What I've learned about community marketing

Community marketing = marketing to a community, duh. More importantly, it's marketing through community.

Which can be pretty slimy, as with most marketing practices. Arguably slimy is the default, in a Sturgeon's law kind of way. But community marketing doesn't have to be like that. I certainly try not to be slimy about it!

Bad: pretending to make friends in order to sell stuff.
Not so bad: you enjoy making friends, and you need to sell stuff; might as well combine the two activities. Ideally within a domain you're passionate about, or at least one that's reasonably interesting.

As for me, internet communities themselves — their structure, their rhythms — have been a persistent fascination, ever since I discovered the Neopets user forums at age 11. (Also, shoutout to the Neopets HTML tutorial 🫡)

When I jumped from tech journalism to working in-house at startups, I blundered my way into this niche of community marketing. It uses many of the same skills as news reporting. A sociable infovore craves the voyeurism of reading the comments, and relishes asking nosy questions. Plus, I get to do it through text, through language; a writer's first and enduring love.

I just wrapped up a year-long engagement with Splits, a fintech startup that serves teams building within the Ethereum ecosystem. The founders identified Farcaster as a dense node of their ideal customers (people who need onchain-native business infrastructure).

My job was not to shill Splits. It was to hang out on Farcaster, identify promising projects and emerging trends, and write about what I was seeing. Essentially to keep Splits top-of-mind for the community, while demonstrating taste and discernment. High-end content is a costly signal.

We produced longform analyses and interview-based case studies that resonated with the population we wanted to reach. Representative comment: "This was a great piece — shared with my head of product." Not coincidentally, that remark came from one of my Farcaster mutuals. I put time and energy into making those connections, so they cared enough to check out what I wrote. Other readers were mutuals or followers of the person whose project was covered in the piece. Leveraging the social graph is what makes community marketing powerful.

At Splits, I also helped the founders promulgate concepts that they returned to repeatedly, like "earning the right," "start with why," and "make it work, make it right, make it fast." We hoped these memes (in the Dawkins sense) would lodge in people's minds, so when they grappled with similar issues, Splits resurfaced mentally.

Good marketing is like a song that gets stuck in your head. You remember a lyric fragment later, and look it up so you can add the song to your daily playlist. Of course, it has to be a song that feels good to listen to, not one that makes you groan when it comes on the grocery store loudspeaker. Being memorable is necessary — very necessary! — but not sufficient.

Ultimately, the goal is for your company to feel like the obvious choice. "Of course I will use that," prospective users should think when they encounter the problem that your product solves. To achieve this you need to establish familiarity, trust, and admiration. They know you, trust you'll solve their problem, and believe that associating with you will burnish their reputation.

These conditions are much more easily met when those prospective users have a friendly relationship with someone who works at the company. And when that person also has friendly relationships with "influencers" within the ecosystem. Again, what makes community marketing work is leveraging the social graph. This approach synthesizes "do things that don't scale" — repeated personal interactions with individuals — and scalability: those interactions are publicly apparent and produce artifacts that can be spread broadly (e.g. blog posts).

Enough context! Splits is the most recent example, but I've been doing this work for close to a decade. Here are the rules of thumb that I've discovered:

Don't create a new community. Join one. To start with, nobody cares about your company. They do care about their peers and how their peers solve problems.
The community holds distributed knowledge about what matters to participants.
Resonance with the right people > viral reach with randoms. A dozen engaged readers who care will beat ten thousand who just keep scrolling. Basically the "1,000 True Fans" framework.
Give more than you get. A lot more! You cannot effectively promote anything within a community unless you are an active, authentic member.
The internet is for interaction. Publishing initiates a feedback loop.
Repetition is the mechanism of memory. Pick the best idea to repeat, then repeat it for longer than feels comfortable.
Memes (again, the Dawkins type) are the unit of long-range narrative.