We have to encourage this in all our communications, from all the tendrils of the corporation."

And that takes courage, especially when the lawyers insist that it's risky to be candid in public.

"Staying silent while the conversation swirls around you is a bigger risk. Talking like a ventriloquist's wooden dummy in a vocabulary everyone recognizes as totally phony is a bigger risk. Sure, you can hide behind your lawyers, but there won't be anything left to protect if you stay safe and quiet long enough. It's time for some rapid evolution."

Dr. David Weinberger, editor, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO), 94 Westbourne Terr., Brookline, Mass. 02446; 617/738-8323. E- mail: [e-mail]. Web: www.hyperorg.com.