Reflection on: The Cluetrain Manifesto

Last semester, I received one of the most surprising, funny, and cringe-inducing Facebook notifications of my life, a friend request from Hector L. Lopez, my father.  Up until recently, my Facebook account was, along with many of my peers, a private social networking site that specifically excluded certain people: parents. Once Facebook expanded its capacity to include anyone with a birth date and email address, it became a much bigger world, where the privacy and exclusivity of college life was now at the mercy of nosey relatives and friends who could relay information and gossip back to people who otherwise would not have had access to such things. Getting a friend request from my father wasn’t scary because I was afraid he would look at pictures and punish me, or anything like that, but I was more so surprised that he had even managed to make an account. You see, my dad is an older man, and not very tech-savvy and the way I see it, he views and uses technology in very static terms. This button does this, if I click that this will happen, if it doesn’t work- it must be broken. Although he uses email and browses the web, I don’t always think he fully grasps the vastness of these new technologies and the Internet and what it has to offer. He simply just doesn’t seem to get it. 

My facebook status on that fateful day my father friended me

            Over thanksgiving break, my dad wanted me to teach him how to use Facebook, and I found myself frustrated when trying to explain the purpose of a status update, or what a wall was, and why the news feed featured certain things and not others. I gave up trying to teach him these concepts, and so he chose to just not use his Facebook because he claimed, “he would never get it” and that it was not useful to him. 

I really did feel bad, but he grew up in a totally different time, and for him to grasp these ideas and learn how to use tools like Facebook or Twitter would require a completely new mind-set and education. I wasn’t ready to sit for hours and teach him how to use a website that in my mind, he would never understand. 

 The Cluetrain Manifesto is described primarily as a business book, but after reading it and understanding how heavily the business theories and ideas rely on interpersonal relationships and communication, it is clear that the book is not just about how to properly market XXX corporation. Rather, it is trying to close that divide between corporations and their consumers and audience, by stressing that markets are conversations. In our web 2.0 world today, these conversations exist through blogs, forums, and other sharing devices where people can talk to each other about what products and services they like without having to be confined by the messages sent from the companies themselves.  If corporations can properly learn how to break down the walls that have been built up from years of advertising, marketing, public relations, and other propaganda and to begin conversations with their consumers they can roll through the tides of web 2.0 unscathed, and be successful. I found the ideas in Cluetrain enlightening and refreshing. 

The ideas all seemed to properly address how the changes in the Internet and social media have and will force corporations to change how they do business. The Cluetrain authors Levine, Locke, Searls, and Weinberger also mentioned several threats to the proper implementation of these new business practices, and the one I found to be most problematic, and most relatable to my personal life, was that of the growing digital divide in our society and globally. The digital divide is a nice term that describes the imbalance between those with access to information and technology and those with much less access. Those with access are at a significant advantage, and is a fact of life that these corporations will have to take into consideration when changing their marketing strategies. 

Although new technologies offer new and innovative ways of accessing information and ways for people to communicate, all the flash, complications, glitz, and “coolness”  that comes along with them are not always concepts that are easily understood by our less tech-savvy friends, like my father. I mentioned my dad’s new Facebook account because I saw how clearly it related to the digital divide that seems to be expanding in our society. Cluetrain mentions that access has expanded greatly over the years to 75% of the population having Internet. However, as important as it is for people to have access to the Internet, if older generations cannot properly be integrated into these new tools, access really means nothing. It’s the know-how and the education that matter when trying to involve older generations into the conversation. The authors say:

“If we’re serious about getting as many people as possible under our conversational tent, we need to get serious about designing inclusivity into the web…one of the keys to acceleration the social changes has been reducing or eliminating barriers to entry, reducing the friction stopping people from participating in conversations” (pg 27).

Some may view these efforts to include older generations as unimportant, but they are as important as the younger, more tech-literate generations if corporations want to get as many people under this “conversational tent.” 

Being home for winter break, I had quite a bit of down time and sat down again with my dad for another Facebook tutorial. To my surprise, he had learned quite a bit in the weeks that I had been back at Lehigh, and he was now Facebook-literate, posting status updates and liking pages like a pro. Although I had previously held a much less optimistic view on my father’s potential to fully grasp Facebook and understand the components, he had learned after all, and was now contributing and participating in the network. My mistake was giving up too quickly on him, and I fear that many corporations are doing the same to people who may need some catching-up to do. Markets can only be conversations if all people can participate, not just those of us who already know the tricks involved into making it into this global chat. I couldn't bear to sit with him for hours to teach him how to use this website because I believed he would never understand it. Corporations need to be willing to put in that extra work for these people if they truly want to succeed in the web 2.0 world.