Obsessions

I keep a browser window open to The Cluetrain Manifesto page on Amazon.com. Since Amazon* updates its rankings every couple hours — for millions of books — this puts the first-time author in the position of a day trader watching one stock. It's easy to get obsessed with it, especially when the book does well. Since I am one of the book's co-authors (along with Christopher Locke, David Weinberger and Rick Levine), we're talking about a lot of obsession here.

Especially since we're doing well.

Cluetrain hit the stores in mid-January, and quickly moved into the top 100. It has jumped all around, lately holding strong in the top 60 or so. Right now we're at #29. Earlier today we were at #33. A few days ago we hit #9. At that sweet moment, only a handful of Harry Porters, Grishams and diet books stood between us and The Very Top. Now we're one notch behind our friend Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. But hey: we kick Jakob's butt among Business Bestsellers (we're # 3) and Hardcover Nonfiction (# 8). (But, to be fair, Jakob's book is twice the price of ours and isn't in hardcover).

Meanwhile, over at at Borders.com, we've got the # 8 Big Business bestseller, possibly because they've been featuring the book on some of their pointer pages. BN.com (Barnes & Noble) labels Cluetrain a "bestseller," but doesn't show it on any of their lists. And it galls us that we're not on Fatbrain's only list.

We also obsess about customer reviews, which are now up to 38 at Amazon. Jakob has one less. We're also averaging five stars while he's only getting four and a half (take that, UseBoy!).

Of course, both books are highly successful, considering both their competition and their small marketing budgets. Nearly all their success has come from Word of Mouse (and, to credit our text-based friends, Word of Command Line).

But it would be wrong to attribute the success of either book to any kind of traditional marketing. Instead, both express the triumph of markets over marketing. And in many ways, that's exactly what these books are about.

Marketing has been at war against markets ever since Procter & Gamble borrowed the word "branding" from the cattle industry. Marketing is wants to "stimulate" our awareness, as if we were single celled

To explain why, I'll leave Jakob to tell his own story. Here's mine.

Back story

Somewhere in the mid seventies it became clear to me that supporting a family was not consistent with journalism or radio — at least not where I lived, in North Carolina. I needed to find something else: something close to my first loves, but also close to real money.

I loved technology, but about all I knew was ham radio, and there wasn't much call for Morse code. Computing looked interesting, but in those days it was confined mostly to universities and large corporations, and I was dangerous in both settings. There were plenty of sales jobs, but there was no way I would take one.

For some reason, this left advertising.

Frankly, I didn't like advertising, either — even though I fancied myself a top-notch copywriter. I got it in my head that the only morally acceptable forms of advertising were those that followed the principles of marketing, as laid down by Theodore Levitt, the father of the marketing concept:

"There can be no effective corporate strategy that is not marketing oriented, that does not in the end follow this unyielding prescript: The purpose of a business is to create and keep a coustomer. To do that, you have to do those things that will make people want to do business with you. All other truths on this subject are merely derivative."*

So I started an advertising agency with two like-minded buddies. Since approximately none of our clients had marketing strategies, it fell on our agency (and often on me) to do these clients' marketing work for them. It wasn't easy.

Most of them wanted to do what we called "chain saw marketing." That label was inspired by a prospective client who ran the largest chain saw distributorship in the Southeast. When we asked to see his marketing plan, he leaned across his desk, looked in our faces and drawled, "I'll tell ya what mah marketing plan is, boys. Mah marketing plan is to sell more damn chain saws."

We wanted to work with companies that appreciated Good Marketing, and we began to find them around the turn of the Eighties, when High Technology started coalescing into a hot category. Since all three of us had technology backgrounds (one of us was a programmer and another should have been, since he had read every science fiction book ever written), we began to market ourselves as a High Tech agency.

The strategy worked, but the pond quickly got small. After a client said, "Y'know boys, there's more action on one street in Sunnyvale than in all of North Carolina," we opened an office in Palo Alto and did even better at our new location. By the end of the decade, we had one of the top high tech agencies in Silicon Valley. And our success was based as much on our marketing smarts as on our creative work.

By then I was running our public relations group, which specialized in "strategic" marketing. Since there was nothing more strategic than good information, I spent much of my time on line, doing research and joining conversations that swirled around the market topics I was paid to care about. At one time or another we had accounts with Compuserve, The Well, Prodigy, AOL, Delphi, AppleLink, and a bunch of BBSes and research houses. Our bills for all of them ran into the thousands of dollars, all of which we put to good use.

But by '92 I was fed up with both advertising and PR, and decided to leave the agency and stike out on my own as a marketing consultant. I didn't realize it yet, but I was actually fed up with marketing, too. I saw markets as webs of conversations gathered around topics. A new marketing logic became clear to me: 1) Markets are conversations; and 2) conversation is fire. After all, the best kind of advertising is word-of-mouth, and the best word of mouth spreads like wildfire. Therefore: 3) marketing is arson.

If a prospective client wanted to set fires, I was their guy. If they just wanted to pump out press releases and inane brochurities, there were plenty of other consultants who would be glad to help.

I got plenty of business, mostly from large companies that had lost their way (Novell, Zenith, Apple, Groupe Bull) and small companies that hadn't found their way yet (Arriba Soft, PGP, Zoomit, Tinking Tools). Plus fractions and factions of successful companies like Hitachi, Motorola and Logitech.

For all of them I was more than just a marketing consultant. I was an expert at positioning. I also had a problem with the topic.

It was in 1994 that I crossed paths with the free software movment, and my live began to angle off on a new vector — one that would eventually make me an enemy of my own profession. It began when my friend Phil Hughes volunteered me to an email list that explored the idea of starting a magazine for the free software business. To me "free software business" was something of an oxymoron, but I trusted Phil, who had been making a good living for years selling UNIX help cards to hundreds of thousands of geeks, most of whom were in the business of writing software that simply did good work, rather than good sales. I also noticed that Phil and his pals were operating in a different universe: one with internet addresses and no usage charges. One where technology itself grew out of conversations between geeks all over the world. I didn't understand it, but I knew it mattered.

Then one day Phil abruptly announced that he was going to start a journal about something called Linux, which was a free form of UNIX.

To be fair, both our lists read like comments pages at Slashdot, but Jakob's subject makes his opinions easier to flame.

Cluetrain has drawn its share of flames, too, though mostly for the Web site that started it all, which was our own flame against Business as Usual. Our goal wasn't modest. "We wanted to burn that sucker down to the water line," Chris Locke (aka RageBoy®) says. Some people, even our friends, didn't like our attitude. When the site went up, Don Norman told us "your attitude sucks." My wife agreed. "I can't believe how arrogant you guys are," she told me.

Well, there was a war going on. In fact, it had been going on ever since Big Business started using market as a verb.

We ( and ) planted ourselves squarely on the side of markets, and aimed our fire straight at marketing: a profession that had been waging "campaigns" against markets for generations, pounding them with "messages" that were "delivered" like ordnance, for "imact," "penetration," "branding" and other hostile purposes.

We knew marketing well, since three of us were defectors from a profession had abused its markets ever since Procter & Gamble borrowed the term "branding" from the cattle industry. Our fourth member (Rick Levine) was a veteran hacker and therefore no friend of marketing, either.

The cluetrainname suggested itself when we were talking about a common Silicon Valley corporate epitaph: "The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery." We registered the domain name within seconds after the subject came up, and that was that. Then we decided that the best way to get our points across was to make like both Martin Luther and Karl Marx. Thus The Cluetrain Manifesto was cast as ninety-five theses that we nailed to one door of the Web.

We started off this way: "If you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get..."

All but three give us five stars, which is phenomenal. averages five stars (the maximum) across 36 customer reviews. That's in addition to the cover blurb by alpha hacker Eric S. Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar: "The cluetrain is to marketing and communications what the open-source movement is to software development — anarchic, messy, rude, and vastly more powerful than the doomed bullshit that conventionally passes for wisdom."

The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book subtitled "The End of Business as Usual," is doing very good business after just a few weeks in release. Co-authored by Linux Journal Senior Editor Doc Searls and three other Internet veterans, the irreverent work is tearing up the charts at Amazon.com, and looking strong at other bookstores in both cyber and meat space. At Amaon, the book is currently

Origins

Somewhere in the mid seventies it became clear to me that supporting a family was not consistent with either of my first career loves, which were journalism and radio. Sure: I knew it could be done, and I even knew a few people who did it; but not more than a few dozen in the part of North Carolina I called home.

I hated sales, even though I was pretty good at it. As a former ham radio operator (who could hack the code of Samuel F.B. Morse), I loved technology; but the world of computing in those days was largely confined to universities and large corporations. I'd had my fill of the former and couldn't imagine myself in the latter. That left only one thing: marketing.

So, even after I started an advertising ageny with two buddies, I thought of myself as a Marketing Guy. I studied the gurus of the subject, which in those days consisted of Peter Drucker, Theodore Levitt and forgotten drones who wrote ponderous books that sought to make a craft of marketing "strategy." Since approximately none of our clients had marketing strategies, it fell on our agency (and often on me) to do these clients' marketing work for them.

The last thing we wanted to do was what we called "chain saw marketing." The label was inspired by a prospective client who ran the largest chain saw distributorship in the Southeast. When we asked him about his marketing plan, he replied, "I'll tell ya what my marketing plan is, boys. My marketing plan is to sell more damn chain saws."

Around the turn of the eighties we realized that High Technology was going to get very big, very fast, and that it would probably not include many chain saw marketers. Since all three of us had technology backgrounds (one of us was a programmer and another should have been, since he had read every science fiction book ever written), we repositioned ourselves as a High Tech agency and quickly did very well. Then, after one client said, "Y'know boys, there's more action on one street in Sunnyvale than in all of North Carolina," we opened an office in Palo Alto and did even better in the new location. By the turn of the nineties, we had one of the top high tech agencies in Silicon Valley.

By then I was running our spin-off public relations agency, which specialized in strategic marketing work. I was also spending much of my time on line. We had accounts with Compuserve, The Well, Prodigy, AOL, Delphi, AppleLink, and a bunch of BBSes and research houses. Our bills for all of them ran into the thousands of dollars, all of which we put to good use.

But by '92 I was fed up with both advertising and PR. I didn't realize it yet, but I was pretty fed up with marketing, too. One reason was that I knew saw the Internet starting to grow out of the universities and defense industries where it began, and I suspected it would obsolete not only the online services, but the two most lucrative marketing services: advertising and public relations. So I left the full-time employment of the agency and recast The Searls Group as a marketing agency specializing in "positoining," which I saw as the most strategic form of marketing.

In 1994, my friend Phil Hughes, who would mock the Macintoshes we ran in our home office, got me involved in an email list that explored the idea of starting a magazine for the free software business. To me "free software business" was something of an oxymoron, but I trusted Phil, who had been making a good living for years selling UNIX help cards to hundreds of thousands of geeks, most of whom were in the business of writing software that simply did good work, rather than good sales.

Then one day he abruptly announced that he was going to start a journal about

The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book subtitled "The End of Business as Usual," is doing very good business after just a few weeks in release. Co-authored by Linux Journal Senior Editor Doc Searls and three other Internet veterans, the irreverent work is tearing up the charts at Amazon.com, and looking strong at other bookstores in both cyber and meat space. At Amaon, the book is currently the # 4 Business bestseller, the # 8 Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller, and #22 overall (the last number changes constantly — in the last week it has ranged from the fifties to as high as #9). It is also the # 8 Big Business bestseller at Borders.com.

The book also averages five stars (the maximum) across 36 customer reviews. That's in addition to the cover blurb by alpha hacker Eric S. Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar: "The cluetrain is to marketing and communications what the open-source movement is to software development — anarchic, messy, rude, and vastly more powerful than the doomed bullshit that conventionally passes for wisdom."

Since the open source movement consists of a vast clue exchange shares this email, which arrived yesterday fromy Tim Chambers, founder of Pikes Peak Perl Mongers (and yes, the link-filled HTML is all his):

"Perhaps, it's slightly presumptuous and revisionist to compare this movement to the Reformation, but, hey -- it's apt nevertheless. Hmm, let's see. It was some sixty years from the printing of Gutenberg's first Bible to Wittenberg. It's been only ten years between Tim Berners-Lee and the cluetrain manifesto. That's Internet time for you. Well, just call me a Protestant :-).

"Wow, cool! I tell Ed Yourdon about the cluetrain manifesto, and nine days later it's one of his featured books! Thanks, ESR, for pointing me to the cluetrain."

The Cluetrain Manifesto consists mostly of 95 Theses, which the co-authors nailed up on the Web, in the spirit of Martin Luther (with a title inspired by Karl Marx) in late March of last year. Thesis #1 is Markets are Conversations. "The best case in point for that thesis," Doc Searls says, "is the entire open source movement, which brought us the Net and now brings us Linux." To illustrate his point,