Cluetrain Manifesto: Part 4

1. Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

2. Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

3. Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

4. 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.

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

6. Bombastic boasts—"We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ"—do not constitute a position.

7. Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

8. Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

9. By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.

10. Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what's really going on inside the company.

11. Elvis said it best: "We can't go on together with suspicious minds."

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.