The long Thanksgiving weekend provided the opportunity to pick up The Cluetrain Manifesto from the local library. The book was published in 2000, however it continues to get high accolades and buzz within the social media community due to the prescient nature of the chapters contained in the book. 
Authored by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger with a forward by Thomas Petzinger, this book articulates the changes taking place in the business landscape today.
The gist of this book, is that there is a new conversation happening online about your brand, company or business and you have two choices to make. You can make the choice to continue to hide behind corporate collateral that contains polished prose, with carefully crafted pronouncements that fall on deaf ears.
Or you can choose to participate in the conversation.
The definition of a conversation is an interchange of thoughts and ideas between people, and you can participate by listening, inviting dialogue, responding to the input whether it is good or bad … and simply coming out from your corporate hiding places.
At Fluid Media, our efforts are intended to help potential clients into this new realm of business by understanding the hesitations, outlining in a precise manner the rationale, strategies and tactics for embarking on this new level of community building and overseeing the process of execution and evaluation.
We are finding resistance from people that we speak to. Many are choosing to remain within the comfortable confines of the top down, one way communication directed at customers (and employees by the way) rather than accept that business is changing and they need to get on board, or that train will leave the station without them.
Our peers are advising that we simply move on to other prospects, that the opportunities are endless and we should not waste our time with potentials who are not quick to engage in a consulting contract. To our detriment, we are not capable of letting go that easily and we continue to evangelize our perspective with the contacts that we have, in the hope of persuading them that this is the future of business.
We have come to the conclusion that our approach will be to continue to promote the benefits of this new business paradigm in order to educate, show with specific evidence that the conversation is in fact taking place, and ultimately to earn the trust of prospective clients that we are capable of assisting them on this journey.
Are you standing at the station, but hesitant about getting on board the train and embarking on this new approach to business? Leave us a message in the comments section, or contact us at jmagennis@befluid.com
We can discuss the conversations that are taking place about your business and your approach to engaging them … at the very least we can talk about The Cluetrain Manifesto.
