The Cluetrain Manifesto
Try snipping paragraphs of text from press releases and a few pieces of printed person-to-person e-mail. Shuffle the paper slips.
Hand the pile to your office-mate, your spouse, or your next-door neighbor. Can they sort them? Of course they can, in short order.
It comes of focus, attention, caring, connection, and honesty of purpose. It is not commercially motivated, isn't talk with a vested interest.
The human voice reaches directly into our beings and touches our spirits.
Voice is how we can tell the difference between people, committees, and bots.
An e-mail written by one person bears the tool marks of their thought processes. E-mail might be employee-to-employee, customer-to-customer or employee-to-customer, but in each case it's person-to-person.
Voice, or its lack, is how we tell what's worth reading and what's not. Much of what passes for communication from companies to customers is washed and diluted so many times by the successive editing and tuning done by each company gatekeeper that the live-person hints are lost.
Authenticity, honesty, and personal voice underlie much of what's successful on the Web. Its egalitarian nature is engendering a renaissance in personal publishing.
We of genus Homo are wired to respond to each other's noise and commotion, to the rich, multi-modal deluge of data each of us broadcasts as we wade through life. The Web gives us an opportunity to escape from the bounds imposed by broadcast media's one-to-many notions of publishing.
Nascent Web publishing efforts have their genesis in a burning need to say something, but their ultimate success comes from people wanting to listen, needing to hear each other's voices, and answering in kind.
Wired Conversations
The message here isn't new and isn't particularly complex. Our elevator pitch is a pretty short one:
??People talk to each other.
The inside and outside conversations are connecting. We have no choice but to participate in them.??
If there's any newness, it's in how the Net and the Web change the balance of the conversational equation.
Technology is putting a sharper, more urgent point on the importance of conversation. Conversations are moving faster, touching more people, and bridging greater distances than we're used to.
Let's take a tour of the various conversational modalities the Net offers and how they carry our voices.
Electronic mail is the wedge cracking the rock of corporate communication.
I write a message, label it with yourname@whereveryouare.com, click the "send" button, and you've got my mail. Most corporate electronic defenses pass it right through.
They might screen out applets, viruses, and other denizens of the internetworked dark, but words slip through like wraiths. Thoughts.
We exchange the mundane, day-to-day electronic utterances greasing our business down its intended path. We also trade other missives, possibly words my management would rather I didn't speak, or didn't hear.
But the flow can't be stopped, not without choking off the lifeblood of most businesses. The inexpedient comes with the expedient, and we have no choice but to work with it.
The basic operating rule of e-mail is that anyone can send mail to almost anyone else — all they need is an address.
E-mail is a more immediate medium than paper.
My expectation of the response time to many messages I send is today, not tomorrow or a week from now. This urgency means I'm more apt to write quickly and conversationally when I respond to a message.
A lot of the spontaneity in e-mail messages comes from writers breaking through their natural caution and reserve, rushing the writing process, giving themselves permission to be blunt, honest, and sincere in response to a query.
Great post with lots of imoprtant stuff.
It's not just a question of knowing how to type, but of giving myself permission to truly converse: to "out" myself in a conversational medium that is informal, honest, yet open to myriad misinterpretations if I choose words and phrases carelessly.
F5Kuox <a href="http://giftdbxwmyqh.com/">giftdbxwmyqh</a>
Despite this scary thought, most people don't find person-to-person e-mail daunting. The ease and directness of e-mail is forging new connections — new conversations — throughout virtually every business.
One-way lists let me send to a large number of people at once, but recipients can't respond to the entire list the message was sent to. There's no opportunity for conversation, other than between you, the recipient, and me, the list owner.
These lists can often have the character of a mass mailing, like a Christmas card list. If the mailing is from someone you don't know who's trying to sell you something, convince you of something, or lure you to a particular Web site, it's called spam.
There's a fascinating subgenus of the one-way list called a webzine or an e-zine, as in electronic magazine. These are periodic bouts of creative journalism sent to willing subscribers, with audiences ranging from dozens to hundreds of thousands.
To their devotees, they have all the interest and attraction of their well-funded offline counterparts. However, they're often more focused, more idiosyncratic, and less plastic.
They're usually created in someone's garage or bedroom office as a labor of love given a pulpit by the incredibly low entry cost of Internet publishing. They may start out like the Utne Reader or Mother Jones magazine, but the Web relieves them of the need to raise capital, rent a press, and pay for postage.
Many 'zines have a strong conversational tone. They mine the incoming stream of responses to take the temperature of their constituencies, and relay tasty bits back to their audiences.
The conversation this engenders often feels like publishing with a more immediate feedback loop.
Two-way lists are even more interesting from a conversational viewpoint.
They let recipients respond to messages, and everyone else on the list sees their responses. But it takes time to wade through all the traffic on a busy list, sifting value from chaff, knowledge from data.
As individual mailing lists grow from small, focused forums, they can easily turn into large, unwieldy free-for-alls. The commitment required to understand the content and context of a list before you post to it is part of the conversational ante this aspect of the Net requires.
Just like voice conversations, these asynchronous exchanges reveal if you're all there, focused and paying attention.
In a moderated two-way list, all mail to the list is screened by someone doing gatekeeper duty.
The moderator's role ranges from that of a friendly guide to being an editor with absolute control over every message sent to the list. Moderators often end up having a great deal of influence on the tenor and substance of list conversations.
Conversations on two-way lists look just like conversations in personal e-mail, except the odds of having several people responding independently to the same piece of mail go way up.