cluetrain.txt

A few years after my stint in Japan, I ended up back in the United
States, hired by an AI software outfit to be their director of corporate
communications. Cool, I thought. That sounded important. I had no idea
what it meant. Only later did I discover I'd become their PR guy.
Bummer.

I was pretty naive back then, but I quickly figured out that public
relations was perceived by the press — the people I was supposed to be
talking to — as little more than thinly disguised hucksterism. I tried
playing the high-tech huckster role precisely once and came away from
the experience feeling dirty, phony. I couldn't bring myself to do it
again, which was a big problem. It was my job. And I needed the money.
Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.

The "key messages" of any AI software company back then involved
head-bangingly abstruse concepts like "heuristics," "backward chaining,"
and "nonmonotonic logic." Very deep. And very boring. I barely
understood this jargon myself. How was I supposed to get on the phone
with some total stranger and enthuse about The Product? The truth was, I
didn't give a damn about the product. What I cared about was knowledge,
how people acquired and used it, how organizations suddenly seemed to
need a lot more of it, and why. What I cared about was how technology
applied — or didn't — to the world of business and the actual people who
worked there.

So instead of pitching the product, I started talking to journalists
about stuff like that. I figured I'd just pretend to be working until I
got fired for goofing off. But something amazing happened. As soon as I
stopped strategizing how to "get ink" for the company that was paying my
salary, as soon as I stopped seeing journalists as a source of free
advertising for my employer, I started having genuine conversations with
genuinely interesting people.

I'd call up editors and reporters without a thought in my head — no
agenda, no objective — and we'd talk. We talked about manufacturing and
how it evolved, about shop rats and managers, command and control. We
talked about language and literature, about literacy. We talked about
software too of course — what it could and couldn't do. We talked about
the foibles of the industry itself, laughed about empty buzzwords and
pompous posturing, swapped war stories about trade shows and writing on
deadline. We talked about our own work. But these conversations weren't
work. They were interesting and engaging. They were exciting. They were
fun. I couldn't wait to get back to work on Monday morning.

Then something even more amazing happened. The company started "getting
ink." Lots of it. And not in the lowly trade rags it had been used to,
but in places like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and
Business Week. One day the CEO called the VP of Marketing into my
office.

"What has Chris been doing for you lately?" the CEO asked him.

"I'm glad you brought that up," said the marketing veep. "In the whole
time he's been here, he hasn't done a single thing I've asked him to."

"Well..." said the CEO looking down at his shoes — here it comes, I
thought, this is what it feels like to get sacked — "whatever it is he's
doing, leave him alone. From now on, he reports to me."

That's how I discovered PR doesn't work and that markets are
conversations.

-- Christopher Locke, The Cluetrain Manifesto (2001)