Dave Rogers has published 'Deconstructing the Conversation Part 0' as a follow-up to his original, discussed by both Dave Weinberger and Doc Searls (and me).

Here are some great excerpts:

...there are ever more companies and ever more marketers and ever more media competing to seize your attention and deliver their messages to you, and those messages are becoming more and more effective. It's not a conversation, it's a highjacking. How's that for a metaphor? Does it evoke the proper emotion? ...

...If you want a conversation, and I think you should, then you need to get off your dead ass and go talk to your spouse, or your neighbor, or the old lady walking the dog by your front yard every day whose name you don't know, rather than surrender more of your time, your attention and your authority to the person who just wants to sell you something. ...

...There's more to life than marketing and competing. The real "consumers" in this marketplace are the companies and corporations and marketers in their hire who consume your attention and your authority...

LOL. Dave totally nailed it. I love this guy!

But here's something to ponder: since companies trying to sell stuff will still hire marketers to hijack people's time, wouldn't it be better to have marketers with some sort of respect for that person's time? I know, I know...it's like 'Ethical Marketing'...like that isn't the biggest damned oxymoron ever.

And, I believe, the Cluetrain isn't a tome on how to market smarter, it's more like a treatise on respecting the individual's attention and authority. Because, as you say, we live in a free enterprise market and these businesses still want to sell stuff, and if they want to sell stuff, they have to market at some point in time in some way, shape or form. Even if it's a non-marketing kind of marketing strategy, just having a product available to people in one medium or another is part of marketing....

...now I digress.

So, really, I think you are kind of saying the same thing, you just don't want to see it viewed with such utopic enthusiasm. Nor do I. That's when the ad agencies and big companies come in and co-opt the ideas and do things that make my skin crawl.

I think of the Cluetrain in terms of the local butcher or the upcoming fashion designer or the startup company (bias bias bias!). Big, mass marketed companies couldn't possibly have conversations with all of their customers. Each of us, individually can really only carry on a handful of meaningful relationships at any given snippet in time, and I'll bet very few of us have built meaningful relationships out of sales transactions.

OMG...imagine the horror if people actually thought a company really cared about anything more than our business! Like the time I insincerely told this boy in sixth grade that I thought he was cute (mostly because I felt bad for him) and he followed me around for the rest of the year until I had to be really mean to him to make him go away. That felt terrible (think the Simpson's episode 'I Choo-Choo-Choose You').

...anyhoo....

I get the apprehensions with The Cluetrain theses. I really do.

It's the closest I've come to redeeming my tainted damned to heck marketing soul, though.