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It's been a long time since I've read a book like The Cluetrain Manifesto -- something written with genuine passion and a human voice that rings like a wake-up call. Silent Spring, for example, yanked back the curtain of societal self-delusion and exposed the industrial age's dirtiest little secret: massive environmental degradation.
Cluetrain does something similar: It exposes the way companies hide behind their marketing departments and refuse to wake up and take part in the dialog that's going on around them. It felt like a fresh mountain breeze was blowing through my weary head as I flipped the pages of Cluetrain, co-authored by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. In a voice that speaks clearly and without mincing words or worrying about offending the guilty, the authors lay down a whole new set of ground rules for companies wanting to capture online customers. Well, "new" is wrong actually. What the authors do is put down in words what veterans of the Net have always known, and businesses must now learn and learn quickly.
The bottom line, the authors say, is that commerce on the Net is about conversation and relationship -- not between the hunter and the hunted, the seller and the buyer. Rather, it's a relationship between equals. Businesses can no longer just broadcast demographically calibrated messages to targeted audiences and wait for the lemmings to place orders. As the authors point out, the market is already having a conversation about them, whether companies participate or not.
Companies that erect a fortress storefront on the Net and send goods out for sale, but immediately hoist the drawbridge at the first sight of a peasant rebellion, will fail. Only those businesses that "decloak" and engage with consumers online will have a fighting chance of succeeding.
I recently interviewed Cluetrain co-author David Weinberger. You can listen to the interview, read the interview, or just scan the highlights below. And, of course, let us know what you think.
David Weinberger on:
On companies hiding behind their marketing departments
"Companies for, oh 80 years let's say, have been in business primarily to keep themselves hidden from their customers -- for deep reasons. They don't want their customers, the market consumers, to know what's going on inside the business, so they have marketing departments that serve as a wall basically to keep people out. Marketing departments often view themselves as trying to bring customers in, but everybody knows that the stuff that's coming through the marketing orifice -- and basically through all of the orifices in the organization -- is so tightly controlled we know it's not representative of what's really going inside the organization."
On companies admitting they are fallible:
"Organizations are incapable, it seems, of admitting that they're made up of humans, that they make lots of mistakes, they make mistakes every day, on every floor of the building I guarantee there's mistakes being made because they're occupied by humans. That the products don't always work, the products aren't great for every application. Companies have this deep resistance to ever acknowledging any of those completely obvious and true things that everybody knows already."
On companies fearing the openness of the Web:
"When they hear about the Web, it's threatening to them, they've got to do something about it, and they figure they put up a Web site, they'll put up some nice pictures, and now they've done their Web thing when in fact we just route around it. It's completely uninteresting. The conversations are already going on, all over the place -- it's in the news groups, it's in review sites, it's in email, it's in instant messaging. I mean, it's all over the place. Conversations are there and companies, when they hear about that, their first impulse is again to try to manage those conversations. They say, "How can we control those conversations and get them talking about our message," and you can't. That reflex, which is an old reflex, it's like the lizard part of their brain. "How can we manage this?" is completely inappropriate."
On how Western Digital gets it:
There's Western Digital -- there's lots of places do this, but Western Digital is one of them: wdc.com. And if you have a problem with the hard drive, they route you towards their open discussion board, which is a completely unmoderated discussion board, so you read through these, and first of all there's just tons of information, and second of all, not only do you get a response really quickly from one of their tech support people, who speaks in her or his own voice, but you also -- there are messages from enthusiasts who jump right in, which is fantastic. When you read through some of these messages, it's not uncommon that the first subject line of the first thread is "Western Digital sucks," "your drives suck," and then you read through and literally the subject line gets turned around because they are being answered by human beings who, you know, talk in their own voice, and eventually it's "you guys rock," "you guys roll," whatever it is. And they've completely turned the customer around simply by being human, by being willing to admit, "Yeah, you know, sometimes our drives don't work. You know, they're not made by God yet, they're just made by people. So sometimes our drives don't work. Everybody knows that." What's the big deal when we have a hundred years of business that thinks it's somehow fatal to admit error.
On how Net marketing must change to succeed:
"Marketing has viewed itself properly as an act of war against an unwilling populace, because people don't want to hear from marketers. The fundamental fact of broadcast marketing is that the people you're trying to reach hate you. They don't want to hear from you. We don't like ads. We don't like billboards. We run from it. Sometimes you try to package up your ad into some mini sit-com so people will just watch it, but even then, you're acknowledging, "People hate marketing," so of course all of the rhetoric, all of the semantics of marketing is based on war. "Marketing campaigns," for example.
"The Web keeps inventing new roles for marketing departments, and we don't yet know what those are, but the temptation of the marketing department is once again to try to jump in and manage and control the public perception, and then when they hear that there are conversations going on, they want to control and manage those. The instinct to control is deeply buried, is deep inside of the marketing department, and what they end up doing, I think, is so far removed from what marketing has become but so close to what the most enthusiastic marketers and other people inside the company want to do. In some ways, it's sort of easy if they can just give up on their fear."
On how the Net marketplace is already full of talk about companies:
"So, conversations are going on out there. If you want to join a conversation in real life -- because these are literal conversations, this isn't a metaphor, these are literal conversations -- how do you do it? Do you go in with three key messages that you're going to now try to work in somehow, and make sure that you use the right sets of phrases because they're in your mission statement or in your marketing guidelines? No, if you're going to enter the conversation you have to have something interesting to say. That's the first thing. Second , you have to recognize that you're not the center of it. We're not on the Web because we want to talk about companies or talk with companies generally. We have better things to talk about. If you want to enter something to say, realize you're not the center and try to remember how to talk like a human being. You're perfectly capable of it when you're not at work. So try to do that when you're at work. An example is, you go to a trade show and you're talking with a friend outside the booth, who then goes inside the booth and starts giving the company spiel, and as she does it you hear this creature -- you know, you've done this too, when you hear this creature that's so alien from your friend that when the friend comes back out, and says, "Well, how'd I do," you know, you want to look her in the eye and say, "You're a jerk. Why were you talking that way? That wasn't you talking?" If you can get past the security blanket of the corporate lingo and start to talk like a human being, again, about things that you care about, then you're doing marketing. "
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Stephen Pizzo: Hello. This is Stephen Pizzo for the O'Reilly Network in the first of what we hope will become an ongoing conversation with the movers, shakers, luminaries, and just plain squeaky wheels of the online community. Today's guest can pretty easily fall under a number of those descriptions. "Luminary" fits well, that's for sure, but "squeaky wheel" probably fits better.
David Weinberger is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book that has climbed from nowhere to 25 on Amazon's list. David's co-authors of this remarkable book are Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, and Doc Searls.
The Wall Street Journal recently declared that The Cluetrain Manifesto will do to -- I did say "to" not "for" -- to online marketing and e-commerce what The Jungle did to the meat-packing industry, what Unsafe at Any Speed did to Detroit, and what Silent Spring did to polluters.
David, this is really a remarkable book. Like I say, as an old-timer, I haven't read anything with such an authentic voice since the 1960s. I mean, you guys have been compared to modern-day Martin Luthers when you went out and slammed your 95 manifesto points up on the Net.
Can you give me just a little bit of an idea of how this all came about?
David Weinberger: Four of us -- who actually had never met and we didn't meet in person until months after the site went up, by the way -- four of us were having a conversation -- an ongoing conversation, e-mail, some telephone calls, in December of '98, because the coverage of the Web, which was massive at the time, seemed to us to be missing a point, missing an obvious point, about the Web. The coverage was so swept up with the e-com and the Internet gazillionaires that the basic reasons why people were on the Web were being ignored by everybody except those of us who were on the Web -- we knew. But the media were missing it entirely. It was very frustrating. So we decided to post a site.
Pizzo: The central point of your book, I guess, if I can just frame it in just a phrase, is "No marketing, no business as usual." You're basic premise is that the Net has really caused a fundamental shift in the relationship between companies and consumers, and that companies that don't understand this really are looking failure right in the eye.
Weinberger: Yes, exactly.
Pizzo: And that theme reoccurs throughout your book. I mean, you're asking companies to do things -- traditional companies, particularly those brick-and-mortar companies that have ported their merchandise and their marketing message over the Internet -- you're asking them to do things -- you use a term, in fact, that I just love: "decloak." You're asking them to do something that is so contrary to what they believe and understand about what their relationship to the market is that it really truly is revolutionary. You're asking them to let their employees, for example, have a direct and ongoing dialogue with their customers. I mean, this really is a huge shift, isn't it?
Weinberger: Yes, it's a fundamental shift. I'm not sure if we're asking that or just point out that that's going to happen, and you either resist it and stay in denial, the way that most companies are, or you figure it out and then you can actually make some progress.
The companies for, oh eighty years let's say, have been in business primarily to keep themselves hidden from their customers -- for deep reasons. They don't want their customers, the market consumers, to know what's going on inside the business, so they have marketing departments that serve as a wall basically to keep people out. Marketing departments often view themselves as trying to bring customers in, but everybody knows that the stuff that's coming through the marketing orifice -- and basically through all of the orifices in the organization -- is so tightly controlled we know it's not representative of what's really going inside the organization.
Organizations are incapable, it seems, of admitting that they're made up of humans, that they make lots of mistakes, they make mistakes every day, on every floor of the building I guarantee there's mistakes being made because they're occupied by humans. That the products don't always work, the products aren't great for every application. Companies have this deep resistance to ever acknowledging any of those completely obvious and true things that everybody knows already.
Pizzo: Well, you know, one of the points that you made that I've particularly keyed in on because I do it all the time is I guess most of us who've been on the Net since the very beginning, it's sort of woven into our lives, now, as a regular utility. We don't really give it a second thought. But I was recently going to buy a vehicle, a motorcycle, and I picked my brand, and I went to the company web site and got the usual brochure-ware from there, and then I immediately dove off into the news groups and found a discussion going on about this particular brand of motorcycle, its plusses and its minuses, and by the time I walked into the showroom to start dealing with the dealer, I knew more about that product than he did because all he read was the company material as well.
So the point you were making in the book is that companies shouldn't worry about talking, having an open discussion with the market, because the market is already talking about them whether they're part of that conversation or not.
Weinberger: It's a great example that you just gave, and absolutely typical, and in a way, completely obvious. Everybody who's on the Web is already doing this. And still the motorcycle company, when they -- for example, when they hear about the Web, it's threatening to them, they've got to do something about it, and they figure they put up a web site, they'll put up some nice pictures, and now they've done their Web thing when in fact we just route around it. It's completely uninteresting. The conversations are already going on, all over the place -- it's in the news groups, it's in review sites, it's in email, it's in instant messaging. I mean, it's all over the place. Conversations are there and companies, when they hear about that, their first impulse is again to try to manage those conversations. They say, "How can we control those conversations and get them talking about our message," and you can't. That reflex, which is an old reflex, it's like the lizard part of their brain. "How can we manage this?" is completely inappropriate.
Pizzo: Well, and, you know, those of us who have been in the belly of that beast -- and you know by this point a lot of us have, and have come out with our sanities barely intact -- know that these companies inside are their most valuable resources, which, of course, are those very people who sit at those desks in those cubicles. You have a wonderful line in your book, here, that says, and this is the online community speaking here, "We know some people from your company. They're cool online. Do you have any more like that? Can they come out and play?"
Let me just say -- and I'll give you another example. In doing the research for this interview, I called around and talked to a woman at a fairly large Internet company in San Francisco, and she said, you know, she's an editor way down in the bowels of the company, she said she got an e-mail from somebody who's having a problem with their web site, and she answered it personally. It was a letter to the editor, but with a problem, and they answered them and then he came back with another question, and she answered it again, and the third e-mail she got from him simply said this, "That's it. I'm buying 500 shares of your company's stock." You know, he didn't have to say any more. What he had gotten was connection with a real person who didn't shuck and jive him, and who gave him the answer to the question he needed.
Weinberger: There's Western Digital -- there's lots of places do this, but Western Digital is one of them: wdc.com. And if you have a problem with the hard drive, they route you towards their open discussion board, which is a completely unmoderated discussion board, so you read through these, and first of all there's just tons of information, and second of all, not only do you get a response really quickly from one of their tech support people, who speaks in her or his own voice, but you also -- there are messages from enthusiasts who jump right in, which is fantastic. When you read through some of these messages, it's not uncommon that the first subject line of the first thread is "Western Digital sucks," "your drives suck," and then you read through and literally the subject line gets turned around because they are being answered by human beings who, you know, talk in their own voice, and eventually it's "you guys rock," "you guys roll," whatever it is. And they've completely turned the customer around simply by being human, by being willing to admit, "Yeah, you know, sometimes our drives don't work. You know, they're not made by God yet, they're just made by people. So sometimes our drives don't work. Everybody knows that." What's the big deal when we have a hundred years of business that thinks it's somehow fatal to admit error.
Pizzo: Well, you guys are truly wicked to the traditional marketing community.
Weinberger: Well, they deserve it, don't they?
Pizzo: I particularly liked your handling of how they would -- your take on how they would have handled the Titanic disaster with the headline "705 delighted passengers arrive in New York," but what's going to be the role of marketers, I mean these companies are going to continue to have marketing departments. I mean what role do you see for these people in the future?
Weinberger: Well, it's a good question and it's not an easy one, because the Web keeps inventing new roles for them, and we don't yet know what those are, but the temptation of the marketing department is once again to try to jump in and manage and control the public perception, and then when they hear that there are conversations going on, they want to control and manage those. The instinct to control is deeply buried, is deep inside of the marketing department, and what they end up doing, I think, is so far removed from what marketing has become but so close to what the most enthusiastic marketers and other people inside the company want to do. In some ways, it's sort of easy if they can just give up on their fear.
So, conversations are going on. If you want to join a conversation in real life -- because these are literal conversations, this isn't a metaphor, these are literal conversations -- how do you do it? Do you go in with three key messages that you're going to now try to work in somehow, and make sure that you use the right sets of phrases because they're in your mission statement or in your marketing guidelines? No, if you're going to enter the conversation you have to have something interesting to say. That's the first thing. Second of all, you have to recognize that you're not the center of it. We're not on the Web because we want to talk about companies or talk with companies generally. We have better things to talk about. If you want to enter something to say, realize you're not the center and try to remember how to talk like a human being. You're perfectly capable of it when you're not at work. So try to do that when you're at work. An example is, you go to a trade show and you're talking with a friend outside the booth, who then goes inside the booth and starts giving the company spiel, and as she does it you hear this creature -- you know, you've done this too, when you hear this creature that's so alien from your friend that when the friend comes back out, and says, "Well, how'd I do," you know, you want to look her in the eye and say, "You're a jerk. Why were you talking that way? That wasn't you talking?" If you can get past the security blanket of the corporate lingo and start to talk like a human being, again, about things that you care about, then you're doing marketing.
Pizzo: Of course we have one other roadblock to that kind of openness and authentic voice, and that's not just the marketing people but the company lawyers. Now, if I were a company attorney, house counsel for some big corporation, I would say to you, "Are you out of your mind? You're telling me that I'm suppose to let every Tom, Dick, and Harry, and Jane down in the bowels of my company to speak for this company? Do you realize how many times we're going to be in court with customers who are going to say that the company made them a promise, or made some pronouncement that turned out not to be true." What's your response to them?
Weinberger: Well then fine, put up the firewalls and don't let anybody speak and you'll be out of business because nobody will know you exist anymore. You'll go dark. You know, if you want to be a big dead spot on the Web, as these conversations spring up and your competitors are jumping in and they have employees who are disagreeing with one another and arguing over about the best way to use the product and tweaking the product in ways that may not have been thought of before, and you're sitting there because the lawyers are afraid to let you speak, you're already out of business.
Pizzo: You make one other point in the book and that is that as the Net community has become more intelligent information consumers, we have learned to differentiate between the official and unofficial voice, whether it be of a company or of an individual, and don't we also have that at play here? If I'm talking to some mail clerk in some company who's making a pronouncement, logic tells me that I'm probably not hearing the official company line. I'm hearing whatever he or she thinks. Correct?
Pizzo: Absolutely. We're very sophisticated to that. The lawyers may not find that that's enough protection, but that's in fact the real protection that companies have. We know that when we're talking with somebody at a party or on a bus, or we're talking with somebody who is not speaking in the official voice and using the official reasons and making the official gestures, that this person is speaking for herself or himself, and the ability to do a sophisticated parsing of the role of the person based on the person's voice and content, humans are really, really good at that. We rarely get confused, despite what the lawyers are worried about.
Pizzo: You brought up a point just before that one that I think touches on another issue, that when a company goes dark, as you put it, you miss that opportunity for serendipity - something that has been so much a part, a key element of the explosion of the online community and all the commerce and activity that has grown up around it, that there's this magic element of serendipity where so-and-so just happens to see a posting by so-and-so and one thing leads to the next and before you know it, you know, a company is born.
Weinberger: It's not because the company hasn't found the posting. It's because they have no way of responding to it because they view themselves as being this sort of flying wedge with the CEO leading the charge to the top. It's a military view of business, but throw the wood behind the arrow. We're all working on one thing, we've got to move in one direction. We make long-term strategic decisions and we execute against the plan, and as they -- now, that is the absolute formula for disaster, because you would be much better off if you had a way of listening to the person who was out surfing last night -- from the mailroom, to use a good example -- who was out surfing last night, met a customer who had a fantastic idea, and if you could just explore that, if you could move more like, oh I don't know, an amoebae, or an inch forward here, come back over there, inch forward there, try to redivert energy in that direction or this direction, rather than having this everybody has to march in step to the drumbeat of the deadline. You'd do much, much better.
Pizzo: All the jargon of 20th century marketing really is the jargon of the war room, isn't it. I mean you "capture territory," you have "marketing blitzes," you "consolidate market share," I mean these are aggressive terms rather than inclusive terms.
Weinberger: Yeah, and marketing has been in the lead there and for a very good reason. Marketing has viewed itself properly as an act of war against an unwilling populace, because people don't want to hear from marketers. The fundamental fact of broadcast marketing is that the people you're trying to reach hate you. They don't want to hear from you. We don't like ads. We don't like billboards. We run from it. Sometimes you try to package up your ad into some mini sit-com so people will just watch it, but even then, you're acknowledging, "People hate marketing," so of course all of the rhetoric, all of the semantics of marketing is based on war. "Marketing campaigns," for example.
Pizzo: What's so interesting about that is that the Net companies I've worked with, particularly trying to set up straight news operations within them for one reason or another, have always fought the openness, the straight news, and always wanted to impose some sort of marketing message within news stories, and each time I would say to them, "Look, let me put two stacks of documents in front of you. They're going to be big, thick stacks, and one of them's going to be that day's complete printout from press wire, all the different company press releases, and the other stack is going to be off of Reuters, and you have to read one of those two stacks all the way to the bottom, you know. Which one are you going to read?" And even the marketing people say, "Well, I'm going to read the Reuters' stack." Why? "Well, because, you know, the PR stuff is PR stuff." So they as individuals understand this, but they don't seem to be able to put it into play when it comes to their own companies.
Weinberger: No, because it's a ritual. The releasing of press releases is a ceremony. It has nothing to do with the day-to-day things because if you know anything at all, you know that the press release is going to be thrown out. It's the last thing that an editor wants to read, is some bunch of propaganda from a self-interested company. It's completely, you know, you have no chance in hell of the press release doing what you think it's going to do, but it does do some other things, like give your boss the sense that you're moving forward, give your boss the sense that she or he is going to be quoted somewhere when it's not going to happen. And you're asking him, "What happens to marketing departments?" Well, one of the things that I hope happens is that marketing departments figure out that one of the things they can do is help tell stories, and by stories I don't mean fiction, but rather finding what's of interest in the company and telling it in a way that humans want to hear about it. Which also includes, by the way, telling the truth.
But press releases are the opposite of that. They take all of the elements of the story, like conflict, takes it right out. It only has a happy ending.
Pizzo: Well, as you so colorfully put it, these people issue these press releases, hoping that some lazy editor in a newsroom will put them in the paper, and there's about as much chance of that as in pounding a crab up his butt.
Weinberger: Quote unquote. That's actually Doc Searl's line.
Pizzo: I had an old editor in a newsroom who used to say that every news story ought to have at least two Hey Maude's in it, and a Hey Maude is when the old man's reading the paper and says over his shoulder, "Hey, Maude, come here. You've got to hear this." And you're book has thousands of Hey Maude's in it.
Weinberger: Well, thanks.
Pizzo: Everyone I've spoken to who has read your book so far has been somebody like me, someone who has been in the belly of the beast, who already gets it, and has thoroughly enjoyed the book because you've given voice to some abstract notions that have been floating around in our heads for quite sometime, and you actually put it down in black and white. But what about these companies, the ones that really have to read this, is your message only going to the choir? Or are you hearing from people who read this book who are people you would say to, "Good, you needed to read this book."
Weinberger: Oh, yeah, sometimes it's almost scary. Absolutely. We've heard from Fortune 100 companies, from marketing departments in them who have said, first of all, this confirms global research that they've done in the past six months about customers feeling empowered and that this is in fact tied to the Web. I mean everything from teenagers up, you know, they're doing the demographic slicing, so starting with teenagers and moving on up. That was amazing to me. This is in one case a company that spends $3 billion a year in advertising, and is now shaking in its boots because they recognize -- and not simply because of our book, but our book came at an opportune time for them -- they recognize the market is turning, that they don't own the customer any more. There's not even an ownership relationship of any type. Yeah, it's been remarkable. I've been surprised and real happy to see that.
Pizzo: In a couple of weeks, I'll be talking with your co-author Doc Searls about this whole patents issue that has blasted into everybody's consciousness recently with the amazon.com claim to the one-click technology, but you know it's very interesting to go back many years ago, four or five years ago when Intel fell all over itself on a chip error and tried to pull the castle gate up. You know, Jeff Bezos over at Amazon stepped right out and pretty much did what you're suggesting in your book. He went out there and listened to what the market was saying about what he had proclaimed and actually had a conversation with it and that conversation actually resulted in him modifying his original position.
Weinberger: Yeah, and I thought it was -- whether or not you think that Bezos's final proposal is the right one or goes far enough, the process by which he came to it I thought was remarkable and remarkably healthy. It literally was a result of conversation, first with Tim O'Reilly and then with hundreds of people who engaged in a discussion board and private email, and he actually -- you know, two things happened, I think.
First is that in the conversation that got published with Tim, you could hear him speaking in his own voice and he didn't sound like such a corporate a-hole as policy would make you think. You know, greedy, stupid, blind, a-hole. Oh, Jeez, it turns out there actually was some substance to his thinking, and he sounded like a real person.
Second thing that happened is that he was willing to listen to his market. The market's not stupid. The market, in fact, if you look at the conversation that was going on, was incredibly intelligent, some brilliant ideas, people who are deeply versed in intellect and in soul, and in these issues. They had a lot to say, and he was willing to listen and to change his mind in public. You know, turns out that's not such a big deal, in fact it's great to see. It's not even embarrassing. It's liberating to see somebody change his mind in public.
Pizzo: Another point that you brought out in the book is that companies think that because the market -- customers -- hate their marketing dreck that they (customers) don't want to have a conversation with them. But in fact the opposite is true. They want to have a conversation in the worst possible way with any company whose product or services they either like or depend on. They just don't want to talk to the marketing department.
Weinberger: That's right, because the marketing department wants to sell them stuff, whereas -- let's go back to your motorcycle example -- if I love motorcycles, I would kill to be able to talk to some of the engineers at the motorcycle company, or anybody there who has the same passion. And that's what drives the Web is passion. The marketing department has perverted that to a single aim, which is "Let's sell you more crap." Who wants to have that conversation?
Pizzo: Well, listen, so what's ahead for you guys, now? Can we expect to see emerge from this the Cluetrain Consultants Group, Inc.?
Weinberger: (Laughs) Nope.
Pizzo: I think we can market you guys as the Ghostbusters of Net Commerce. What do you think? We can get you an old Brink's truck, put a satellite dish on the top...?
Weinberger: I think you ought to be in marketing. That's how cynical that idea is. Several of us will go on writing. There are more books individually coming from us. No Cluetrain 2, No Cluetrain: The Cookbook -- although there's an idea.
Pizzo: Listen, let me see if I get this right here. I'm certain you will see your book's market share continue to grow because it is positioned to exploit the uncertainties that exist within numerous vertical e-commerce enterprises, as well as appealing to the growing net-savvy consumer market segment.
Weinberger: I'm sorry, I couldn't keep up with the typing. Can you e-mail that to me? It's brilliant.
Pizzo: Well, David, listen, like it or not, the gods of demography are smiling upon you. Great book. I don't often fall in love with books but if the listeners of this program read one book this year, read The Cluetrain Manifesto. It's probably the most important book you'll read this year.
Weinberger: Wow. Thanks.
Pizzo: Thank you, David.
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