I did not forget about this series, I swear. Going offline for 9 days has taken a bit harder toll on my workflow than expected, so I'm a few days behind.

My promise to you is to be back on track before the end of this week, hell or high water.

Thesis #24: Bombastic boasts--"We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ"--do not constitute a position.

This is the sort of "positioning" that you may sling in front of your investors...but your customers don't give a crap.

Your customers, if they care about anything, it's what you are committed to. At least one of the things you're committed to should be them, at least in their mind.

Boastful "positioning" is about as valuable as a mission statement. Remember when Guy Kawasaki suggested that business ditch meaningless mission statements for meaningful mantras? The real reason the mantra was valuable was it gave businesses something to execute against.

Something to make decisions against.

Your "position", should it be to "become the preeminent provider of XYZ", says nothing to your customer about how you plan to make decisions, only where you plan to get with those decisions, even if it includes sacrificing them.

Today, I challenge you to drop your position for a set of core values.

A value system is a set of consistent ethic values (more specifically the personal and cultural values) and measures used for the purpose of ethical or ideological integrity...The first value category is Core Values, which prescribe the attitude and character of an organization...

In your business, your core values define how the members of your company will act and who and what are your priorities in order to attain desired goals for the business.

Core values put people first.

Unlike a boastful "positioning", which does not.

If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed something awry this week...I've been silent.

That's because I'm on vacation, my first real unplug in 4+ years.

I had the first half of this week's Cluetrain-a-Day series ahead of time, but now it's Thursday, February 5th and I'm no longer ahead. Posts will resume on Monday the 9th (including some rapid-fire posts to get back on schedule) but in the mean time, I'm enjoying some fresh powder at Whistler-Blackcomb.

Hopefully this much-needed recharge will allow me to come back with fresh perspective for you to enjoy.

See everyone next week!

Thesis #23: Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about.

I don't like this thesis. Well, I don't like the second half of it.

I do agree that companies need to own who they are. But the second part of this suggest something dastardly.

Something that, if you're not careful, it leads you down a road of being unauthentic.

You can't just hire a clever copywriter to position your company as quirky, off the wall, or funny because that's what your market wants.

That's not the point.

If your position only exists to appease your market, you're doing it wrong.

Your position shouldn't be what everyone else thinks, it requires introspection, and a strong set of values. Not only does that make it easier to take that position, but it lets all of the bullshit of trying to maintain that position go away.

If your market doesn't care about your position, you've got two options: pick a new position to execute against, or pick a new market.

Here's the clincher.

There's only one of you. There's always another market.

Be yourself. Be authentic. That's the only position you can have.

My boy Gary Vaynerchuk has a lot to say on this, he calls it "executing against your own DNA". You have to know what you are, and own it.

Thesis #21: Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

There's a misconception in corporations that seems to stem from the manufacturing era. That misconception is that work and play are mutually exclusive.

Now, hang on a second. I'm not so bold as to assume that just because someone is serious all of the time that they aren't a hard worker. Or that they work too hard. Or anything like that.

What I want to point out is two things:

First: this thesis points to companies and says "lighten up". We've already established that "the company" is a construct full of people. Those people operate within a culture which is based on their own behaviors, but also with the guidance of the company's leadership.

So in order for a company to "lighten up" as this thesis suggests, we're talking about a corporate culture shift, which is a pretty large undertaking because people don't really take imposed culture very well. Instead, "lightening up" needs to be a holistic change for the company.

This is hard. Really hard. Especially in a litigious country like the US of A, companies are afraid of humor because of the potential for harrassment lawsuits.

Again, the one human emotion that companies are any good at expressing, fear, and it's in the way again.

Note: I have a little bit of a problem because I also think that this thesis is a little bit one sided. In order for companies to lighten up and take themselves less seriously, people (read: customers) need to be prepared to view companies as fallible constructs full of people, just like them.

I wonder if this is a problem that will be sorted over the course of a generation or two. Already, we're seeing indications that new companies can enter an otherwise humorless industry and lighten things up.

Let's look at one industry that many of us love to hate: airlines.

Flying the Friendly Skies

There is practically nothing to laugh about when it comes to flying. The experience sucks.

I hate waiting in line. The food is crappy. The seats are small and my legs cramp. Crying children. Smelly people.

I'm cringing as I write this because I know I'm getting on a cross country flight in 24 hours.

I have a ton of respect for people who spend their lives in airports and on airplanes, because it's one of my least favorite places to be. I love to travel, but I don't like the experience of getting from here to there.

With two exceptions.

Southwest Airlines and Virgin Air.

Both of these airlines have competitive pricing, more comfortable seats...all sorts of amenities that I appreciate. But that's not what makes the experience special.

Unlike the majority of their competitors, who view air travel as a sort of cargo delivery process, Southwest and Virgin have lowered their guard and exposed a sense of humor.

In the case of Southwest, many of their flight attendants have taken the otherwise droning takeoff and landing announcements and spice things up. I imagine there's some scripting that the attendants share because I've heard some of the same quips, but in other cases, it's been clear that the attendant took this chance to show off their own sense of humor.

My experiences with Virgin have been even better. Their company mission statement (not just for air travel, for the entire Virgin brand) reads:

We believe in making a difference. In our customers' eyes, Virgin stands for value for money, quality, innovation, fun and a sense of competitive challenge. We deliver a quality service by empowering our employees and we facilitate and monitor customer feedback to continually improve the customer's experience through innovation.

Not too far from the humorous Southwest attendants, check out Virgin's pre-flight safety video:

As a side note, Southwest and Virgin are two companies very active in social media, both having numerous social campaigns under their belt and active Twitter Service Representatives (see @southwestair and @virginamerica). These companies have a sense of humor, and strong senses of human social interaction, as part of the company's existence.

It's not (just) a campaign. It's part of the company's being. The companies empowering their employees to interact like normal human beings (who have a sense of humor) instead of agents of a machine (that doesn't).

Can this be done in a pre-existing company? I think so.

It will take time.

It will take leadership.

It will take commitment.

And it will take trust.

Hm. Maybe this is going to be harder than I thought.

Thesis #22: Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.

In the previous example, I pointed to a couple of very tangible experiences where a sense of humor improved my experience as a customer. But aligning those experiences with this thesis, you begin to realize that there's more to humor's effectiveness than clever scripting.

Wikipedia sez humor occurs when:

• An alternative (or surprising) shift in perception or answer is given that still shows relevance and can explain a situation.
• Sudden relief occurs from a tense situation. In this context, humour is often a subjective experience, as it depends on a special mood or perspective from its audience to be effective.

Getting a sense of humor is hard because humor is fueled changing your perspective.

Business is notorious for stagnation. So long as profits aren't down, there must not be a problem.

Stay the course. Stay the course.

Oh, that massive inefficiency in our process? Who cares.

Didn't I tell you, profits aren't down?

It boggles my mind how many businesses don't seek improvement until there is a problem. And more often, they can't even see the problem until it's too late because they weren't checking operations from more than the most comfortable angle available. On their asses. Behind their desks. Looking at spreadsheets.

Changing your perspective in itself is a valuable action for you to take for your business. Along with an opportunity to understand and, maybe even invoke some humor about your business, you have a chance to take a look at business process from that new vantage point. Poke holes. Experiment.

There's a LOT to be said for some quality self-analysis, and the willingness to take on a sense of humor is a good incentive.

This is your chance to own your problems instead of keeping them outside of your field of vision. Maybe you can even make a joke about the problem once you know about it.

Relief of tense situations

Shit happens.

If you freak out, like a deer in headlights, you're paralyzed.

Isn't there something soothing when someone can take an otherwise tense situation and diffuse it with humor? It needs to be done carefully, but the sense of likability that can come with a good understanding of humor has a good chance of taking the edge off some potentially tense situations.

Some notes, though.

1. Don't be condescending.

That's part of being genuine.

1. Don't laugh at the customer. Laugh at yourself.

That's humility.

1. You want them laughing with you.

That's teamwork, and that's progress.

ITS GOOD TO BE BACK! Thanks again to Stephen Smith for taking the reigns on the last 3 posts in this series (theses 17, 18, and 19). It was a much needed recharge for me, plus an opportunity to get ahead a little bit. So, without further adieu...

Thesis #20: Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

If a company makes a mistake in the woods, and there is no-one there to point a finger and laugh at them, will they correct their mistake?

Everybody makes mistakes, and it's ok. It's human. That's a good thing, remember?

To be human.

Companies seem to think that their mistakes are their weakness, and do everything they can to control where their mistakes end up. Ultimately, they get found out. There are no secrets, remember?

So life hands you lemons, in the form of public ridicule for your mistakes. More likely, you planted those lemons yourself. But you're not going to admit that.

Let's make some lemonade.

Get over your Gelotophobia

Prior to writing this post I had no idea that this word existed, and for the first 30 seconds of knowing this word existed I was under the assumption that it had something to do with italian ice cream.

Gelotophobia is a debilitating fear of being laughed at, and doesn't seem to have been studied extensively (if at all) in the United States. The majority of the research that has been done has been conducted in the last year.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the researchers who are putting energy into researching this affliction should look no further than commercial enterprises, and the people that found them/run them. This has to be the most common affliction of companies.

What I really mean is, the people who comprise the companies. Not just the entrepreneurs that start them.

What's fascinating to me is that the affliction of "fear" is the is the most human emotion that companies seem to let bleed through from the people inside, to the outside world. From what we've seen, companies are really good at being afraid, too. They can't quite send their high powered attorneys after someone who laughed at them, can they?

The optimist in me see that as a good thing, and if nothing else, a starting point. If we can get companies over their fear of being laughed at, the cluetrain can continue down it's path.

*Ahem* full steam ahead *ahem*.

Note: This is a guest post from Stephen Smith, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.

Thesis #18: Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

Changes and Opportunities

The internet has developed as an agent of change unparalleled in human history. The near-instant communication it provides to people all over the world is a more important change than even the Industrial Revolution. The internet is tearing down walls faster and faster every day:

• Citizen Journalism is reporting news faster and more honestly than the legacy organizations
• Consumer advocacy groups are creating online communities to discuss products and services
• E-mail communications can transmit a single message to millions in moments
• Amateur videographers are creating entertainment that reaches niche markets - or tens of thousands
• People are connecting in like-minded groups to pursue social agendas, commercial concerns, and education.

Consider the new tools

Twitter and its "private" counterpart, Yammer, enable a stream of instant chat, or "Tweets". These tweets are snippets of information - what you are doing right now. Or what you are thinking about. Or sharing a link to something that you think is interesting.

In the previous post we discussed how Twitter became the focal point for the Motrin-mom fiasco. Twitter also became the clearinghouse for information about the "miracle on the Hudson", with the very first photo made available online at TwitPic.

[via cnet] The rapid-fire spread of a close-up photo of the US Airways plane that crashed in the Hudson River Thursday resulted in the service that hosted the picture going down.

This photo, of the US Airways jet that crashed into the Hudson River Thursday, brought so much traffic to TwitPic that the site, which allows users of several mobile phones to post pictures to Twitter, saw its servers get overloaded.

(Credit: Janis Krums)

TwitPic, an application that allows users to take pictures from their mobile phones and append them to Twitter posts, went down after at least 7,000 people attempted to view the photo of the airplane taken from a commuter ferry by Sarasota, Fla., resident Janis Krums.

According to Noah Everett, the founder of TwitPic, who still runs the service by himself, after the photo of the plane was re-tweeted by a large number of people and then picked up by several news sites, including Silicon Alley Insider, the resulting traffic was too much for the site's servers.

Many of the most internet-savvy, and a large number of young people, are turning to social media for their news. As Mack Collier expressed just the other day:

Which of course led to a heated debate. A debate that is likely going on in the boardrooms of collapsing newspapers across the United States.

What do we do about these customers talking to each other?

The short answer is, "You need to get out there and talk to them, too."

The long answer has a lot more to do with how you engage these customers, in order to gain their trust. As Searls and Weinberger wrote in Cluetrain Chapter 4: Markets are Conversations:

For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.

For a long time - nearly two generations - the sellers were in control of the conversation. The idea of a "spokesperson" came into being, that is, a person who spoke what the sellers wanted them to say. TV, radio, newspapers - all designed to push messages out to the buyers. Broad-based messages that told you, in effect, that you needed this product or service so that you could be just like everyone else. This was the seller's ultimate goal: to create a market of uniform buyers that could be manipulated, whose behavior could be predicted, and whose money could be harvested.

Then the internet showed up and threw a monkey wrench into the mechanism.

What Marketing Departments need to know

Here are some thoughts on understanding the changes in methods of conversation:

1. Buyers want to talk to other buyers in order to share in the experience of your product or service. This is market research of the purest kind, the most valuable and the most unpredictable.
2. Sellers must learn to join in these conversations without coming across as bullies, or smarmy salesmen. Partners, parties to the discussion.
3. Sellers now have an opportunity to do something that has never been available before: to find and build a real relationship with their best buyers and advocates.

Don't waste it.

Note: This is a guest post from Stephen Smith, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.

Thesis #19: Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

Harsh words. But very true, to a point.

Engage your market directly

There are examples of companies experiencing the positive and negative effects of direct communication. You can check out Dell & Zappos on your own, to get more acquainted with those examples.]]> Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:16:12 -0800 http://virb.com/alexknowshtml/posts/text/1058799 http://virb.com/alexknowshtml/posts/text/1055049 I haven't been happy with the readability of my blog for a really long time. It's been a complaint amongst readers for a long time as well.

Starting today, you don't have to read it in a feed reader to get rid of the god-awful contrast problems I had before.

I looked at a LOT of wordpress themes and even the ones that I liked were so poorly built that I couldn't stand to work in their code to modify them.

Brian Gardner created Dropshadow, the theme that I'm using now. It was a clean theme, and the code was very nice to work with while tuning things up and adding features and content areas. Thanks, Brian.

The next redesign is the one I'm really excited about...it will be the first time I've ever created a custom design for my blog. I don't have any ETA on that, but it is coming.

Thanks for enduring through that last theme's unreadability. This change is for the better.

Thesis #16: Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

Don't Pitch Me Bro Uploaded by chrisheuer

As we've established, the language of "pitch", which includes sales, marketing, campaigns, verticals, leveraging, and more...is ineffective.

When it works, it only works when you cast a net so massive that you are working the power of numbers. If you pitch to hundreds of thousands, even millions of individuals, of course you're going to have some rate of conversion. But that's a ton of wasted energy. And in terms of voice, and language, is a great way to the business equivelent of laryngitis.

Why is the language of "pitch" ineffective at anything other than alienating your audience? Think about it this way. While some of us are better at it than others, we all have some innate "lie detection" built in to our communications arsenal. First line of defense? Irregular speach patterns, followed by messaging designed to obscure intent.

Now let's examine the physiology of "the pitch". By definition, a pitch is meant to succinctly explain

a) what you are pitching
b) why it is valuable
c) who you are, related to that element of value

Notice anything missing?

The ideal pitch explains how perfect your product or service is for the person being pitched to.

Unfortunately for the "pitcher", that's when our innate lie detection kicks in. For me, it's the "too good to be true" meter that usually goes off the charts.

That's usually when I turn my back. I don't know about you, but the things that set off my lie detector send me the other way.

As soon as I hear a pitch, I assume that I'm in the middle of a bait and switch.

"Here, stay for the weekend in this beautiful ski resort. It's free. All you need to do is sit through a 2 hour presentation about our time share offerings".

Right. I saw that episode of South Park and I'm not buying it.

Which is why the companies that use the voice of "pitch" in all of their communications are finding that they look up from their pitch script to realize that they are talking to an empty room.

"Where did everyone go?" the pitching marketer asks.

They're online, and they're talking to each other.

From their latest post,

So now let me tell you why peer-to-peer works better: Because it's peer-to-peer. I don't care how good your intentions are if you come from inside the company, you're still from inside the company and people aren't going to trust you completely. You are a PR tool. You are doing your job.

It's been proven that the vast majority of people trust people "just like me." One of my favorite things that Holly, Fiskateer #1, said to us during her training was, "I'm a crafter FIRST. And a Lead Fiskateer SECOND." This is the honest, transparent perspective that only someone from the outside can bring. So the people in the community know where their loyalties lie. They are not part of the machine. They are part of the community.

The entire post is based on two different pathways for guiding community leadership. One is to pick a representative from within the company, and the other is to look to the community of users and empower them.

If you've been reading the cluetrain-a-day series, you'll know which I (and the Cluetrain) (and Spike from Brains on Fire) recommend.

Great post, Spike!

As I said when I started, it is a work in progress. An experiment, like most everything else I do. That meant there would be changes.

First, the successes:

• With $0 spent on marketing, I have had booked and executed successful unsticking sessions.
• I launched a weekly ustream show, attended regularly by 25-30+ people. This has been a HUGE success, besides being a lot of fun. As long as I can, I will continue to grow this show.
• I went on LuckyStartups.com, a show that highlights startups. I had a great interview with their host, and the chat room for the show was really engaging as well

Now, the problems.

In short, as the reality of our economy sinks in, the tighter people's funds are getting. They're not stopping innovating, but they still need help.

How Unstick.me got Stuck

Herein is the problem with this sort of work. The people who can afford it often take advice, and toss it out the window. The people who can really succeed with consultations like Unstick.me provides simply cannot afford $240. Or maybe even $200. I think there are people who I can really reach, but the...uhm...sticking point has been my pricing.

So there you have it. The United States has a new president, and you have a new pricing point for Unstick.me sessions.

Effective today, I'm reducing the price of the 1 hour Unstick.me consultation to $140.

Unstick.me <3's Coworking

It's no secret that my passion is coworking. I've been an active member and contributor of the Coworking community since late 2006, when i started getting noisy about IndyHall. As IndyHall has grown, I've shared countless hours worth of insight, knowledge, and experiences, and in return, have had the pleasure of seeing the community flourish and a number of other very successful coworking spaces grow out of the lessons that we were able to share.

Picking my brain about coworking seems to be of interest to a lot of people, which is why I'm now offering a Coworking Special. Same 1 hour one-on-one in a format of your choice, but so long as we stick to coworking-related topics, the price drops to a $100. If you ask any of the people I've spent an hour or less with talking about coworking, I firmly believe that they will tell you that this is the bargain of 2009. That's not me being arrogant. I know what other consultants charge for their time and provide less value.

Paypal baked right in

I'm also taking a new reservation system for a spin. This one requires payment in order to confirm an appointment, and is hooked right into paypal. It's easy as pie to reserve your hour, for a coworking session or the straight up Unstick.me consultation.

So if you've been holding out on the Unstick.me session that you think you need, maybe now's your shot. Have a friend or loved one who's stuck? Sign them up. I'll toss in something special for gifted Unstick.me sessions, just make sure to make a note in the "special comments" field of the reservation.

But what about that early adopter tax?

Steve Jobs can get away with it. I don't think it's fair for me to assume that I can. If you scheduled an Unstick.me session prior to Monday, January 26th 2009 and paid the full amount, please contact me for a refund of the difference. Seriously. All you need to do is ask.

Note: This is a guest post from Stephen Smith, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.

Thesis #17: Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on TV are kidding themselves.

This thesis was true when it was written 10 years ago but for different reasons than it is today. The evolution of the marketspace is the biggest change in the worlds of ("big M") Marketing and PR since the invention of television. The ubiquity of the internet generates the pre-condition for markets (read customers) to talk to each other for free. Once separated by geography, marketspaces are now connected in multiple ways in online communities.

Unsolicited feedback is the rule, not the exception

Corporations are still spending vast amounts of money on research, polling and "focus groups" but the thought-leaders are inviting their markets to provide this information, or better information, for free. On the other hand, as the "Motrin" and "The other white milk" episodes prove, companies can get vociferous and very public feedback whether they want it or not. (We will re-visit these social media firestorms again with Thesis #19)

The Social Media transformation continues

The marketspace is changing, the markets are changing, the customers have already changed. And changed again. Stay-at-home-moms used to be a special sort of target market, ripe for the broadly-cast TV advertising messages. They used to be bored and lonely. Today they represent a purchasing powerhouse that is one of the most interconnected groups in America. Social networking sites report that the SAHM groups are among the most active and most frequent users of the services. The SAHM groups, once isolated, are now spending a lot of time talking, sharing, and comparing information on every product and service available.

For more on this fascinating evolution, I recommend also reading a book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies" . You can find out more about the book at the Groundswell blog.

What Marketing Departments need to know

Here are the "secrets" to understanding the changes in marketspace:

1. Your market can now talk back, and to each other, in a way that was impossible during the TV era.
2. Your market is going to talk about your company, its products and services and policies, whether you like it or not - and you cannot control this discussion from the outside.
3. Your market wants a place to gather, to talk and ask questions and share answers. Give them that place or they will build their own.

As Alex wrote in Thesis #11:

...they trust each other WAY more than they trust your marketing department.

In my next post we will explore Thesis #18: how markets are now marketspaces, interconnected person-to-person virtual networks and the impact this has on Marketing.

1. A good marketer is a Community Advocate
2. A good marketer knows today's brands aren't built in boardrooms or ad agencies or brainstorming sessions
3. A good marketer plans a little, but changes alot
4. A good marketer doesn't only respond to community needs today, but also knows what needs will arise tomorrow
5. A good marketer rewards the community members who stand behind him/her
6. A good marketer gets involved in the community
7. A good marketer is her/his own client
8. A good marketer knows when to back off
9. A good marketer learns to use the tools available to them
10. A good marketer never takes her/himself to seriously

Now go read the whole thing. Tara's explications of each of these points are briliant.

While doing some more research for case studies, I came across a research report by the Online Community Research Network from March 2008. Less than a year old, I think it's still relevant and extremely telling about the effects of the themes we've been discussing. Furthermore, like the Cluetrain Manifesto before it, it's a quantitative prediction based on historical trends of things to come. I cannot tell from their website if they have more current reports than this one available, I'd love to see the results of the year to change.

Anyway, some relevant results from the report that relate directly to the Cluetrain.

One of the questions in the survey was: What were the 1-2 compelling sources of value from your community or social media efforts that you constantly communicate? The answers followed the themes below, which also include direct pull quotes from the survey responses. There's some solid stuff in here.

1. Community helps problem solve faster and more efficiently than Customer Support, saving our company time and money:
o "Customers are able to get faster response and answers to their problem utilizing the community over contacting Customer Support."
o "Knowledge share, and hence problem solving, is more efficient due to the community model."
o "The ROI on employee time devoted to the forums far exceeds the returns on the usual support methods."

2. Availability of information and content for specific areas of interest:
o "Niche communities, focused on specific areas of interest. Market leaders on-line and in print with high cross over traffic."
o "You won't find this content anywhere else - written by our members to raise best practice within vendors."

3. Increases site traffic / more engaged relationship with us:
o "The more we invest into community, the more organic traffic we get."
o "Our community sites get more than 3 times the engagement for solutions, capabilities and use case content than our traditional sites."
o "Views of photo albums remain the most popular area of the community. Members may not wish to participate in discussions, but they do want to see photos of their events."
o "An online discussion moderated by subject matter experts that followed an in-person event with the same moderators achieved the most participation of any attempts to engage our users."

4. Idea Creation / What we learn from members of the community:
o "We will have the opportunity to get first hand feedback on products and ideas for improvements and enhancements."
o "We discovered some problem areas in usage and service adoption that caused us to change our materials and strategy."

5. Lead Generation / Conversion:
o "Converting contacts, acquaintances, and other informal relationships into donor relationships."
o "Converting contacts into activists and issue leaders."
o "When we enlist our community members to represent us physically or virtually, our reach and conversion metrics dramatically increase."

6. People are saving time / building skills by using our site:
o "People creating and building productive relationships with people that help them improve their practice or do their work better."
o "Our community members credit participation in our community with their increased skills in using our products."

7. Build customer loyalty:
o "Community members are more likely to volunteer their time, services, advice, and financial support than non-members."
o "Employees who belong to the community almost never 'turn over'. They are consistently the best performers out in the stores."
o "Offering a community to your clients where they can speak to you and each other significantly increases customer loyalty."
o "More connected members spread the word and come back frequently."
o "If you want to understand your stakeholders and develop the relationships, you have to think in communities."
o "Online dialogue creates a more open environment that deepens trust and team work throughout the organization."
o "Research shows that customers in a community can have a sense of involvement with the company as long as we make sure they are heard and that involvement can lead to great loyalty."
o "Our community members are actively engaged with the brand and don't hesitate to tell us what they like, and don't like. They feel a real sense of ownership of the brand."
o "Our ability to personally communicate with future users of our product substantially influences their perception of our company."

8. Online community is growing our membership base:
o "Our blog has increased community participation by 80% over the past year."
o "We have doubled the size of our community membership in the last 6 months. 2 years ago, only 34% of our Company's upsells and renewals were also members of the Community. In 2007, 75% of our upsells and renewals were Community members."

So ROI is alive and well in Social Media...

And we see a solid reinforcement that Cluetrain theses are a driving force behind the value being noted.

For more details on this report, see Bill Johnston's blog post.

Thesis #14: Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

It's really difficult to discuss "voice" when related to text and messaging. While there are different types of "voice" related to language and communication, the type that many people most lucidly process is the audible kind.

This is going to make things difficult when it comes time to turn this series into an e-book or go to print, but in the mean time we don't have to worry about those constraints. This is the internet!

So. It's example time.

Twine.com - What happens when you let things unwravel

Twine.com launched a beta back in October 2007. It allows it's users to collect, share, and discover things they are interested in. Early semantic web stuff, whatever that meant then. Cool platform. Not my point.

They launched a year later with a redesign (yay beta feedback!), some solid press. Unfortunately, most of that press left users confused about what it actually did. Semantic web is a kinda heady concept that we won't bother getting into here. That, itself, isn't even the problem.

The real problem was that the corporate overview language was...well...just that. Corporate. It's bad enough that the concept is heady, why would you fill your descriptive - read "marketing" - messages with language that normal people don't use?

Twine: The Overview

This overview was descriptive...but it's voice was mechanical. It sounded like it was written by someone who'd been immersed in Twine for a while, instead of by someone with a voice that the audience could identify with: someone trying to understand what the heck Twine is for.

The day after the launch, a Twine employee uploaded the same overview video to their personal Youtube account. OK. Not the exact same video. Here's the caption from that video:

Our site www.twine.com needed an overview video. I came up with this as a practical joke on the team with some help from Sam. Basically, we changed the voice over and the music to make the video a little less "corporate".

Warning: this is extreme, and has some...um...language issues.

Twine: The (Unofficial) Overview

The video didn't change. But the voice did.

The unofficial parody voice was extreme, but it was one that somebody could identify with. The only people who could connect with the original one were the internal people at Twine, and even they seemed to prefer the parody video.

What's really amazing is that the company embraced it. A video like this could have come from anywhere, employees or customers, and Twine could have buried it. Instead, they have a video that got 25x more viewership on Youtube compared to the corporate-speak variation.

Disclaimer: The purpose of this demonstration is to show the difference between corporate-speak, and...the other thing. It's not to say that every company can, or even should, convert their marketing messages into Web 2.0 gangsta-speak.

Thesis #15: In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business--the sound of mission statements and brochures--will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

The homogeneity of voice predicted by the Cluetrain of 1999 has been realized. What's worse, is that its artificiality has this creepeing effect that leaves no corner of communication untapped.

The Cluetrain has been cited as a precursor, possibly even a crystal ball, into the world of Social Media that we live in today. Of course it seems that way, hindsight being 20/20 and all. Realistically, though, I think what the Cluetrain did was recognize patterns in how humans communicate in real life, how humans communicate in business, and the differences between them. Social Media, whatever it can be defined as at the very moment that I'm writing this essay, is the convergence of those conversations. Human conversations and business conversations.

But we're experiencing a culture clash.

Funny for some, uncomfortable to watch for others. Either way, a poor representation of reality.

The language we use to describe business activities is almost equally as absurd if you consider it in the context of the rest of your life. In the rest of your relationships.

I recently "overheard" a dialogue recently, a couple of Tweets shared between between Dave Troy and Tony Bacigalupo about "sustainability" as related to business.

Sustainability is a term that's thrown around in business a whole lot, typically tied to business modeling. Even worse, it's found it's way into marketing, and we've started talking about building "sustainable relationships" with our business partners and customers.

Think about that for a second. It sounds positive at first, but put it into context.

Right.

The homogenized business voice is so unaware of itself and how contrived it sounds that it doesn't even know that it's in a hole, let alone how to dig itself out. Meanwhile, the human conversations are more real than ever before, with more people discovering their own voices and how powerful they can be when they are honest and authentic.

Here's the problem. Discourse in business is taking place as if it's still "us" versus "them". Like this is a high school dance and the boys are afraid of touching the girls.

Cooties. Ew.

I'll let you in on a little secret.

There is no them.

Dave just announced on the Coworking google group that they are opening with an astonishing 25 members at various levels of commitment. This is brilliant.

How did they do it?

They fostered community instead of rushing into the space. When the time was right, they had a space that the community needed, instead of a space that needed the community.

I'm sick of saying it over and over. Somebody finally listened. And they are succeeding.

If you need help figuring out where to get started with your coworking initiative, I've got this little thing I do...go sign up for a session.

Thesis #11: People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

Uploaded by Brassard

Imagine walking through the aisles of your local Walmart with a shopping list. You know with a certain degree of confidence that you're going to be able to grab each item on your shopping list, and the more generic the contents of your list are, the better your chances of leaving with 100% of what you came for. Walmart, and other mass market vendors, have mastered this model by carrying not just one, but many of the same commoditized product.

To the undiscerning eyes (or the carefree shopper), soap is soap. Socks are socks. Televisions are televisions. So long as they do the same thing, the sale goes to the lowest bidder.

Walmart is the intermediary, and doesn't care who the lowest bidder is because they make a margin on it either way.

But people have fundamentally changed, and they are more than just value conscious.

The carefree shopper cares more now than ever before, because they are more informed. It's an interesting set of cause and effect, too.

Companies are too busy selling a line of marketing drivel, so in true "Boy who cried Wolf" fashion, every bit of messaging companies sent out is assumed to be marketing drivel.

Now consumers have networked markets. They have each other to find which soap leaves their skin the softest, which socks keep their feet the warmest, and which television the big game will look best on.

And they trust each other WAY more than they trust your marketing department.