The Cluetrain Manifesto
"Companies that are actually communicating with online markets have flung the doors wide open. They're constantly searching for solid information they can share with customers and prospects via Web and FTP sites, e-mail lists, phone calls, whatever it takes. They're not half as concerned with protecting their data as with how much information they can give away. That's how they stay in touch, stay competitive, keep market attention from drifting to competitors. Such companies are creating a new kind of corporate identity, based not on the repetitive advertising needed to create "brand awareness," but on substantive, personalized communications.
The question is whether, as a company, you can afford to have more than an advertising-jingle persona. Can you put yourself out there: say what you think in your own voice, present who you really are, show what you really care about? Do you have any genuine passion to share? Can you deal with such honesty? Such exposure? Human beings are often magnificent in this regard, while companies, frankly, tend to suck. For most large corporations, even considering these questions and they're being forced to do so by both Internet and intranet is about as exciting as the offer of an experimental brain transplant."
Word.Read the original manifesto.
Buy the Cluetrain Manifesto book.
RageBoy
(a.k.a. Christopher Locke)
This dude is off the hook; easily the most in-your-face troublemaker in the business book business; a vocabularian errant who gives me incredible hope. (Ahem... nice semicolons.)
I got my dirty mitts on a galley copy of Gonzo Marketing. POW! (or something.) That's to say that it was good. Chris has a great way of writing, and you should really buy the book. Maybe get it from the library, swipe it from a friend (thanks, Brian!). At least read it when Chris inevitably posts the whole thing online for free, like he did with his last liberating litany, the Cluetrain Manifesto. The full download is at the bottom of the page, but you can buy it from Amazon if you're feeling munificent.
When the weasels get you down, and you start thinking that maybe you deserve to be treated like a number, he's the one who storms the ramparts of the corporate corpus with a witty case entreating people to act like people and not pawns for the man, whoever that is. You better check with your supervisor? Yo, check this first - it's Entropy Gradient Reversals and if it don't make you think then maybe you deserve to be a number:
While you're at it, sign up to receive valuable soul-saving emails from The Titanic Deck Chair Rearrangement Corporation. Not sold in any stores. Don't delay, call now!
Go nutty > >
Gonzo Marketing
"Gonzo marketing is the shorthand I use for the work I do -- work I fell into almost accidentally, rather than as a path I set out on knowing in advance where it would lead. At first, I looked for models, guidelines, some sort of framework that would make sense of the business world I suddenly found myself inhabiting. But what I found seemed oddly broken, or ill-conceived from the outset. Perhaps because I came to the computer industry from such a contrasting set of experiences -- brain surgery (yes, really), railroad braking, goat husbandry, boat carpentry, pharmaceutical, uh... mergers and acquisitions -- most of what I saw passing for best practice seemed naive to the point of being ridiculous. Even from the inside, it felt demeaning.
At first I thought I'd get the hang of it with time. But I never did. Along the way, I've become less and less professional. To make a living, I had to find something I could do that actually worked. And to work for my company or client, first it had to work for me. Call it a character defect, but I'm no good at anything I can't put my heart into. So I explored. I followed my heart. And I began to discover that many of the things that worked were the diametric opposite of what was normal and expected in business. In fact, the more diametrically opposed, the more contrarian the approach, the more effective it tended to be. I began calling these directions, attitudes and informal rules-of-thumb "worst practices." "
Learn to be yourself in ten easy lessons! Order your copy of Gonzo Marketing today!