Writing Your Manifesto

[DCrux]

Few web memes can compete with the manifesto, The Cluetrain being a hipster laundry list of cocktail party witticisms.

Manifestos can also be a way to differentiate yourself from the believe nothing, rudderless, dull gray businesses dressed in pretty Web 2.0 garb.

Philosophy.

"People want things that are hard to find. Things that have romance, but a factual romance, about them.
	I had this proven to me all over again when people actually stopped me in the street (in New York, in Tokyo, in London) to ask me where I got the coat I was wearing.
	So many people tried to buy my coat off my back that I've started a small company to make them available. It seems like everybody (well, not everybody) has always wanted a classic horseman's duster but never knew exactly where to get one.
	I ran a little ad in the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal and in a few months sold this wonderful coat in cities all over the country and to celebrities and to a mysterious gentleman in Japan who ordered two thousand of them.
	Well, the coat is magnificent. Simple, functional, handsome, extremely well made, affordable and, yes, romantic.
	I think that giant American Corporations should start asking themselves if the things they make are really, I mean really, better than the ordinary.
	Clearly, people want things that make their lives the way they wish they were."

– J Peterman

Lots of people decry the Macolyte faithful. All the while aspiring to get the same type of devotion and enthusiasm (not to mention premium pricing power) from customers who have become jaded with advertising hype. They constantly fail because they don’t believe in anything but Apple’s bank account.

Some ideas for writing your manifesto…

[INDENT]1. Capture the zeitgeist. Talk the talk, but more importantly…

2. Walk the walk. Nothing screams vapid like a grandiose statement so vague as to be meaningless, and so disconnected from basic business practice nobody could guess whether you are following your manifesto or not.

3. Believe in something. Because customers are starved for someone with genuine vision who actually stands for something.
   [/INDENT]

Manifestos can generate everything from links and publicity, to a steadfast customer base and employee guidance. But you have to manifest your ideals in everyday action to reap any benefits.

Related:

Writing A Manifesto: An Entrepreneurial Must 37signals to Seth Godin – people are either buying your manifesto …or they’re buying a commodity to be had at the lowest cost (plus whatever they can get away with).

How to Use a Manifesto to Spread your Blog’s Message you mean there’s more than spamming search engines? Who’da thunk it. You can spend the next three hundred years getting nowhere putting the carbon copy industry standard rehash into “your own words” or get noticed with a manifesto.

Jewelboxing is a manfesto-driven site. How you can tell: The utter lack of generic stock photography. Either manifest your manifesto in daily, routine, action or get [URL=“http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/the-gluetrain-manifesto/”]Gluetrained by parody sites making fun of what lack of follow-through has turned into [URL=“http://www.huhcorp.com/”]vapid cliché.

J Peterman notice how you could not get a thousand Craigslist monkeys typing on a thousand keyboards for a thousand years and some up with the consistent style found across products in this catalog.

Getting Real is about as close to an encounter with an incomprehensible alien culture as the modern web dev is likely to ever have.

[ralphm]

Nice post, DCrux. My biggest gripe with a lot of sites / products is that they don’t make clear what the do and why they do it. After reading those links you posted, I’m starting to wonder if the home page of a site I’m working on should just basically feature a short, simple manifesto on the home page, with a few simple links. In you view, can a manifesto just be a shortish statement, or os that something else?

[DCrux]

In you view, can a manifesto just be a shortish statement, or os that something else?

All I can say is yes, it could be a shortish statement. A whole lot of caveats apply.

One caveat could be whether or not a Unique Selling Proposition is appropos. (No way to tell based on what is revealed here).

Another is whether or not there’s the typical preference for short versus long. (That is a data mirage, by the way. Completely provable through analytics people won’t read a long passage …and absolutely right – generic, unfiltered, unqualified traffic won’t read; but potential customers will.)

Test results, comparing the two, support the conclusion people who are unlikely to ever be your customers – except in the fevered imagination – won’t read, they scan. The problem comes in when naive non-marketers “what if” these non prospects into viable potential customers.

On the web, and pretty much nowhere offline, the premise is any and all raw traffic is convertable potential customers. If so, online would be the only medium where such a premise holds true.

Customers however, capable of actually being customers and viable prospective customers – they also scan …and then they read what’s of interest – in depth. Offline it’s possible to reach people who will never buy, under any circumstances. And offline, this is considered a mistake.

You don’t find many circustances which could be judged a mistake online. Every apartment dweller “could be” interested in the aluminum siding offer spam you’re sending. And sure; a vanishing small fraction of a fraction of a single percent could be moving into a house that could be sided.

But that’s not the way to bet. The economics differ when your cost to mail is in the thousandths of a penny. And the analytics get skewed a bit when you’re measuring how many apartment dwellers are interested in reading about aluminum siding for their home. True enough, apartment dwellers are strangely resistant to reading anything at all about aluminum siding their home.

The analytics are absolutely right about that.

[Sega]

I’ve read the material, and it’s given me a different perspective. Would one be expected to write his entire website in this style, or simply the front page. I can see how writing like this would work because it engages you with the readers as well as allows them to relate to your situation more so that the competitions.

[DCrux]

One would be expected to believe in something. And to have a pulse.

If it isn’t what you believe, rather merely shallow affectation, it can be walled off – a costume to be slipped on or off. Sooner or later, and probably much sooner, that kind of thing comes off as your creative writing exercise you did once, and it’s done.

Manifestos are for visionaries and believers. That either shows up in your invoices, and how you answer the phone or it’s a ruse. And no, I don’t mean its a cheap slogan that you say, or print under the logo.

Manifestos are guiding principles. If your business isn’t guided by them, in pretty much everything you do, it’s highly unlikely you’ll benefit from putting one up. Quite frankly, a manifesto you don’t actually believe in is going to make the writer look like a hypocrite at best …and a flim-flam con man at worst.

The difference between Apple and competitors is Apple has a guiiding vision. Competitors are guided by Apple’s bank account, and everything you see comes off as “We get the game …you want us to pretend we believe in users. Okay, we can pretend like we do that. Heck; we’ll pretend we’re lime jello if you let us slap on an extra fifty bucks to the price tag.”

That’s why everything anyone ever attibutes to Apple is smart marketing. They simply can’t see anything else but well cloaked cynicism. Yet you can see a tectonic shift in product design. Hardly anything looked like the iPod before the iPod, but everything does after. Hardly anything looked like the iPhone, but the design defined the smartphone after its introduction. You don’t change your product design when all it is is marketing.

Your manifesto are the meta rules encoded in your company DNA. Manifestos inspire and in form how you conduct your business.

One more time; a manifesto can not be a set of good sounding “lines.” Think guidelines, not fortune cookie inscriptions. Consequently, the manifesto goes on one page – how you manifest your manifesto goes on the whole rest of the site. That’s evidence you are guided by and believe your own principles. In some obscure parts of the planet that would be what the word integrity means.

Related:

Let’s say you decide you will be a “content driven” web design shop. Okay, what’s the first step then? A lot of people wouldn’t get "just say “no” to lorem ipsum, they simply couldn’t imagine something like content driven web design as anything but a meaningless buzzword. And so, they can say content driven all the live lond day. They just can’t perform content driven web design.

Apparently there exists a couple of generations of people who can not connect words and action. They simply see no causal relationship between anything, at all, in anything. People do stuff. Stuff happens. Who knows why?

[ralphm]

@DCrux

If it isn’t what you believe, rather merely shallow affectation, it can be walled off – a costume to be slipped on or off. Sooner or later, and probably much sooner, that kind of thing comes off as your creative writing exercise you did once, and it’s done.

Manifestos are for visionaries and believers. That either shows up in your invoices, and how you answer the phone or it’s a ruse.

All good and challenging points. This concept of a manifesto that you put into practice contrasts wonderfully with the ubiquitous ‘prospectus’ that tells you how great an organization is, when in reality you know that not a single one of the dull-eyed employees even knows what’s in it.

There’s so much more I could say, but I don’t have much time right now, so in lieu of a fuller response, let me just say—

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

[DCrux]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

Well put. The text is derived from sections 1.10.32-33 of Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the Boundaries of Goods and Evils, or alternatively [About] The Purposes of Good and Evil.

Should one know the boundaries of good and evil, to that extent they might be ready to write their manifesto. A good place to start would be to highlight the industry has a really shaky grasp of those boundaries. For example, the megapixel myth.

I’m sure that’s how you meant that. Ingenius shorthand. I should compliment you on not being flip. (Remind me later)

The bottom of every Granite Rock invoice reads, “If you are not satisfied for any reason, don’t pay us for it. Simply scratch out the line item, write a brief note about the problem, and return a copy of this invoice along with your check for the balance.”

That is not a refund policy, that is not the start of a process to get a customer return authorization number. That’s a manifestation of a manifesto. And for any business who caters to bottom feeders and can’t concieve of a value added competitive advantage, that’s a recipe for business suicide. A poison pill for copycats.

Let me ask you something. Of all the cut-and-paste “competitors” out there, exactly who do you suppose is going to cut-and-paste this onto their site? This is called content driven copy protection.

Things that sound nice, but have no connection to results will be ripped off. Instantly. Stuff you’d actually have to do to some threshold of performance won’t. To put it some other way, what you are doing with something like this is called a social contract.

It’s a social networking thing.

Related:

The Megapixel Myth blowing the whistle on inbred industry thinking is one way to start thinking about what should be in your manifesto.

[markbrown4]

I love Getting Real.

I’m surprised you didn’t mention this: Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

This is closest thing to a work related manifesto I have written:
Front end standards

A personal manifesto for me would be something along the lines of:
Work hard, seek truth, enjoy life, listen a lot, speak little, respect and value life.
That’s about it.

[ralphm]

Thanks for that Agile link, Mark.

The only problem I see with your own manifesto is that the CSS you’ve used on that page is so interesting that I can’t concentrate on the words. But then, I guess this is a good example of ‘walking the talk’, so to speak.

[markbrown4]

@ralph_m

Thanks for that Agile link, Mark.

The only problem I see with your own manifesto is that the CSS you’ve used on that page is so interesting that I can’t concentrate on the words. But then, I guess this is a good example of ‘walking the talk’, so to speak.

Thanks Ralph, You can always disable styles if it helps

[DCrux]

And I, in turn, am surprised you didn’t mention this: The Art of 'Ware

Sun Tsu reimagined for software development. I like this because it doesn’t look like one hundred and fifteen code comments strung together, there is a unifying theme.

Things like progressive enhancement need some 'splaining, Lucy. My take on this is accessibility for people who could conceivably actually buy what you’re selling. Which is a nice change of pace.

Point being I have no earthly idea what makes moving parts a heading over progressive enhancement. At best, they’re synonymous. It’s pretty much all like that.

[ralphm]

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