The book that changed my (work) life

I read the cluetrain manifesto 10 years ago (when it first came out) as I was just starting my career as a professional marketer. This was after being trained and degreed in engineering and working as a demo jock and implementation engineer for enterprise IT software. It was quite a shock moving from the numbers game of working the software, to the glam game of coming up with ‘messaging’ and ‘pain points’ and ‘programing’ (and not the C++ type). The cluetrain came along just in time to convince me that I shouldn’t leave marketing and go back to the world of demos, because what I had been told about marketing by the people that had been doing it for so long was changing. The book was important enough that it added a fundamental tennant to the way I approach my job: Markets are conversations . Any time I feel myself wandering or looking for a way to get out a story about what we do, I always remember that simple phrase and it always gives me an insight about what to do.
There was a get together a few weeks ago in NYC to how things have actually come out in the 10 years since the book came out. I wish I could have attended in person, but this video is almost as good: