...and other real life Pinko Marketer tips...

It used to be that you would have to learn how to 'talk to the customer'. You would have to study their language and mimic it back in order to build trust. Not with Pinko Marketing. That's totally old school.

Instead, the REAL issue for a Pinko Marketer is how to actually talk to one's boss about what's going on in the community. Opposite. You need to study corporate language and mimic it back to your boss. This is my biggest issue. Communicating passionate issues without getting all whipped up is very difficult and when done incorrectly, can make you a really bad community advocate.

Instead of yelling, "You don't get it!" and stomping out of the boardroom, try the following:

1. Gather all of the feedback from the community and parse it into simple tables and charts. Show, don't tell.This could be as simple as sending out unedited customer comments to the entire organization.


2. Take the "You guys suck for changing this feature!" message and translate it into, "Some of our community members are confused as to why we changed this feature. Next time we plan on these changes, we should try getting some feedback on it first."


3. Provide solutions, not just beefs. Your job is to filter the feedback (good and bad) and, before taking it to your engineering team (or designers, etc.), go back to the originators and ask how they would have done it differently. Then, take those answers and build a list of suggestions to accompany the feedback.

This is a great deal harder than it sounds. Being part of the community means that you feel the pain of the community. You will get emotionally charged. When you are part of the community and you know that the difference between disgust and happiness is making your app Mac compatible, but your head of engineering is saying, "Only 4% of the market uses Mac, why would we waste our time on this?" you may want to yell expletives and tell him that he doesn't get it. But you can't. You have to be more strategic.

Being strategic in the opposite direction is actually more difficult than it ever was with the top-down approach.

Any other examples?

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