I certainly don’t want to suggest that there is anything afoot here other than what has been written, but at the same time I sense a brewing conflict between the old school traditional marketing crowd and the more recent community based initiatives that many companies have bootstrapped with. I want to be careful to avoid the notion that this conflict is somehow unexpected, disruptive, or even overt but rather focus on the inevitable growing pains that companies go through when they begin to scale and are less about “3 engineers, a dog, and a dream” and more about health benefits, “infrastructure”, and an exit plan. For venture backed companies this must be more prominent given that most VCs will opt for the known over the unknown and quite frankly don’t have much experience with intense community strategies as a primary marketing vehicle. I suppose there really is no new new here other than than the buzzwords, companies in the Valley have always struggled to find a balance between growing into mass market while retaining the cultural identity of being a startup.

::HorsePigCow:: life uncommon: Announcement #2 – Rogue on the loose:

Although Riya recognizes the importance of community-focused marketing and how far they’ve come because of it, they are planning to hire some MarCom people to champion a more traditional and mass appeal strategy. Or something like that (I don’t know the person they are going to hire, so I can’t assume anything).

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