Aaron Strout:     

Hi, my name is Aaron Strout. Welcome to the We Show.

[music]

Aaron Strout:    

Thank you for joining us on the We Show today. My name is Aaron Strout, and I’m the VP of marketing for Mzinga, a leading provider of workplace and customer community solutions.  This podcast is one in a series and can be found on the WeAreSmarter.org site, Mzinga.com, and iTunes under "We Are Smarter."

Today I am talking with Tara Hunt, who is the co-founder of Citizen Agency. Tara is also a well-known blogger. She has her very well-known blog called HorseCowPig, and we may get to talk a little bit about how that came to be. I love the name. She is also a community evangelist, and you can probably find her speaking at a number of the different 2.0 events and mashups and all that good stuff. Welcome, Tara. It’s a pleasure having you here today.

Tara Hunt:     
Thank you, Aaron, for having me. I should add, though: It’s HorsePigCow, although HorseCowPig is redirected there. It’s an honest mistake that many people make.

Aaron Strout: 
HorsePigCow, so thank you for –

Tara Hunt:     
Herding the animals –

Aaron Strout: 
I’m sorry about that. But anyway, I love it. Maybe you could start off by telling us real quickly, it’s on your sort of [on the] About [page] on the Citizen Agency site, but it’s a funny story how you came about coming up with that name. Then you can talk a little bit about your background.

Tara Hunt:     
Yeah. Sure. It’s actually a really silly thing that my mom has. Whenever she’s forgotten somebody’s name or – you have that temporary freeze – so she would say, “Adam … Egon, horse, pig, cow, Erin,” and “horse, pig, cow” jars her memory. It’s just so silly and so human, that it just always reminds me of my roots and coming back to being human.

Aaron Strout: 
Well, I think that’s important. As we were leading up to our talk today, you did talk a little bit about the fact that you picked that seemingly silly name because you felt like it kept you grounded. I think one of the problems that we run into – there’s a brotherhood and a sisterhood among a lot of people that are working toward the betterment of community and pushing that forward. But I think that you had mentioned there are some people that consider themselves rock stars, and they do tend to forget where they came from. This is a way to be able to keep yourself humble and sort of keep yourself grounded, which I think is – it’s the fundamental essence of what community is.

Tara Hunt:     
Yeah, absolutely. It’s that We Are Smarter Than Me idea, and it’s really important when we’re talking about community. If you’re an expert on community, you understand that it’s not just you; it’s not just me that creates that voice. It’s a whole group of people. When I stand in front of an audience of 1,500 people, I’m not talking as an expert. I’m just giving validation of the many voices, the many really knowledgeable people that are in the audience that could well be standing up beside me. Someday I’d love to see more conferences where there is more audience participation, because the wisdom really is in that crowd of people.

Aaron Strout: 
Absolutely. Well, it’s interesting because I did a – I’m doing a series of community roundtables, and it’s sort of an experiment. It’s kind of like a new version of a webinar. But midway through, I had Bill Johnston from Forum One Communications and George Jaquette of Intuit, and they’re both experts in the community space, but we had a lot of very smart people on the call. Jake McKee was one of the people.

Midway through – we had sort of a chat dialogue going along, as well as the audio portion – I had someone say to me, “This doesn’t really feel very interactive, and it doesn’t feel very roundtablesque,” because I was asking these guys the questions. They were responding, and occasionally we were letting the audience chime in. I said, “You know what? You’re absolutely right.” What we did is I opened the questions up to the entire audience, and all of a sudden the chat went crazy, and they started answering the questions. I love that concept, and I think you’re absolutely right, that there’s so much knowledge and expertise pent up in the crowd, in the community. Really being a good facilitator – like you said, when you’re standing in front of 1,500 people and you listen and you facilitate enables that expertise to come through.

Tara Hunt:     
Yeah, absolutely. I’d like to see our industry, the community, the emerging community marketing or whatever we – I don’t even know what we’re calling it – geek marketing industry, really change that notion of there are no singular pinnacle rock stars, that we all have something to add, because it really is the basis of what this is all about. I like that story about your roundtable. That’s great. I think a lot of people can learn from that.

Aaron Strout: 
Thank you for saying so, and I learned something at that point. And this is me thinking that I’m a pretty good community guy and I like to listen, but it tees up my first real question to you, and that is that I came up with a marketing background. I’m guessing you have somewhat of a marketing background. since you are doing this really geek marketing or being the Citizen Agency. There’s been a lot of talk, I think, in the community space recently about whether marketers can have conversations with their customers, because traditionally marketing has been very much a one-way dialogue. You put out some messaging, you blast it out whether it’s through print ads or television, or direct mail or e-mail, and you hope people respond. But you as the marketer never really close the loop with those people and you never really hear back from them unless they’re angry at you. Do you think it’s possible – maybe you could talk a little bit about what you see, and how you make this happen with some of your clients and help them create the conversation with their customers versus speaking at them?

Tara Hunt:     
Yeah. Well historically, I mean as you indicated, marketers have sort of been pitted against their customers in that way, even all the language around that: “Hey, we’re targeting them.” There’s this supposedly receiving masses of our message, and a book that really changed my idea of that – I was working at an ad agency back in 2000 or 2001, and I found the Cluetrain Manifesto, which of course is sort of that canonical piece that said, “Markets are conversations and this is what it’s all about.” That really started to change my way of thinking about how we interact with customers. Probably the biggest realization I had was at some point – and I don’t know why this had to be a realization, but at some point I went, “Oh jeez, I am a customer, right? Why not put on that hat, even as a marketer? Why not come at it from the point of view, from the perspective of a customer, instead of always from that, ‘I have to move this product to market’ kind of perspective? How about I actually get hijacked in a way by that customer perspective, and really turn it around?”

I think that’s the point at which we can start having real conversations, when we’re peers with our customers. Not when we’re marketers to customers because we’re still trying to achieve this end goal of selling a product. That’s all well and fine, that’s our job, but that’s not conducive to a conversation. We’re trying to get something very specific out of it, and not thinking about what the customer’s needs are, first and foremost. So yeah, that’s what I would say, which the conversation can start is when we’re on a peer level, when we’re no longer a marketer, when we are, as well, the customer.

Aaron Strout: 
I like that message a lot, Tara. I think that’s an important one, and I haven’t really thought of it that way myself. I’ve always tried to put myself in the customers’ feet, or put them in their shoes, rather, and really look at it with that lens. You’re absolutely right, that at the end of the day we do need to do our jobs, but I think you can look at it from a “How do I want to hear the message? What would make the most sense for me? How can it be conveyed in a way that feels friendly and conversational?” It’s a nice way of putting it.

Tara Hunt:     
Well, we’re customers, probably as much if not more of the time than we’re marketers, right? We are. We live in this world. We buy houses, we set up bank accounts, we buy shoes, we surf around websites. We do all that stuff, so how do we feel in those times, and how is it that we can pull ourselves out of that experience and totally forget about it as marketers? That’s what baffles me, and that’s what I had to change about myself.

Aaron Strout: 
It’s funny that you bring up the Cluetrain Manifesto, because part of what I was alluding to is there was sort of a roundtable interview with David Weinberger, who is one of the authors, and he had some interesting things to say. I actually attended a Cross Media Forum recently, and Peter Hirshberg from Technorati presented. And he’s been doing some work with Doc Searls, who is one of the other authors. I actually pulled a few of the bullets from this white paper out into a blog [post] I did, and I want to read one of the bullets that is [from] Doc Searls that I thought was very amusing, but it speaks to what we’re talking about. And that is, “People in productive conversations don’t repeat what they’re saying over and over. They learn from each other and move topics forward.”

I think that’s part of the beauty of this dialogue, is not being rude and listening to one another and being respectful of one another, and that it can have a much more productive outcome in the long run because you get better feedback and you do have, I think, better customer relationships with your customers.

Tara Hunt:     
Yeah, and damnit, be off-brand, be off-message, like just have a conversation. It’s OK to be human.

Aaron Strout: 
The world is a messy place, right?

Tara Hunt:     
It sure is.

Aaron Strout: 
Which gets me to my last question for you. Some of the things that you have on your Citizen Agency site – I’ll call them mantras; you may call them different rules or five rules to sort of live by. One of the first, very apropos, is Embrace the Chaos. You have four others, and I’ll just read them quickly, and maybe you could talk about how you came up with them, which is your favorite, and then which is the hardest to get your customers to embrace? It, like us, may be the first one because that’s sort of a tough one to let go of: 1) Embrace the Chaos, 2) Balance your Tripod, 3) Put Community First, 4) Be Part of the Community You Serve, and 5) Have Patience. I think those are all great lessons and certainly good rules to live by. Can you talk a little bit about those and tell me what your favorite is, and which one you have the toughest time with your customers on?

Tara Hunt:     
Yeah. Well you hit the nail on the head. Embrace the Chaos is the toughest one for anybody to actually embrace. Chaos is not a natural business state, right? That’s why we have so many plans for every stage of business. It’s why we do financial planning, we do market planning, we do analyses and brand management, and all these ways to control the message, all these ways to control every step of a project so that we know exactly where we’re going to be in six months from now. The thing is, what I’ve noticed, unless you have a military grade project manager carrying you along, we very rarely actually end up in the places that we start off in. We’ve taken a lot of energy to put towards at the beginning of a project to control it, when in the end some of the most magical – and I call it “everyday magic” – but these magical things that happen along the way happen not because of careful planning but because you embraced change, and you embraced ways in which – you’ve embraced feedback, and other ways in which we interact every day that things come along and are totally surprising, totally unplanned, and just land in our laps.

So, for instance, we were working with a client who was really cool at embracing the chaos. We went to a conference where Adobe was looking desperately for somebody to demo their latest Air products, right? Our client happened to be a Flash-based web app. Well, perfect. We called them up. Within two days, they were able to turn around – I think it was an Apollo app. at that time – now it’s Air – and then they became the Adobe- showcased app., just because they had the resources ready. Now if we had overplanned, all of their engineering team, everybody, would have been locked up into this plan going forward. A phone call needing something turned around in a day and a half, two days, would have never been able to happen. It was just this amazing serendipitous situation.

Now, Balance your Tripod is about looking at also the product, and I think Seth Godin’s Purple Cow comes to mind every time I think about this. You know, you have your product, you have your community and you have your business side, right? It’s about balancing these things. Keeping in mind that your product has to match with your messaging, and with the way that you’re approaching things, or else nothing is going to work out. I think a really great example of this is the “triple bottom line.” I don’t know if you’ve heard that –

Aaron Strout: 
I’ve not. Maybe you could spend 30 seconds on the triple bottom line?

Tara Hunt:     
Sure. The triple bottom line is an emerging business ethic, where people consider not only business as a bottom line, but as well, customers and the environment, so it’s a different way to look at what your bottom line is. Balancing your Tripod, really, we came up with that before we had heard of triple bottom line, but I would substitute that for this any day.

Putting your Community First – I sort of alluded to this earlier, where you’ve got to take yourself out of the business role and put your community needs first. I think that will turn around and reward you and your business and your bottom line ultimately. If you put your money first, if you put profit first, then you’re gonna have a hell of a time building that community.

Being Part of the Community You Serve – now this is my personal favorite, if you’re asking about favorites. I hate to pick favorites, but if I was to –

Aaron Strout: 
Well it’s a good one. It’s a good one to be a favorite, I think.

Tara Hunt:     
Yeah, absolutely. Being Being Part of the Community You Serve, to me, just means that what I said earlier: Taking off that marketer hat and you’re a customer. You understand innately what the needs are that you’re fulfilling. You are serving your customers, and you won’t be able to understand that until you get out of your boardroom and out from behind your desk, and actually into the community that you’re trying to serve. So if your customers are big social media users, you have to use that social media and start interacting on a very real level. You’d be surprised at how many companies say, “Yeah, we want to be on Facebook. We want a Facebook ad,” but have never actually used it. Or they’ll have used it for about 10 minutes and say, “Well, this is kind of stupid but it seems to be popular with the kids.” It’s that sort of strategy, totally unsuccessful. You need to really understand your customers and, therefore, you have to become your customers.

Then, number five: Have Patience. Community stuff has high impact, but it can take a lot of time. Traditional marketing techniques, of course, evolve all sorts of degrees of [inaudible] spamming, so it’s sending out the message to as many people at one time as possible, getting all those sticky eyeballs, and driving people to wherever you need to drive them to. Well, as we’ve seen with a bunch of things, including a Tech Crunch effect, for instance – Tech Crunch will feature your company, and you get a huge amount of traffic. But what we’re really concerned about instead of that traffic is the attrition rate, right? So you might get that big bunch of people at the beginning, but that’s going to drop off if you don’t have everything else in place. And it’s probably going to drop off anyway, until you start to build a good relationship. You build trust. Trust takes time, right? Connections with people take time, so communities do take time. And some communities take off faster than others, but having patience is really important, I think, in achieving any sort of goals with a community strategy.

Aaron Strout: 
Well, great messages to live by. And so, Tara, it’s been a real pleasure having you today. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Thank you for the audience for listening in. Really appreciate it, Tara, and I look forward to bumping into you at probably some physical events in the not-too-distant future.

Tara Hunt:     
Excellent. Thank you, Aaron.

Aaron Strout:     

We appreciate you listening in to this series of the We Show podcasts. To find other podcasts like this, you can check out WeAreSmarter.org, Mzinga.com, and also iTunes under "We Are Smarter."

Thanks so much for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next week.