Aaron Strout:     

Hi, my name is Aaron Strout. Welcome to the We Show.

[music]

Aaron Strout:    

Thank you for joining us on the We Show today. My name is Aaron Strout, and I’m the VP of marketing for Mzinga, a leading provider of workplace and customer community solutions.  This podcast is one in a series and can be found on the WeAreSmarter.org site, Mzinga.com, and iTunes under "We Are Smarter."

Our very special guest today is Doc Searls, who is the co-author of best-selling – social media icon really – The Cluetrain Manifesto. He’s also a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center and senior editor at Linux Journal. Welcome today, Doc.

Doc Searls:     
Thank you very much. I enjoy being here.

Aaron Strout: 
So, you’re a busy man. I’ve done a little bit of an intro to you, but why don’t you talk a little bit about what you’ve been up to since you wrote the book eight or nine years ago – maybe some of the work that you’re doing at the Berkman Center right now. I think in our pre-conversation, you said there are some interesting things going on there.

Doc Searls:     
Yeah. Well, just to fix the dates … It is kind of odd with Cluetrain, because Cluetrain grew out of conversations between Chris Locke, David Weinberger, and myself. David Weinberger is another fellow here at the Berkman Center, by the way. Both Chris and David have actually written each two books since then. I haven’t, so I get to sort of continue carrying the Cluetrain torch. But the conversations really started in the fall of ’98 and then carried on through ’99. We published The Cluetrain Manifesto on the Web in, I think, March or April of ’99, wrote the book in the summer of ’99. But the book came out in early January or February of 2000. Just in time, as some people told us, to cause the crash. I think if we were that prescient about it, I would have sold some stock. But I didn’t, so no claims to prophecy there.

In any case, there’s sort of a shoe that was dropped with Cluetrain, which was kind of a rant in the general direction of companies on behalf of customers, saying, “You don’t understand what we’re doing, and what the Web is actually about” – the demand side as well as the supply side – “We can supply as well as you guys can,” and a bunch of stuff like that.

But there was another shoe that was not dropped at the time that we’re trying to do here at the Berkman Center, with something called Project VRM, where VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management. The idea is to put in the hands of customers tools that make them better able to engage with vendors, and more independent of vendors at the same time. It’s sort of like when Chris Locke, who wrote probably the first clue in Cluetrain, which said, “We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We’re human beings, and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.” We really didn’t give them much to deal with. Customers have generally been at the mercy of vendors. You know, our wallets are filled with identifying cards that are actually supplied by the supply side; they were supplied by the big vendors.

The question that we’re exploring here is, What we can do to empower customers to be better able to engage with vendors? It’s kind of – it’s a new thing; it’s a brand new thing, actually, but it’s got a community growing around it. It’s got some development going on, and it’s coming at markets from a whole new way, from the customer’s side rather than the vendor’s side, so we’ll see how it goes. But anyway, that’s the focus of my work here at the Berkman Center. It’s ProjectVRM.org. So if you look up “VRM” now, I think that acronym has now moved ahead of voltage regulator module on Google search. So, you’ll find it there.

Aaron Strout: 
Well, thank you for giving that background, and that leads nicely into my next question. It has been a while since you and Chris and David and Rick put together the original Cluetrain Manifesto. You had, I believe, 95 theses or basically, these clues that you were talking about. So if you were to estimate, how many of these have been put into place? Now I think you are well ahead of your time in sort of mentioning some of these, but how much progress have you seen companies make?

Doc Searls:     
I want to make sure it’s theses, with a “T-H,” and –

[Laughter]

Aaron Strout: 
Not to be confused with F, huh?

Doc Searls:     
Exactly. Yeah, I figure if you’re listening on a low-fi device –

Aaron Strout: 
Yeah, thank you for clarifying.

[Laughter]

Doc Searls:     
Some might actually think that’s correct. I don’t know. I don’t know how many have been put into play. What we did with Cluetrain was, we chose 95 because that worked for Martin Luther, and we called it a manifesto because that worked for Marx, and we called it Cluetrain because that was the – that came out of an old Silicon Valley epitaph that said, “The clue train stopped there four times a day for 10 years, and they never took delivery.” We found that that domain was untaken so we took it, and that’s all the thought that went into the name, honestly. But the –

Aaron Strout: 
Although, I’d argue that’s a lot of thought. That was actually pretty –

[Crosstalk]

Aaron Strout: 
–  with the background yesterday in Wikipedia. Yeah.

Doc Searls:     
Yeah, exactly. But some of the statements were just statements – “hyperlinks subvert hierarchy,” “markets are conversations.” Mostly, they were meant to be provocative. I think one that Chris wrote that just said, “Your advertising isn’t working. Just go shove it.” (Editor’s note: The thesis actually said, “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.”) Stuff like that.

I think the important thing about the theses there was really the voice it was spoken with. One of the things that we said in there is that the voice that matters is the authentic voice of human beings, and not the faked-up voice of press releases and corporate orifices that speak in – and I think it was Chris’s term – in the antique language, a language that will become as antique as that of the French Court. We still do that to some degree. There are still – yesterday I was at ApacheCon in Atlanta, and we were looking at the Web Economy Buzz Phrase Generator that a guy named Dack came up with, which was written about the same time as Cluetrain, that said things like, “Leverage B2B eyeballs.”

Now there’s one called the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator, and it has things like, “Enable social media this-and-that.” But one of the things it has is Cluetrain, which appalled me. I – “Oh, my God,” you know? Here’s a bullshit generator that actually has Cluetrain in it, which tells me that Cluetrain – in some ways it’s been adopted as more corporate bullshit rather than what we meant it to be in the first place, which was a call for individual people to speak in their real voices and for companies to get out of the way. That’s happened to some degree, but not across the board.

In listening to a lot of what Mark Zuckerberg said in announcing this new advertising system for Facebook, it was just Advertising BS 1.0, even though he was saying, “The next 100 years of advertising are coming along, and we’re gonna lead that charge.” To me, the next 100 years of advertising is no advertising at all, so I’m not sure he was on the train there – although maybe he’s read the book. I have no idea.

Aaron Strout: 
Yeah. Interesting, because a backhanded compliment, I guess, the fact that Cluetrain did get included in the Bullshit 2.0 generator. I did actually read your post, then had to generate a few myself. One of my favorites that I printed out was “remix-standards-compliant community,” so –

[Laughter]

Doc Searls:     
Exactly. Exactly –

Aaron Strout: 
You know, it’s like they’re so meaningless, and I guess to that end –  and you’re touching on this right now – are companies starting to just pay lip service to this new concept of really turning the organization inside out, and using these social media tools and communities because they think it’s hip and it’s buzz worthy, or are there companies that are really starting to get it? Like I think Procter & Gamble as a company, or Dove. I was talking with Peter Hirshberg, whom I believe you’ve been working with recently –

Doc Searls:     
Oh yeah, I know Peter really well. He’s a good friend.

Aaron Strout: 
And it does seem like there are some companies that get it, but do you get a sense that there are more than not that just pay lip service to this right now?

Doc Searls:     
Well it’s interesting. I mean, you know – oh boy. You know, I’m thinking of all kinds of foul things that we did. What’s his name? Dave Barry once said that “companies hold meetings because they cannot actually masturbate.” There’s something that we do collectively that is really inhuman and strange, and what you get with policy and procedure is just bizarre very often. At that level, I don’t think much has changed at many companies. At others, they’ve actually changed a great deal, but you may not even be able to see it. For example, Apple is a very locked-down company in terms of its speech. Very few bloggers at Apple. It’s really a hazard to be a public figure at all if you’re not Steve Jobs at Apple, and even Steve is very careful in what he says. On the other hand, the company really does speak with a human voice. I mean they go out of their way with those ads, like the ones with, “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac,” to have real-sounding people, and they resonate for that reason. There’s something Clueful in what they do, even if the company is kind of locked up.

On the other hand, there are companies like Johnson & Johnson, which immediately jumped onto the Cluetrain in a big way. I’ve been to a couple meetings there, and people carry their little orange­-and-white-and-silver books as if they were the Bible in some cases. And they really believe it. The problem is that it’s very hard for a company that deals in the healthcare field to speak in a human voice, because it’s against the law. The language the company itself speaks with is incredibly formalized and regulated. The interesting thing is that they, at a moral level in trying to do good in the world and trying to be real and human, and more importantly, humane, they’re struggling with it. It’s very interesting to me to visit with a company like that, where they’re working on doing the right thing even if the public face of the company doesn’t look any different than it did before.

I think something similar to that is actually happening at Procter & Gamble. I remember after Cluetrain came out, one of the first calls we got – it went to David Weinberger – was from P&G. He went and visited with them, and I guess gave them what for – I don’t know what the nature of the conversations were.

This was way back in 2000, maybe even earlier than that, but they’re dealing with it. I’ve had talks with the people at Wal-Mart, at Target stores, at a number of other companies – Prudential – where a lot of the conversation you have at a human-to-human personal level is, “We’re struggling with this.” This is not an easy thing to do because traditionally and operationally, only the most formalized orifices are allowed to speak.

I deal with this also with my work with Linux Journal. When I want to talk to an IT manager or a CTO, or even a rank-and-file engineer, which are always the best people to talk to, what they always say is – or almost always say; not all the time – “Well I really can’t talk to you,” or “I can’t be quoted, because I’m not an official spokesman for the company.” You speak to these official spokespeople, and it’s bullshit, you know? It’s not quotable at all, and it’s not even useful. So sort of at a human level, it’s a mixed bag, but on the whole, I think, has been moving in a generally positive direction.

Aaron Strout: 
How do we overcome that? It seems to me that that’s the biggest hindrance to this movement getting over the hump, because it really is very important. I think it’s this whole notion of the We Are Smarter Than Me, the Wisdom of Crowds, Wikinomics. And the interesting thing is companies like Google and Microsoft are using things like prediction markets to say, “We actually want to hear the voices of the lowest ranking employees, because we see real value in that – but we’re not gonna actually give them a mouthpiece,” as you’re talking about. So will companies ever get over that? I mean, is there something that needs to happen? Is it a matter of the people that grew up with Cluetrain and were in their 20s when it came out, and now are in their 30s and maybe in another four or five years are in their 40s? And they’re starting to move into those SVP/EVP senior roles, that they will actually help enact this change?

Doc Searls:     
It’s hard to say. I would take the extreme long view on it. In some ways, at least for me – I don’t know whether David or Rick or Chris were influenced by Peter Drucker, but I was – in some ways I see some of what Cluetrain was about to be very much along the lines of what Peter Drucker said for most of the maybe 75 years that he wrote about management and about business. One of the things he pointed out many years ago was that the modern corporation is, in fact, not very old; it’s a very recent development. His point of view was the industrial age began, and it will end slowly. He came up with the term “knowledge worker” in like the ‘50s, or something like that. He spoke about management as being like conducting a band or an orchestra, where it’s really the people who play the music that are truly important. Everybody plays a role, and everybody keeps improving, and things like that, and that the ideal role for a corporation is to organize talents and not make a profit, and to relate to its customers and not just sell stuff. In some ways, he was a voice in the wilderness on that. On the other hand, he’s being proven right in the long term.

I think it’s just going to take a long time to do what I call “turning companies inside out,” which is to say what matters are the people on the inside, not the edifice that we put up to represent what a company is. You know, the tall building with the foyer and the guy in the uniform, and the security and the badge you wear, and all that stuff that David Weinberger very eloquently and correctly called “truly frightening,” actually – that we confuse building a company with building a fort. That’s old stuff and I think that’s going to end, but it’s going to take many years. Some companies it’ll happen faster than others. Some are there already.

I think, for example, Southwest Airlines; the culture that Herb Kelleher set up at Southwest, where everybody can speak for the company, where everybody is encouraged to play an active role, where there’s a general understanding that companies are just ways of organizing paychecks and getting work done, and “We’re here to help that happen. We happen to be in the airline business, and we’re just going to do the best job we can and try not to take ourselves too seriously, while taking our responsibility seriously.” That came down from the top. Kelleher was a pretty down-to-earth, fun, radical kind of guy, and that shows in that company. They didn’t need The Cluetrain Manifesto to tell them what to do. A lot of other companies really do, and have to struggle with it. It’s going to take them a long time.

Aaron Strout: 
Well, Doc, a great sort of information, case studies, and update on sort of what you’re thinking about today. I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us today. I look forward to hearing more from you in the near future, and bumping into you at other blogger dinners, like the one that we saw each other at over at Jeremiah Owyang’s benefit.

Doc Searls:     
Well, thanks. That is a fun thing.

Aaron Strout: 

We appreciate you listening in to this series of the We Show podcasts. To find other podcasts like this, you can check out WeAreSmarter.org, Mzinga.com, and also iTunes under "We Are Smarter."

Thanks so much for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next week.