Get your marketing out of my community

I just read a great blog by Tara Hunt. It’s a cool article (on a great site), but it really worried me. This is exactly what scares me about the Community Ambassador position: that I’m going to be asked to do something to promote the product that is not in the interest of the community. I’ve been there (it’s called retail) and I don’t want to go back.

“Community has turned into a garish buzzword, leading hungry marketers by the snoot down a new path of public/commercial boundaries being crossed.”

Will Pate and I were just talking about Community as a bad word today. We’re trying to choose the name for the next version of the Flock.com page currently called “Participate”. I’m against using participate (it brings to mind memories of “Participation is 20% of your grade”), but I’m nervous about using the word community. Do we have a community? Yes…a small but dedicated community. Why do we put so much emphasis on it? Mainly because it helps to drive quality in the product and support, and because it makes Flock that much more fun to use and talk about. But is part of it because we (and/or the higher ups) think community sells?

This section of Tara’s article defined what we need to be doing:

“We have to be willing to lose ourselves to the community. We need to become community advocates. We need to reverse the line of communication and bring word back to our bosses and our clients that their products are hurting the environment, exploiting labor, not acceptable to be tested on animals, falling apart, causing addiction, causing health issues, hurting our children, driving us further apart, etc.”

This is totally true. This is my goal. This is Will Pate’s goal. It’s probably unacheivable in any company without getting fired, but we’ll try.

Don’t get me wrong: I think Flock is headed in a great direction. I’m not concerned about Flock specifically so much as the general direction of Community/Company interaction. The most wonderful thing is occuring right now: companies are finally noticing their customers and even interacting with them via blogs and the like. We just have to be careful that this communication stays open and honest and does not become yet another vehicle for overzealous and heavy-handed marketing (see all the MySpace spam accounts as an example).

Here’s hoping we can win the fight, at least at our small level. Keep telling me what you like about Flock. Keep telling me what you dislike about Flock. Keep telling me what’s important in your world and what should be important in mine. Keep telling me about cool stuff you found on Digg (though I probably already saw it because I’m addicted to Digg). If we listen to each other, we can do more than create a great product: we can create an awesome community that is more than a marketing ploy. And wouldn’t that be fun?

-Evan
evan at flock dot com

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Community”Community Marketing” Flock “Evan Hamilton” “Will Pate” “Tara Hunt” www.futureofcommunities.com Marketing “Community Ambassador