During most of the 1990′s I lived in the village of Lenggries, in the foothills of the Alps in southern Germany. In 1994, I found myself in charge of Intel’s European PR at a time when they decided that Pentium was no longer to be sold just “B2B” but as a “B2C” product. Q4 of 1994 was hell. Budgets ballooned overnight, marketing went haywire, the world changed and Pentium became the kind of product your mum would talk about. I spewed out a series of White Papers during that time, inspired by the huge changes going on, and the new insight I was getting daily. “The Savvy Consumer” was my most memorable, and I talked of customers being so clever and informed that companies would never be able to con them, would have to talk with them directly and make products which they wanted to buy.
So when The Cluetrain Manifesto came by in 1999, I spent no more than 10 minutes on the website. “This is right”, I said. Rick Levine, Doc Searls, Dave Weinberger and Christopher Locke had articulated much much much better than I could, what the future would be like. I was in awe. And still am. These people are the future, I said then. I stopped writing my White Papers. The text which would change the world had now been written and I didn’t need to bother any more. The boys had completely and utterly captured the spirit of revolution which I hoped would both make the corporate world a much better place to be: honest, open and human.
Here are my 5 favourite theses from cluetrain, some of them edited and reduced:
- markets consist of human beings (no 2)
- there are no secrets (no 12)
- companies need to lighten up (no 21)
- we are immune to advertising (no 74)
- we have real power and we know it (no 89)
What’s your favourite?
I chose ‘cluetrainee’ as my online tag with respect to those authors – easier than Adams6077 and more googleable. And Doc, David and Chris have kindly given their permission for this. Rick’s a bit harder to contact, but I’m hoping he won’t mind either.
The Cluetrain Numbers
Here are some cluetrain numbers. Some missing, and with some, I’m not certain which are right:
- cluetrain.com registered on 2nd January 1999
- The Cluetrain Manifesto became a website in April 1999
- The book was published in paperback in December 2000 (according to the inside cover of mine)
- Number of worldwide “signatories”/afficionados – don’t know
- Number of copies printed – don’t know
- Number of webvisitors – don’t know
- It is ISBN (10) 0738204315 and ISBN (13) 9780738204314
