Listen Up

 

By Doc Searls
April 16, 1998

"All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value! So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!'"
— Howard Beale, in
Network, by Paddy Chayevsky


Bob Davis is the CEO of Lycos, Inc., whose growing portfolio of companies (excuse me, portals) now includes Lycos, Hotbot, WhoWhere and Tripod. I'm sure Bob is a great guy. And I'm sure Lycos is a great company. A lot of people seem to like them both. And you have to admire both his ambition and his success. To witness both, read his interview with PC Week, where he predicts that the Lycos Network (the sum of all its portals) will overtake Yahoo as "#1 on the Web."

Lycos will win, Davis says, because "We have a collection of quality properties that are segmented into best-of-breed categories, and our reach has been catapulting."

I can speak for Hotbot, which is still my first-choice search engine; but by a shrinking margin. I often test search engines by looking for strings of text buried deep in long documents on my own site. Hotbot always won in the past. But since Lycos bought it, Hotbot has become more of a portal and less of a search tool. Its page is now a baffling mass of ads and links. And its searches find less.

In today's test, Infoseek won. Last week, Excite won. Both found pages that Hotbot seems to have forgotten.

Why? Bob Davis gives us a good answer.

"We're a media company," he says. "We make our money by delivering an audience that people want to pay for."

Note the two different species here: audience and people. And look at their qualities. One is "delivered." The other pays. In other words, one is cargo and the other is money.

Well, I don't care if Lycos' stock goes to the moon and splits three times along the way. The only #1 on the Web is the same as the only #1 on the phone: the people who use it. And the time will come when people will look at portals not as sources of "satisfying experiences" (another of Davis' lines) but as useless intermediaries between supply and demand.

Words of Walt

You there, impotent, loose in the knees,
open your scarfed chops till I blow grit within you.
Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets.
I am not to be denied. I compel.

It is time to explain myself. Let us stand up.
I know I am solid and sound.
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow.

I know that I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself
or be understood.
I see that the elementary laws never apologize.

.
— Walt Whitman, from
Song of Myself

"Media company" guys like Davis are still in a seller's market for wisdom that was BS even when only the TV guys spoke it — back when it literally required the movie "Network." That market will dry up. Why? Because we've been mad as hell for about hundred years, and now we don't have to take it anymore.

Three reasons.

  1. Humanity. This is what Walt Whitman reminded us about more than a hundred years ago. We are not impotent. Media companies may call us seats and eyeballs and targets, but that's their problem. They don't get who we are or what we can — and will — do. And the funny thing is, they don't get that what makes us powerful is what they think makes them powerful: the Internet. It gives us choices. Millions of them. We don't have to settle for "channels" any more. Or "portals" that offer views of the sky through their own little windows. Or "sticky" sites that are the moral equivalent of flypaper.
  2. Demand. There never was a demand for messages, and now it shows, big time. Because the Internet is a meteor that is smacking the world of business with more force than the rock that offed the dinosaurs, and it is pushing out a tsunami of demand like nothing supply has ever seen. Businesses that welcome the swell are in for some fun surfing. Businesses that don't are going to drown in it.
  3. Obsolescence. Even the media guys are tired of their own B.S. and are finally in the market for clues.

Alvin Toffler had it right in The Third Wave. Industry (The Second Wave) "violently split apart two aspects of our lives that had always been one... production and consumption... In so doing, it drove a giant invisible wedge into our economy, our psyches ... it ripped apart the underlying unity of society, creating a way of life filled with economic tension." Today all of us play producer roles in our professions and consumer roles in our everyday lives. This chart shows the difference (and tension) between these radically different points of view — both of which all of us hold:

Producer view
Consumer view
Metaphor Business is shipping ("loading the channel," "moving products," "delivering messages") Business is shopping ("browsing," "looking," "bargaining," "buying")
Orientation Business is about moving goods from one to many (producers to consumers) Business is about buying and selling, one to one
Markets Markets are shooting ranges: consumers are "targets" Markets are markets: places to shop, buy stuff and talk to people
Relationships Primary relationshiphs are with customers, which are more often distributors & retailers rather than consumers Primary relationships are with vendors, and with other customers

These are all just clues, which are easily deniable facts. Hence a line once spoken of Apple: "the clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery." But Apple was just an obvious offendor. All of marketing itself remains clueless so long as it continues to treat customers as "eyeballs," "targets," "seats" and "consumers."

For the past several months, I have been working with Rick Levine, David Weinberger and Chris Locke on a new railroad for clues: a ClueTrain.

Our goal is to burn down Marketing As Usual. Here is the logic behind the ambition:

Markets are conversations
Conversations are fire
Marketing is arson

The result is here — in what The Wall Street Journal calls "presumptuous, arrogant, and absolutely brilliant."

Take a ride. If you like it, sign up. Feel free to set fires with it, add a few of your own, or flame the ones you don't agree with. What matters is the conversation. We want everybody talking about this stuff. If they do, MAU is toast.

Here is my own short form of the Manifesto (inspired by Martin Luther, the long version has 95 Theses). Feel free to commit arson with (or to) any of these points as well.


Ten facts about highly effective markets:

  1. Markets are conversations.
    None of the other metaphors for markets — bulls, bears, battlefields, arenas, streets or invisible hands — does full justice to the social nature of markets.
    Real market conversations are social. They happen between human beings. Not between senders and receivers, shooters and targets, advertisers and demographics.
  2. The first markets were markets.
    They were real places that thrived at the crossroads of cultures. They didn't need a market model, because they were the model market. More than religion, war or family, markets were real places where communities came together. They weren't just where sellers did business with buyers. They were the place where everybody got together to hang out, talk, tell stories and learn interesting stuff about each other and the larger world.
    '
  3. Markets are more about demand than supply.
    The term "market" comes from the latin mercere, which means "to buy." Even a modern market is called a "shopping center" rather than a "selling center." Bottom line: every market has more buyers than sellers. And the buyers have the money.
  4. Human voices trump robotic ones.
    Real voices are honest, open, natural, uncontrived. Every identity that speaks has a voice. We know each other by how we sound. That goes for companies and markets as well as people. When a voice is full of shit, we all know it — whether the voice tells us "your call is important to us" or that a Buick is better than a Mercedes.
  5. The real market leaders are people whose minds and hands are worn by the work they do.
    And it has been that way ever since our ancestors' authority was expressed by surnames that labeled their occupations — names like Hunter, Weaver, Fisher and Smith. In modern parlance, the most knowledge and the best expertise is found at the "point of practice:" That's where most of the work gets done.
  6. Markets are made by real people.
    Not by surreal abstractions that insult customers by calling them "targets," "seats," "audiences," "demographics" and "eyeballs" — all synonyms for consumers, which Jerry Michalski of Sociate calls "brainless gullets who live only to gulp products and expel cash."
  7. Business is not a conveyor belt that runs from production to consumption.
    Our goods are more than "content" that we "package" and "move" by "loading" them into a "channel" and "address" for "delivery." The business that matters most is about shopping, not shipping. And the people who run it are the customers and the people who talk to them.
  8. Mass markets have the same intelligence as germ populations.
    Their virtues are appetite and reproduction. They grow by contagion. Which is why nobody wants to admit belonging to one.
  9. There is no demand for messages.
    To get what this means, imagine what would happen if mute buttons on remote controls delivered "we don't want to hear this" messages directly back to advertisers.
  10. Most advertising is unaccountable.
    Or worse, it's useless. An old advertising saying goes, "I know half my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half." But even this is a lie. Nearly all advertising is wasted. Even the most accountable form of advertising — the junk mail we euphemistically call "direct marketing" — counts a 3% response rate as a success. No wonder most of us sort our mail over the trash can. Fairfax Cone, who co-founded Foote Cone & Belding many decades ago, said "Advertising is what you do when you can't go see somebody. That's all it is." With the Net you can go see somebody. More importantly, they can see you. More importantly than that, you can both talk to each other. And make real markets again.

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