(2026-03-26) Mann What I've Learned About Community Marketing

Sonya Mann: 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.

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

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.

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.

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. (not not)

you need to establish familiarity, trust, and admiration.

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.

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.

The community holds distributed knowledge about what matters to participants.

the "1,000 True Fans" framework.

Give more than you get. A lot more!

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.