An Interview with Doc Searls [Hidden Dragon BizBlog 1.2]
The Cluetrain Manifesto is one of the most important business books ever written, and if you have not read it, I urge you to do so immediately! There is an interview with one of the authors, Doc Searls, over at Global Neighborhoods:
2. How would you say the business world has changed since you and your co-authors wrote Cluetrain Manifesto?
First, the business world now runs on the Net, pretty much. Second, the business world knows that it can’t get along without the Net, which helps. Third, the biz world is *beginning* to realize the Net brings, as we said in Cluetrain, a revolution in demand at least as big as the one in supply — and not just because the demand side has joined the supply side with stuff like YouTube and BitTorrent and eBay.
In the original website version of Cluetrain, Chris Locke wrote, “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.”
This is strong stuff, because not everyone in the business world has caught on, as Searls mentions here:
5. How has business fundamentally changed because of social media? How will it change in the coming years?
The walls of business will come down. That’s the main effect of the Net itself. Companies are people and are learning to adapt to a world where everybody is connected, everybody contributes, and everybody is zero distance (or close enough) from everybody else. This is the “flat world” Tom Friedman wrote “The World is Flat” about, and he’s right. Business on the whole has still not fully noticed this, however.
I see these changes happening faster and faster in the next few years. With big changes in the nature of “content” and the device that is used to view/read/listen to it. I wrote about the “ideal” convergence device a while back, and I suspect that when something like it becomes available, the changes to traditional business models will be like a tidal wave.
Here is a Business Week article from two years ago, talking about this very subject:
But if the blogs eventually swallow up ad revenue, what’s going to happen to us?
Yes, we, too, are under the gun. MSM, the bloggers call us. Mainstream media. And many of them delight in uncovering our errors, knocking us off that big pedestal we’ve occupied since the the first broadsheets started circulating.
We have to master the world of blogs, too. This isn’t because they’re taking away ad revenue, at least not yet, but because they represent millions of eyewitnesses armed with computers spread around the world. They are potential competitors — or editorial resources.
Does anyone dare to make a prediction? Tell us in the comments.
Original post here: Stephen
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