Sometime One Degree Contributor Tara ‘Miss Rogue’ Hunt doesn’t like to play by the rules. She started her career over seven years ago as the first-ever online marketing position in-house at a junior oil and gas firm. Soon, she decided to start her own company, Rogue Strategies.
Last summer, Tara moved to California to become the marketing director at “Riya.com”:http://www.riya.com/.
More recently, Tara joined ranks with Chris Messina and Ben Metcalfe to form Citizen Agency, a consultancy that specifically helps bootstrapped companies and startups connect with their communities. Tara continues to blog at HorsePigCow, is a “BarCamp”:http://www.barcamp.org/ evangelist and leads a community of marketing revolutionaries under the Pinko Marketing brand.
*One Degree: What is “Citizen Agency”:http://www.citizenagency.com/ ?*
Citizen Agency starts with three Citizen Agents – “Ben Metcalfe”:http://www.benmetcalfe.com/blog/index.php, “Chris Messina”:http://factoryjoe.com/blog/ and “myself”:http://horsepigcow.com/ – who are grassroots advocates, first, and community building consultants, second. Technology companies hire us to help them connect with their communities, whether established or barely there.
Our process is simple:
I show them how to be part of the community they are serving, introducing them to their community members and building communication channels for them to open up further as well as build bridges for their community to collaborate.
Chris helps them turn feedback and user experiences into improvements in the product and helps them design to become a truly essential product – open sourcing (APIs) and employing web standards along the way.
Ben’s expertise in building developer networks (he built the devnet at the BBC) comes in handy when those APIs are available. An API is no good without developers. 😉
Strategies for customer delight… not customer acquisition. The latter naturally flows from the former.
Month: August 2006
On Tuesday we asked if every company should have an online presence. One commenter suggested that “Uncle Johnny’s Snake and Drain Service” would be better off updating their fridge magnets than worrying about the Internet”.
Today’s question asks whether you CAN find a good reason for Uncle Johnny to get online. Add your thoughts and read what others are thinking after the click…
8 CommentsOne of the big reasons “I joined Tucows”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/03/24/ken-schafer-joins-tucows earlier this year was the company’s strong desire to build a “new marketing” team within Tucows.
The company gave very few resources to the small overworked marketing team they had in place for the last few years and, frankly, it’s amazing they got as much done as they did. Kudos to Jacqui, Adam, Scott and those that were gone before I got here.
But now the cracks are showing and the company knows it’s time to rethink the “if you make it, they will come” approach to marketing (unfortunately common to many tech-heavy companies). And so I was brought in to rethink what marketing means for “Tucows”:http://resellers.tucows.com/.
That was music to my ears and I’ve taken the tune to heart. I’m rethinking not only marketing at Tucows, but how marketing in the 21st century would be done if we were given the chance to hit “reset” and start all over again.