InformationWeek

What are these smart companies? When the Manifesto first appeared, there were few compelling examples. A year later, there are many--and they're just the advance wave.

Take Ford Motor Co. In February, Ford unveiled a plan to give its 350,000 employees Net-enabled home PCs. The mainstream press made much of the $30 million worth of equipment involved--and totally missed the main story: the Internet and the market conversations it spawns.

In announcing the program, Ford president and CEO Jacques Nasser said, "We want to be able to improve communications and make sure that our employees, every one of us, are connected to what's going on in the marketplace, so that we know where consumers are heading, what's happening to market trends, what's happening to product trends, and [can] make it easier for our employees to have a better understanding of the shift that's happening out there."

Ford encouraged its employees to tell their own stories in their own voices. With a single stroke, Ford has done the unthinkable: It has relinquished the paranoid control companies have traditionally maintained over market communications. Companies that argue it's unworkable for employees to interact directly with the marketplace have lost the argument. The No. 2-ranked company in this year's Fortune 500 just got out of the way--big time.

One day after Ford's announcement, Delta Air Lines revealed a similar offer to its 75,000 employees. A month later, Intel followed suit, bringing another 70,000 workers online. Doug Busch, Intel's VP of information technology, said, "We hope that many other companies will choose to offer such a program to enable their employees and families to experience the Internet and get ready for the connected E-home of the future."

That bit about the "E-home" is typical sound-bite fodder. Intel's upside is different from those of Ford and Delta, neither of which sells chips. The real advantage of these initiatives is that Intel's employees will create relationships within online markets, replacing PR blather with person-to-person conversation.

Expect many more companies to put their workforces in cyberspace. The trend will revolutionize conventional marketing.

But what if you're not a Fortune 500 company with tens of thousands of employees? Personalization.com--a site I manage about using technology to customize information or commerce--constitutes another model for fostering open-market conversations. I need to give you the disclaimer: A client foots the bill. However, even on the site itself, you won't find any of the usual corporate hype. Steve Larsen, senior VP of marketing at Net Perceptions Inc., read The Cluetrain Manifesto before we started planning Personalization.com. Instead of creating yet another online brochureware graveyard, he wanted a real conversation around a subject crucial to his company's and his clients' future.

The first thing we did was ban product promotion from the site. We invited contributions from the community of interested early adopters, but we also invited dissenting views and published pieces highly critical of personalization. Take this excerpt from a piece by Robert Seidman, publisher of Robert Seidman's Online Insider (www.onlineinsider.com): "Technology can do a lot of things, but it can't yet provide the level of deep personalization that people really want without putting a lot of work on the people who want the information. As long as that's the case, most people won't use it."

We set up Web-conferencing software and invited anyone with an interest to participate. Some of the issues are thorny, and debate can run hot, but there's no censorship or filtering of messages.

Finally, we invited Net Perceptions' competitors to use the same platform to communicate to the audience that's coming together around the site. There's one catch: I won't publish thinly veiled advertising, and contributions have to communicate genuinely useful information. People want substance, not the intelligence-insulting stuff companies have too long offered them.

It ain't hard to do. Take a deep breath--then take the leap.