This series of posts comes from the book: The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls. and David Weinberger.
What’s happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called “The Company” is the only thing standing between the two.
Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.
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.
Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.
Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.
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.
So many of the Cluetrain points speak directly to so many of the stages of the transformation process that I outlined in Frequency. As the world’s vibration speeds up, old systems that don’t change, that stubbornly fight “ego-death”—like corporations—will fail.