http://www.cluetrain.com/apocalypso.html

I basically agree with you. Conversations are not markets, and such reversals of Doc’s great one-liner are extremely unfortunate, to say the least. While Cluetrain was marketed as a “Business book,” I think it became a bestseller precisely because it lobbed such a big FUCK YOU at business. That was certainly my position ten years ago, and it remains so today. I once thought the net might encourage business to become more humane, but that clearly has not happened in most cases. I am sickened by much of the use Cluetrain has been put to by rapacious idiots in search of ever-increasing profits. My “other blog” – Mystic Bourgeoisie – has sought to uncover much deeper causes of this cultural psychosis. Do have a look.

Naturally, we can end up talking shop at picnics, raves, in the playground picking our kids up from school… though that’s not the purpose of these gatherings.

Irritatingly, some people manipulate conversations at social gatherings so they can pitch. (I’m no longer friends with the people I’ve known who have tried pushing AMWAY etc at social gatherings).

It just seems to happen online more often.

“Whatever happened to MySpace?” It’s still there, with more than 100 million unique visitors every month. But it has stopped growing. As TechCrunch said in January:

Facebook, still a private company, is the world’s default social network. MySpace is still the king in the US, but trends suggest that 2009 is its last year on top. By January 2010, at current relative growth rates, Facebook will overtake MySpace as the largest US social network as well.

It’s just that with the news focus on fast-growth Internet start-ups, a company doesn’t get mentioned unless it’s still growing faster than a malignant cancer. Like Twitter is.

Reader’s Digest, for example, was doing that through the letterbox very successfully in the second half of the 20th century because the letterbox was the place consumers were ready to engage. Telstra recontracted a lot of customers through telemarketing in the 1990s/early 2000s because its customers were engaging with them through that channel.

But things change and while channels like the letterbox and telemarketing are still very effective for some messages, there now have other channels to work with. And when we’re talking about online channels, we are dealing with conduits for a message that are very fast and relatively inexpensive. Both these features don’t exactly encourage investment in the quality of those messages.

Discussions like this one are happening because the novelty of putting words out to lots of people (whether in Twitter, Facebook (where did MySpace go?), blogs etc) is passing. We now look for quality in these words and expressions. And that is leading to questions like those above around how we can most easily assess that quality and relevance.

We know not to call after 9pm. We know not to leave 5 message in a day. We know not to doorknock before breakfast. Without normed protocols marketing messages in “social media” are like those fundraisers who operate in shopping centres and street corners – ie throw enough lines out and something will bite. (And if you need to, grab the fish and corner it until it jumps on the damn thing.)

But unless society values this outcome, it will not become the norm. Whether your social media is a face-to-face conversation, phone call, letter or Facebook posting, if you’re not adding something of value to the dialogue the conversation will not last.

We’re happy to participate with marketing in these spaces when it either speaks directly to an immediate need we have or if it entertains and engages in a way we are comfortable. Most of this marketing is therefore less overt and can potentially fly under the radar. I suspect we are exposed to marketing in social networks far more often than we recall when discussing issues like this — even an individual on Twitter is marketing traffic for his AdSense filled blog when he or she shares content with us and invites debate. It’s just that we have no issue with those that complement our social network activities.

While discussion here has been civilised — thank you! — elsewhere that hasn’t been the case. That’s a fundamental of human nature.

I’ve been influenced again by James Burke’s 1985 TV series, The Day The Universe Changed. In the first episode he makes the point that we are what we believe. That as a society we are literally defined by our beliefs.

A challenge to our beliefs is therefore a challenge to us. We therefore defend our beliefs. Sometimes, we’re prepared to defend our beliefs to the death. The Cold War was all about defending Our Way Of Life.

The marketers who spam Twitter with nothing but endless hyperlinks, or the person who walks into a family picnic and starts handing out flyers for dry cleaning, probably genuinely believes that what they’re doing is acceptable. Those who respond with aggression are just as certain it’s not. Indeed, they respond aggressively because the behaviour is so far from their own social norms that it marks their opponent as something less than civilised, so their response in turn need not be civil.

This also drives the phenomenon where people don’t merely choose not to follow the spammers on Twitter, they actively block them and, often, loudly complain about them so word of the anti-social behaviour is spread through the tribe.

Just writing this is triggering even more thoughts, but they’ll have to wait until after breakfast…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/jul/15/games-evony-spam-internet

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“Quite possibly. If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in recent weeks, you may well have noticed the vast number of promotions for a game called Evony – campaigns on websites featuring buxom fantasy queens; countless Google ads and (more disturbingly) millions of spam comments left on blogs.

On the surface, Evony is a pretty standard online strategy game – a simulation in which players take the role of a medieval noble who must build up an empire. But the way the game has been marketed has created a bit of a stir: the games marketer Bruce Everiss has charted the volume of spam being sent by its creators, while Jeff Atwood, a US programmer and blogger, has documented the ads’ increasingly racy nature – from a simple medieval warrior promising the game would be “free forever”, through a string of increasingly racy images … until, finally, it was simply advertising itself by showing a pair of breasts.

“Thanks for showing us what it means to take advertising on the internet to the absolute rock bottom … then dig a sub-basement under that, and keep on digging until you reach the white-hot molten core of the Earth,” he wrote last week.”

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I attended a recent ACS (Australian Computer Society) event where the use of Twitter as a marketing tool was discussed (by a marketing company). It has also been discussed in Accounting Journals discussing both the benefits and the pitfalls. One of the articles provides an account of how several organisations have got it wrong as the people they entrust with marketing are also social animals. In place of the old model ( a lengthy campaign thought through in detail ) Twitter is a place of instant responses and as the articles stress ‘reputation is everything’ and it can be ruined in an instant on Twitter.

I have written more on this at http://globalvillagegovernance.blogspot.com/2009/07/society-maybe-there-is-such-thing-after.html

What surprised me was the degree of hostility to the comments expressed — demonstrates how deeply economic values are embedded and held as the new religion. Check out the depth of feeling in some of the comments on http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/28/society-values-morality-political-vision

We connect simultaneously to several different subcommunities and part of that includes a seriously Darwinian view on who can join. Intrusive marketers leave the tribe pretty quickly. I worked with one OSS company I liked to try and explain that Socmed marketing was different because of the need to build rapport. Press releases are blatted out without rapport — you are interested or not. Rapport was not in their lexicon, and sadly, eventually, even I unfollowed them. We have the power to ignore those that ignore social rules.

My concern is that many people are joining these networks without understanding how abrupt we sound in emails and 140 characters. I have email traffic from 20 years ago and it’s just plain embarrassing how aggressive and unsympathetic I sounded. I’ve looked at the responses to Minister Tanner’s first blog and I see behaviour that would never occur (I hope) in a face-to-face meeting. How much time in our early communities did we spend trying to prevent ‘flame wars’. Now we have individuals and hungry marketers unleashed into social communities without the tempering of experience. Can it be true that Twitter usage grew 800% in Australia from Jan to Feb 2009? If so, what does that mean for new arrivals eager for the bounty that they have been promised, and older users like myself, entrenched in my little network?

The same conflicts arise in the physical world, but one of your points is that we have ways of understanding these. Even so, marketing appears everywhere. One hypermarketer earnestly believes that one should never eat alone — meals are another opportunity to network (business network) that should never, ever be wasted. I accept that person has earned their success. I also choose not to live like that.

I understand Cluetrain is being updated — but without the marketing hype and focus, could Twitter have ever taken off? The Oprah phenomenon alone created a measurable leap in membership. But what then? How do we manage our conversations? Your answer sums it up — our many simultaneous roles and conversations are now revealed to a wider audience. I talk XR6 (Motor vehicle), photography and EVE Online with one person, Religion with another, and support a gay couple setting up a video broadcasting operation out of NYC. Each conversation is different — each group is independent. All are welcome to participate. The disrespectful or intrusive leave the Tribe with one click.