The Cluetrain Manifesto

"Most companies with Net-dot-dollar-signs in their eyes today are still missing the "something special" dimension. The something special is . . . voice."

"The future business of businesses that have a future will be about subtle differences, not wholesale conformity; about diversity, not homogeneity; about breaking the rules, not enforcing them."

"You've got to break down and trust people both inside and outside "your" organization?and the Web is responsible for those quotation marks. It is radically blurring the boundaries of what's inside and outside. "

"We are so desperate to have our voices back that we are willing to leap into the void. We embrace the Web not knowing what it is, but hoping that it will burn the org chart?if not the organization?down to the ground. "

"The fact that Web pages are conversations hasn't sunk in because they look like publications. But they are conversations: expressions of individual voice looking for response."

"On the Internet, markets are getting more connected and more powerfully vocal every day. These markets want to talk, just as they did for the thousands of years that passed before _market_ became a verb with _us_ as its object."

"There's no denying that a saturation ad campaign that puts your company's name in tens of millions of banner ads will buy you some name recognition. But that recognition counts for little against the tidal wave of word-of-Web."

"What's the Web's character? You can slice it into seven basic themes."

"Companies that let their customers and suppliers into the process early on deliver better products. And they forge the bonds of trust and delight that are the only one that work in the "frictionless" Web."

"How can we reverse our habit of understanding matters by jumping to further levels of abstraction and instead learn to dig into the concrete, the personal, and the unique?"

"Ignorance is power. A maxim often heard online is that the Internet routes around obstacles, meaning it ignores them."