What is a good book on VISUAL COMMUNICATION?

The name of a particular book on corporate communication in the information age.

• I'm looking for the title of a book that talked about corporate communication, and that was much discussed in 1999 or 2000. I think there were three or four authors, and my impression is that they all had one-syllable names. They also had a really good website on corporate communication (though I'm not sure if that was the term they used). The book talked about how the public didn't want to hear centralised corporate-speak - and that in the age of instantaneous communication, internet groups etc, it was easy for the real story about a company to get out, and that companies needed to focus more on empowering their people (largely staff) to do lots of the communicating for them. It included lots of examples, and one in particular (I think the company in the example made either whitegoods or cars) which talked about an employee who happened across customers complaining about his company's goods/service on a website. He joined in the forum, explained the reason for the apparent slackness (they had to wait for head-office parts or something) and turned the discussion around - all in his spare time. Can anyone tell me the name of the book?

• Answer:

  Hello. The book was "The Cluetrain Manifesto" (2000) by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0738202444/ The web site was (and is): http://www.cluetrain.com Here's how it looked in 2000, courtesy of the Internet Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20000229141743/http://www.cluetrain.com/ The whole book is now online at: http://www.cluetrain.com/book/index.html The part that you mentioned about an employee turning around a negative web discussion is in Chapter 3. You were right. It was a car company (Saturn, specifically). http://www.cluetrain.com/book/talk.html --------------- search strategy: "four authors" companies "internet communications" Thanks.