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Category: Blogs

Five Questions for Citizen Agent Tara Hunt

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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.

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QotD – Can You Blog About Customers?

Today’s question of the day comes to us via a reader how wishes to remain anonymous (for obvious reasons):

Imagine you have a client who is making major mistakes in their approach to the Internet.

Is there any way you can blog about them and show the world this is not what to do without alienating or loosing the client?

Add your suggestions and comments after the click…

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What If Your Fans Create Faux Blogs?

One Degree is On Notice
_(tip o’ the hat to “shipbrook”:http://www.shipbrook.com/ for the “On Notice Generator”:http://www.shipbrook.com/onnotice/)_
One of the biggest no-nos of corporate blogging is creating a “fake blog”:http://loosewire.typepad.com/blog/2004/10/faux_blogs_and_.html, or “faux blog”:http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/category/faux_blogs/ or “character blog”:http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/04/character_blogs.html (all the same thing really).
Blogs are supposed to present the authentic voices of _real_ people. And since made up characters or “amalgams” can’t, by definition be “real”, they are generally (and justly) considered the ultimate sign that “you just don’t get it” when it comes to the blogosphere.
So what happens when _someone else_ creates a character blog that people might think is _your_ doing?
This is not a theoretical question as we’re dealing with this right now at “Tucows”:http://www.tucows.com/.

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