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ences them… and acting accordingly, according to company interests. I mean, this stuff is pretty basic, and no one in comics besides me really does this.

Can someone tell me why?

I could go on: there’s the bottom-up and top-down approaches… where you figure out who you want to target and why… you could target influencers individually, which is the bottom-up approach… what retailers call hand selling. Put the product or message into each person’s hand and hope they do some viral marketing for you. This is how everyone had heard about The Blair Witch Project… or you could do the "top-down" approach, which is more of a broadband strategy which puts your message out in front of the community… …and the thing that kills me about this missed opportunity in the comic book industry is that it’s nearly free to implement. Because of their loyal ty to comics and the immediacy the web gives for information exchange, most rabid fans are already on the Internet. If a company had a fully loaded head count in a department (or even assigned a savvy production coordinator from marketing or a junior editorial staff member) the revenue implications are minimal or could even be accounted for as advertising costs. AND EVEN THEN a particularly good community manager would act not only as a mouthpiece for the organization, but act as a communications channel from the community back to the organization itself. It’s win-win for everyone. Now, some folks sort of do this; there are Marvel boards and DC boards and Wildstorm boards, and heck, probably even Little Lulu discussion boards by now… but marketing individually like that is counter-productive for a good community manager. You don’t want your own community! You have to look at this outreach as targeting the audience of comics fans instead of Marvel fans or DC fans or Little Lulu fans or whatever. Otherwise, you’ll be perceived as just a shill. There’s a big difference between "force" and "influence" and that’s what good community management should under stand.

Comics fans. Not company loyalists.

Because if you don’t look at the big picture, you’re preaching to the con verted

Or worse, leading a horse to water.

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