Why the Cluetrain Manifesto is still right
The oughts were a weird time. Looking back, it was very liminal. And it was out of the moment this change started that The Cluetrain Manifesto emerged. Before social media was a thing. Before online ads had audience targeting. Before third-party cookies turned into an invasive species.
“The passion of the web is remaking every social structure it’s meeting, including government, education, entertainment, and, yes, business.”
- Doc Searls, foreword to the paperback edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto
This collection of musings on the early days of the internet is still relevant 20+ years later. And they may point the way towards the next 20 years of digital culture. Because The Cluetrain Manifesto was more than observations about websites, newsgroups, and usergroup forums.
Cluetrain pointed to two critical qualities:
1. The engagement and passion-for-quality of genuine craft.
2. Conversations among recognizably human voices.
- Christopher Locke & David Weinberger, EZ Answers, The Cluetrain Manifesto
Reading this circa 2003 felt like discovering other people who cared about the same thing I do:
The infinite promise of the internet to create connections between people.
Re-reading this book twenty years later touched something I knew deep down in my bones even as a marketing noob. Something proven out in the way digital marketing has evolved.
Forgetting about the humans behind the screens is bad news bears.
The large body of websites and apps developed since this book first appeared were often viewed (after the fact) as an inevitable next step. But lots of people made choices along the way about what we value and how much we are willing to trade.
Engaging in digital conversations has devolved into lowest common denominator efforts yet again, because we started valuing impressions and clicks over communities and conversations.
We constructed artificial boundaries around what the internet does. And it’s biting stubborn marketers in the butt.
Wherever there’s an audience, there are ads
This is an eternal truth. When my husband and I toured Italy on our honeymoon, we included a day trip to Pompei. One of the murals excavated mostly intact was an advertisement for a brothel.
Early online advertising revolved around billboards, adopting a term from traditional outdoor advertising. Because none of us knew what we were doing, so use a name that people have some context around. And it was pretty accurate. Because there was no real audience targeting involved outside of the specific website.
“Traditional” online display advertising started to feel like wallpaper. It faded into the background.
“We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.”
- Thesis 74, The Cluetrain Manifesto
So things evolved. Through the power of cookies (and other questionable tools) audience targeting became a thing. Then retargeting became a thing, and you couldn’t escape the ads.
Regulation became a factor after a series of very bad events from Meta. Niche audience segments for advertising shifted because people were using these to discriminate against people. Enormous buys juiced up reach and impressions in what became a very crowded space.
Intrusive ad tracking became the norm, because marketers had to justify spend. And big tech was all too happy to help get a bigger piece of the budget pie.
Calculating marketing ROI meant contributing to the lingering third-party cookie dependency that’s blown up in our faces. And that’s not the only thing that got seriously messed up over time.
Is social media still social?
In the beginning (MySpace, The Daily Jolt, Facebook), the whole point was to connect with other human beings. As a human being. As in making personal connections.
The promise of the internet was all about discovering your inner voice, sharing it, and being instantly understood by people with the same interests.
“… the Internet connected people to each other and provided a space in which the human voice would be rapidly rediscovered … The something special [about the Internet] is what the Manifesto calls voice … Across the millennia in between, the human voice is the music we have always listened for, and still best understand.”
- Christopher Locke, Internet Apocalypto, The Cluetrain Manifesto
I was considered a little bit of a maverick for suggesting my company create social media profiles and engage with bloggers circa 2006. My public relations colleague turned down her nose at all of it. My communications director boss let me play around with it, because he trusted me as a marketer.
Facebook released business pages in 2007. Social media management and cultivating bloggers became a function of PR more so than marketing. Social media as the primary way to connect with your audience became a given. Paying to boost posts so you can reach followers doesn’t even feel strange anymore.
Social networks losing audiences big-time is no longer a rarity. But we haven’t identified replacements. And we still want to connect with people who care about the same things we do.
AI isn’t new, and early reviews sound very familiar
I find AI large language models fascinating. Mostly because I’m always fascinated by technical innovation and advances. But with anything it’s not only the idea, it’s in the execution.
“… if industrial automation is de-skilling, AI is akin to a frontal lobotomy. Instead of distributing knowledge, so-called expert systems made it dependent on complex and inflexible software. In most cases, these programs simply didn’t work. Knowledge worthy of the name is highly dynamic. It requires deep understanding, not just rules and algorithms. While machines are lousy at this sort of thing, people are remarkably adaptive and intelligent. People learn. Real expertise is changing too fast today to legend itself to automation.”
- Christopher Locke, Internet Apocalypto, The Cluetrain Manifesto
ChatGPT, “the new Bing”, and Bard are super fascinating. But they’re also (as of now) still very wrong a lot of the time. Disturbingly and in ways that might not be easy to catch.
A co-worker and I were playing around with Bing’s AI chatbot out of specific curiosity: Would this tool make it easier to find companies and people who you’d want to reach out to? Refining along the way, we got to a list of people with common interests and related info about them. But was it accurate? Spot checking was questionable.
So then we asked it to share info about me. Almost right on. But where it was wrong, it was spectacularly wrong. Bard thinks I attended a large public university and majored in Communications. That would make sense for someone working in marketing. Except I attended a small, private liberal arts college and majored in Theater & Dance.
On a smaller scale, while ChatGPT is pretty decent at summarizing blog articles, it can’t summarize within a target word or character count. (Yet.)
AI tools are going to become embedded within other tools. And they’ll get better, more useful, and hopefully more ethical over time. I’m genuinely excited about that. But they can’t replicate the human voice.
I do not think this word means what you think it means
People talk about the internet like it’s an institution. And in many ways the impact is like that of an established institution. But nobody’s at the wheel. And we should remember that.
“Because the Web is by far the largest, most complex network ever built, and because no one owns it or controls it, it is always going to be, in the words of Time Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, ‘a little bit broken.’”
- David Weinberger, The Hyperlinked Organization, The Cluetrain Manifesto
That still feels so damn relevant. Especially at this moment in time when everyone is trying to figure out what to do about AI models and weird shifts in social media. We broke things and it’s unclear how to fix them.
What exactly is unfolding here?
We are decades into the internet and nobody is in charge. I’m not saying we want somebody to be in charge. But it’s important for us to remember that enacting change is hard — even when there is an established structure.
“It’s not just systems that are imperfect. More important, so are we humans. Say it with me: humans are imperfect. I am imperfect.”
- David Weinberger, The Hyperlinked Organization, The Cluetrain Manifesto
Substack received a lot of attention recently by launching Notes. It’s a Twitter-esque feature allowing Substack authors and readers to share short notes, as well as follow individuals.
“There was a time when social media was fun more than frightening. But there’s no going back to the time of Blogspot and LiveJournal. The goal cannot be to Make the Internet Great Again. The incumbents are entrenched, there are more than 6 billion smartphones in circulation, and the AI genie is out of the bottle. But we can go forward.
By changing the rules of engagement — by creating a new media universe with different laws of physics — the internet can be better than it has ever been. We have been living with the worldwide web for only three decades. In that time, most of our media business efforts have revolved around advertising. We see the potential for so much more.”
- Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi, Substack Notes announcement
The internet — and all the modes of experiencing it — is much more undefined (and undefinable) than we imagined. Enacting change when there is no structure feels like a lot.
How do you map a customer journey when there are no borders?
Marketers are so used to thinking about a defined customer journey. And attribution based on this journey. We would do well to remind ourselves that the map is not the territory.
The Cluetrain Manifesto settled on seven characteristics of the web:
- Hyperlinked
- Decentralized
- Hyper time
- Open, direct access
- Rich data
- Broken
- Borderless
That last characteristic is fascinating. Marketers inherently want to create order out of chaos so we can track what’s working and what’s not.
“… on the Web it is often hard to tell exactly where the boundaries are.”
- David Weinberger, The Hyperlinked Organization, The Cluetrain Manifesto
It’s difficult to track marketing — even though we desperately want to. We’re wading through more data than ever before. I’m not saying there’s no attribution data, but it’s hacked-together, manual stuff. You can’t equate correlation and causation. But it won’t stop people from trying.
Marketers need to get better at distinguishing between what is helpful and what’s noise. It feels like we are measuring an awful lot of noise lately. We’ve forgotten that the customer journey map is an idea, not reality.
Yes, you have to set goals, and measure performance. But, not all things are in fact measurable in a way that is accurate, relevant, and helpful. The messy middle is hard to track and often inaccurate, misleading, or both.
What if it doesn’t have to be that way?
Let’s learn from our mistakes
Could the internet reshape itself as it evolves over time? I sure hope so.
We got so used to the internet that it started to feel like a physical foundation, upon which we could build other things to last internet-forever.
We forgot that the internet is really a wee bit broken like all of us imperfect humans, and the boundaries we thought existed are moving targets.
I love the idea of digital marketing getting better all the time by remembering to be more human. Can we do that with both established and emerging technologies?
“We ask questions about the future of the Web because we think there’s a present direction that can be traced into the future. But, in fact, the questions we ask aren’t going to predict the future. They will create the future.”
- Christopher Locke and David Weinberger, EZ Answers, The Cluetrain Manifesto
Online discoverability, interactions, and platforms should change over time. The internet should adapt as developers and users imagine new ways of doing things.
Wouldn’t it be nice if helpful marketers paired up with developers who hate bad user experiences? What would they come up with that’s better than the status quo?
Let’s get serious about making it easier for people to find stuff that helps make their lives better. Reach the right person, at the right time, with the right message. Without being super duper annoying.
“There are millions of threads in this conversation, but at the beginning of each one is a human being.”
- Christopher Locke, Internet Apocalypto, The Cluetrain Manifesto
If the internet is not only borderless, but amorphous, we can remake it over and over again.
It is a collective responsibility because no one person is in charge of the internet.
But.
We aren’t a collective. We’re individual humans going about individual lives — and sometimes finding our threads crossing one another.
Can we be more purposeful about when and how those connections happen?
Yes, it’ll be a little bit wonky, but that just means it’s a reflection of us as imperfect humans.
