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[T]here is no demand for messages. The customer doesn’t want to hear from your business, thank you very much. The message that gets broadcast to you, me, and the rest of the earth’s population has nothing to do with me in particular. It’s worse than noise. It’s an interruption. It’s the Anti-Conversation.
— The Cluetrain Manifesto
If there is one thing that the Internet will change more than anything else, it is marketing.
Online, the truth is cheap, plentiful and multifaceted. There are experts everywhere, and advice – good, bad, and indifferent – is free. As people have learned to be sophisticated readers and communicators of information, the traditional advertising executive has begun to look like the old man on the plague cart in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (‘I’m not dead yet! I feel happy!’) – down for the count, despite his feeble protests to the contrary.
What’s killing marketing? Conversation. Good old talk.
While talk is cheaper than a TV ad during the Super Bowl, it’s just as powerful. During Super Bowl XXXIV, dot coms like WebEx.com, Pets.com, HotJobs.com, Computer.com, LifeMinders.com and Oxygen.com spent bazillions from their IPO war chests on TV ads. Do any of those names ring a bell? Nope. Nada. Nein. Despite their huge investments in traditional advertising, we don’t even know what most of these companies do (If asked, they’d probably mutter something about ‘Internet solutions,’ a cognitively meaningless phrase if there ever was one).
Consider how important traditional marketing was to legendary Internet successes like Linux, Hotmail, Google and Napster: not at all. These companies became popular through the only true marketing medium of commonspace – word of mouth. People liked (loved!) these tools and told their friends, who told their friends. Word of mouth works wonders.
The connection between word of mouth and commerce is not a new one. It is as old as the first used donkey salesman. If your ‘new’ used donkey had a bum hoof, you’d definitely make sure everyone else in the village knew about the crook who’d sold it to you. And that would have been curtains for the donkey salesman, time to pick up and leave town. But with the Internet, you can’t leave town. USENET is everywhere. Web sites titled [Your trademark here]sucks.com are everywhere. The collective mind is everywhere, and it’s got your number, buddy.
While commonspace and the reemergence of the market as conversation will knock marketing back onto its comfortably padded ass, this doesn’t mean that it’s bad for business. Just the opposite. Here’s a chance to engage in business practices that feel better because they are better. After all, we all still needthings and we all still have to make a living. This doesn’t change. What does change is that the scammers and schmoozers will find it harder to scam and schmooze, and we will all find it easier to locate businesses that will engage us with and respect our intelligence.
So if you want to move your business back