The Conversation Was Always the Point.
Community, relationship, and the last dying howl of impersonal marketing.
My LinkedIn inbox is full of people trying to create relationships with me. But they always do it by asking questions that lead to their predefined product.
They ask if they could get me more meetings, more leads, help me write a book that will get me more meetings or more leads. Endless. The format is always the same: fake curiosity, leading questions, an inevitable pitch disguised as a conversation.
I haven’t been on LinkedIn in months. The ick of it drove me away.
If any of those people actually asked me what I need, what my real challenges are, what I’m hoping for, what I’m trying to figure out, I’d probably be willing to talk with them. I might even want to. But they’re not asking. They’re performing a script dressed up as curiosity. And I can feel the difference in my body before I can articulate it intellectually. So I close the tab.
That feeling is the entire argument of this piece, compressed into a bodily response. People can feel the difference between someone who only wants to sell and someone who wants to relate. They always could. But we’ve spent decades building businesses on the assumption that people can’t tell, or won’t care enough to act on it.
They can. And increasingly, they do.
In 1999, four guys (Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger) published 95 theses on a website called The Cluetrain Manifesto. The first thesis was three words: Markets are conversations.
I’ve been around long enough to see a few cycles. Ideas arrive, get dismissed as idealistic, fade into the background noise of business-as-usual, and then resurface when the world catches up. I read Cluetrain years ago and thought it was brilliant. Inspiring, even. But the world wasn’t ready then.
Companies heard “markets are conversations” and bolted a comments section onto their website. They opened a Twitter account and called it engagement. They launched a Slack community with great energy that went quiet in six weeks. They heard the message and performed a version of it without ever actually doing it.
Twenty-six years later, I believe the world is finally ready. I don’t think it’s because companies got more enlightened. I think it’s because the transactional, performative stuff has stopped working. People are numb to the charade and want something real.
A shift is underway
Andy Raskin wrote about Zuora’s sales deck, what he called “the greatest sales deck I’ve ever seen.” The reason it worked wasn’t the design or the copy. Zuora didn’t start by talking about their product. They started by naming a massive, undeniable shift in the world: the subscription economy. They made the case that this shift would create winners and losers. They teased the promised land. And only then did they talk about what they could do to help.
I want to do the same thing here. Because there is a shift underway right now that is at least as significant as the one Zuora named. And most companies either haven’t seen it, or they’ve seen it and are pretending they can wait it out.
The era of the transactional company is ending. The era of the ecosystem company is beginning.
Companies that build genuine, sustained, two-way relationships with the people they serve. Relationships that go far beyond the sale. Places to belong.
The Cluetrain authors said this in 1999. Back then it was a provocation. In 2026, it’s a survival requirement.
Four forces are killing the game
There are four forces hitting simultaneously right now that make this shift unavoidable. Any one of them would be significant. Together, they’re tectonic.
1. AI is making broadcast marketing worthless while making real conversation finally scalable.
Two things are happening at once, and you need to hold both.
First: when every company can generate polished content, thought leadership, social posts, and ad copy with AI, the signal-to-noise ratio of traditional outbound marketing collapses toward zero. We are drowning in a tsunami of competent-but-soulless content. The Cluetrain authors said in 1999 that markets could already smell the BS behind the marketing perfume. That instinct is about to get a thousand times sharper, because now the perfume is being manufactured at industrial scale by machines. The only thing that will cut through is what the manifesto always said would: genuine human voice, real relationship, authentic community.
Second: AI simultaneously makes it possible to actually do what the Cluetrain prescribed. In 1999, the advice to “let your employees talk directly with the market” hit a scaling wall. One real human in a CompuServe forum was beautiful, but how does a company maintain genuine two-way dialogue with tens of thousands of people? Now it can. But it’s not because AI replaces the human voice (that would just recreate the broadcast problem with better automation). It’s because AI can handle the connective tissue. It can help synthesize what the community is saying, surface the conversations that need a human response, maintain continuity across interactions, reduce the friction of community facilitation. The conversation becomes scalable without becoming fake.
But I think there’s something even bigger coming, and I don’t hear anyone talking about it yet. Right now, the dominant AI paradigm is company-to-individual: a company deploys AI to interact with individual customers, one at a time. That’s the old marketing model with a smarter interface. The real inflection will come when AI begins connecting people to each other around shared interests, shared problems, shared work. When technology stops being a channel and starts being connective tissue for human community. I don’t know exactly what form that will take, but I have a strong sense that it’s coming. When it does, it’s going to favor companies who already understand that their real value is in the relationships between people in their ecosystem, not just the relationships between themselves and their customers.
2. The organizational boundary is dissolving, whether you design for it or not.
The neat categories of “employee,” “customer,” “partner,” and “competitor” are becoming fluid. A person who’s your customer on Monday might be your contractor on Tuesday and your competitor’s collaborator on Wednesday. The employment contract itself is breaking down. More people are working independently, contributing to multiple ecosystems, carrying their expertise across organizational boundaries.
I believe the phrase labor elasticity is going to become central to how companies operate in the next few years. The ability to scale your labor capacity up and down quickly, drawing on a network of independent contributors who move fluidly between organizations, will sort companies that can adapt from companies those who struggle. For a long time, we might have said workers should become more elastic too. But by now, companies have been forcing that elasticity onto workers for years. Layoffs, restructuring, the gig economy, the hollowing out of stable employment. Workers are already elastic. They’ve been learning it in real time, whether they wanted to or not. We’re at a pivotal point now where companies either will build the relational infrastructure to actually work well with a fluid workforce, or they’ll keep treating people as interchangeable inputs and wondering why trust is so hard to come by.
Thinkers I respect in organizational design (Frederic Laloux, Aaron Dignan, Rod Collins, Peter Senge) have done transformative work on what happens when you decentralize authority inside a company. Self-management, distributed decision-making, evolutionary purpose. That work matters deeply. But after over thirty years of doing organizational work, I’ve come to believe that decentralizing inside the walls only goes so far when the walls themselves are the problem.
The next step in organizational design is making the membrane between the company and its ecosystem deliberately permeable. Designing the organization so its community is part of its architecture. And treating it as a marketing channel doesn’t cut it. Community is a structural element.
James Surowiecki identified the conditions for collective intelligence: diversity of opinion, independence of judgment, decentralization of knowledge, and a mechanism for aggregation. Those conditions are more easily met in a permeable organization-community ecosystem than inside any single company, no matter how progressive its internal structure. And Peter Senge’s learning organization was always constrained by the boundary of the organization itself. What I’m describing is the learning ecosystem, where the company and its community learn together.
3. The economics have flipped.
This one is simple math.
Customer acquisition costs have been rising relentlessly. Facebook’s average CPM nearly doubled from $4.26 in 2014 to $8.01 in 2024. Google search cost-per-click went from about a dollar to nearly four. And those rising costs came with declining effectiveness: average conversion rates across paid social channels dropped from roughly 2% in 2015 to under 1% by 2024. It’s a double squeeze. You’re paying more and getting less.
Every company running the traditional outbound playbook is on a treadmill that’s speeding up. And the response from most marketing departments has been to run faster on the same treadmill (more content, more channels, more spend, more attribution modeling) rather than to step off and ask whether the treadmill is the problem.
Meanwhile, companies that invested in genuine community relationships weathered recent disruptions better and built assets that compound over time rather than depreciating. Notion grew to a $10 billion valuation with 95% organic traffic and minimal paid advertising, because a million community members were doing the work that traditional companies spend millions engineering. Patagonia has multi-generational customer relationships rooted in shared values, not discounts.
The cost of broadcasting is going up while its effectiveness goes down. The cost of community infrastructure is going down while its value goes up. Follow the math.
4. People are starving for genuine belonging, and companies are sitting on the raw materials to give it to them.
We’re in a loneliness epidemic. Robert Putnam documented the collapse of civic association in Bowling Alone over twenty years ago, and it’s only accelerated since. Churches, clubs, civic organizations, the traditional containers for belonging, are in decline. People are looking for spaces of real connection and shared meaning, and they’re not finding enough of them.
At the same time, a client gushes to me about Farmer’s Dog. That’s the food he ordered for his dog until last year, when it passed away. When my client canceled his subscription, someone from the company called him 15 minutes later and asked—sincerely—how he’s doing. And the CEO sent a fruit basket with a handwritten note a few days later. Do you think my client will ever buy another brand of dog food?
Companies that have a genuine point of view, real values, and something meaningful to say about how people should live or work or create are sitting on the raw materials for exactly the kind of community people are hungry for. I’m not talking about brand communities in the shallow marketing sense. I’m talking about real communities of practice and shared concern. Real care.
The Cluetrain fellows got it right: “Human communities are based on discourse, on human speech about human concerns.” And: “The community of discourse is the market.”
What’s different now is that the need for that discourse is acute. Companies that create genuine spaces for conversation around their domain of expertise are filling a void the broader culture is failing to fill. That’s a responsibility and an opportunity that most companies haven’t begun to take seriously.
Continuity matters
So if the forces are this clear, why aren’t more companies doing it?
Part of it is that they think they already are. They have a community Slack. They host an annual conference. They run a webinar series. They post on LinkedIn. The read customer feedback and surveys.
But what I see over and over in most companies: they have a lot of thoughts about what they could do for their community. And what they’re actually doing is a series of disconnected events and interactions.
An event generates energy. A workshop creates connection. A launch brings people together. And then nothing. No follow-up. No continuation. No ongoing dialogue. The energy dissipates. The connection cools. People go “that was cool” and walk away.
This is the slow death of relationship. And I don’t think most companies appreciate how destructive it is.
When you come back three months later with the next event, you’re not starting from where you left off. You’re starting from a deficit. The community remembers being left. It’s harder to generate that resonance the second time. The vibrance is diminished. Each cycle of engagement-then-silence trains your community to expect abandonment.
Conversations are continuous. That’s what makes them conversations rather than announcements. If you’re only showing up when you have something to sell or something to launch, you’re running a series of campaigns with a community-flavored veneer.
Cluetrain again: “Engagement in these open, free-wheeling marketplace exchanges isn’t optional. It’s a prerequisite to having a future. Silence is fatal.”
In 1999 that was about whether you join the conversation at all. In 2026 it’s about whether you stay in it.
You can’t fake this from the outside
There’s another thing I see constantly, and I want to say it directly: you cannot build an authentic ecosystem relationship with your community if your internal culture doesn’t match.
The Cluetrain identified this with precision: “There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market. These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other’s voices.”
If your employees are living in a command-and-control culture while your marketing team runs a “community-first” initiative, the inauthenticity radiates outward. Your community will sense it the way you sense when someone is performing warmth versus actually being warm. The dissonance is palpable even when it’s hard to name.
The community work has to start inside. Not because it’s the right order of operations on a project plan, but because the quality of the external relationship is limited by the quality of the internal one. You cannot give to your ecosystem what you haven’t got.
This is the hard part. This is where the real organizational design work lives. Cultivating a culture where people speak honestly, where information flows freely, where employees are trusted to represent the company in their own voice. Companies that get this right internally discover that the external community work becomes almost natural, because the posture of genuine dialogue is already part of how they operate.
Companies that skip the internal work and go straight to the community strategy discover that no amount of programming can compensate for the hollow feeling their audience picks up.
Here’s how this looks at scale
I want to give you three examples at very different scales, because this is a design principle, not a tactic reserved for companies of a particular size.
Patagonia might be the clearest example of what this looks like when it’s mature. Their relationship with their community is built around shared environmental values. Patagonia Action Works connects their customers directly with grassroots environmental organizations. Their Worn Wear program turns customers into participants in a circular economy. Their retail stores function as community hubs. They once ran a full-page ad on Black Friday that said “Don’t Buy This Jacket.”
Vincent Stanley, Patagonia’s company philosopher (the fact that they have a company philosopher tells you something), described how when the company started explaining everything they were doing to minimize environmental impact, customers developed a sense of participating in shared values when they bought from Patagonia. The activism became the basis of the relationship. And it works from the inside out. Employees live the values. Internal culture and external community speak the same language. That integrity is what makes the whole thing hold together.
Buurtzorg, a Dutch home care organization featured in both Laloux’s and Dignan’s work, is a different kind of example. Founded in 2006 by Jos de Blok, a nurse who was fed up with bureaucratic healthcare, Buurtzorg now has over 10,000 nurses organized into 900+ self-managed teams of 10 to 12. There are no managers. A back office of about 50 people. Twenty coaches, not supervisors, who help teams function. Their motto is “humanity over bureaucracy.”
What makes Buurtzorg relevant here is that the community is literally built into the care architecture. Each team is embedded in a specific neighborhood. Nurses don’t just treat patients; they build networks with local families, general practitioners, and community organizations. The patient, the family, the neighborhood, the nurse team: they all become part of one ecosystem of care. The boundary between “organization” and “community” isn’t blurred. It was never drawn.
The results are hard to argue with: patient satisfaction 30% higher than comparable organizations, required care hours per patient 50 to 67% lower, and nurses who describe their work with the kind of language you almost never hear in healthcare. One nurse said: “Working in an organization that trusts you and cares for you makes things possible you had not thought about before. The creativity was just out of the box.”
Buurtzorg isn’t a tech company or a $3 billion consumer brand. It’s a home care provider that decided the old model was broken and built something that treats people (patients, nurses, communities) as participants in a shared project rather than units to be managed.
Notion is a third example, from a completely different direction. Their community didn’t start as a corporate initiative. Users loved the product so much that they spontaneously created Reddit groups, Discord servers, YouTube channels, and local meetups, all without Notion’s involvement. Notion’s response was to listen, support, and amplify. Their Head of Community’s first act was to meet individually with every community leader to understand what they needed, not what Notion needed from them.
They created a certification program because community members were already building consulting businesses around the product. Some Notion consultants now make their entire living from this ecosystem, and Notion doesn’t take a cut. The community teaches itself, supports itself, evangelizes itself. Notion’s job is to tend the conditions and stay in the relationship. Notion grew to a $10 billion valuation with 95% organic traffic and barely any paid advertising.
Their Head of Community captured something essential: “Community is something that’s so hard to build and so easy to lose. Community’s magic is in its inherent fragility.” That fragility is the continuity argument. The relationship requires constant tending.
In all three cases, the directionality matters. None of these organizations started by asking “how do we build community to serve our business goals?” They started by asking what the people in their ecosystem actually care about, and how they could show up for that. The arrow points outward. Commercial value flows back as a consequence of genuine relationship, not as an engineered outcome of community strategy.
Can you be honest with yourself?
If any of this resonates, I want to offer a handful of questions. It’s not a checklist (that would undermine everything I’ve just said) but an honest self-assessment. You can do this do quietly without performing the answer for anyone. But be honest about what is.
Could a customer name a single human being at your company who they feel is in dialogue with them? Not servicing them, but in a relationship with them?
After your last event, workshop, or community gathering, what happened the next day? The next week? Was there a designed continuation, or did the energy just dissipate?
If you stopped all marketing tomorrow and only maintained your community spaces, would people still show up?
Does your community’s intelligence actually inform your strategy? Or does your strategy determine your community programming? Be honest about which direction the arrow points.
Are you willing to let your community see you be wrong, change your mind, or not have the answer?
If you asked your community to describe their relationship with your company, would they use the word “relationship” at all?
Progress, not perfection
This requires courage. It requires imperfection. It requires showing up before you know where the conversation is going, tending to relationships before you can measure their ROI, stepping into the genuinely uncertain space of being in real relationship with the people you serve.
The Cluetrain Manifesto was right. Markets are conversations. They always were. What’s was true but early in 1999 is now urgent. Companies that don’t build genuine, sustained, two-way relationships with their ecosystems are going to find the ground disappearing under them. Not someday. Now.
The starting point is deceptively simple: pick one conversation your community is already having, show up as a human being, and don’t leave.
The discipline is in the staying.
If you’re paying attention, you see these community ecosystems everywhere. GitHub, LEGO, TEDx, Buffer, Gore, Valve, Handelsbanken… not to mention small businesses you’ve not yet heard of. These are a few communities worth checking out:
DOGCULTR: Are you a “dog owner” or something more? Do you imagine what kind of world your dog wants to live in? This new community is all about that.
Jumpsuit: This merry band of joyful misfits is where I work, but it’s so much more than work. The Patreon is a great place to start your trip into the multiverse.
Spirit Tech Collective: This one seeks to 50X the resources flowing into the Spirit Tech sector, and it looks like the future to me.
This is what real relationship looks like.
Excellent writing, excellent analysis and superb insights. Thanks Joseph!
Joseph, thank you for this in-depth analysis. It resonates completely with what I am seeing. We are nearing a tipping point for traditional hierarchical (and "flattened" hierarchical) organizations. More and more thought leaders and more and more leading-edge companies are exploring ways to increase the edges between community and company. The conversation is the point.