Julianna
From the name you might guess that HorsePigCow is a blog about livestock, but it’s actually the blog of community marketing specialist Tara Hunt. A Canadian transplant in San Francisco, Hunt is one half of Citizen Agency a consultancy that specializes in developing community-centric strategies around product research, design, development and marketing.”
Community is definitely the focus here, and Hunt provides much food for thought – one of her key themes is that you can’t create an artificial community, you have to market to your existing community by working with them and for them – very interesting stuff. You can tell that Hunt’s work is deeply personal, and she draws many personal stories and experiences into her analogies about companies, communities and marketing. HorsePigCow is that rare blog that balances both business and personal, is well written and provocative, and whether or not you agree with Hunt’s position, she is an eloquent writer with lots of great ideas to get you thinking.
Here are a few of the best posts from the last couple of months:
The Gift
We never really think about what we are going to get out of something we are giving, whether it is time or money or ideas or support. We do think about whether these gifts align with our own values, how the community will benefit and if we can afford to do it (we are definitely not martyrs and feel we can do better work if we can feed ourselves). I think this is a key point. So many companies will donate time, resources and money to something if they can establish a clear ROI. They’ll ask for a certain number of ‘impressions’ (logos, banners, etc.) or connections or a better public image.Expand at the Edges
If you want to seed growth, it is better to look to the edges of the market you are already seeing success in. AND an even SMARTER move is to give the current market the chance to grow to the edges organically. This will be your strongest indicator of a successful expansion. When it happens, garden it and foster it along. If it hasn’t moved along yet, you may still have loads of work to do on your core market. You have to continue to fertilize the roots. Without your roots, you fragment the edge markets and risk losing your strongest reputation market (or alienating it, which will find its way through the branches).When you choose quantity over quality, it ain’t community-positive Barriers to entry, like site sign-up, for instance, aren’t always necessary. Google doesn’t make you sign up to search. But they do make you sign up to use anything else. Yahoo! doesn’t make you sign up to search or browse, either, but I don’t know any other Yahoo! properties that will allow you to post your own content without having that Yahoo!ID. There are definite benefits and drawbacks to this, of course. The drawbacks are that, if you don’t have an account, you have to go through the process of setting one up. Before you are ready to ‘commit’ yourself somewhere, you may not want to do that. The benefits, though, are numerous for both the company and yourself.