I found this post "The Marketing Hipster Dictionary" by Craig Rosenberg (aka The Funnelholic) and enjoyed it.  (Yes, I found it through a vanity search since he mentioned me... but Craig is a good guy, already in my RSS reader and I've done a webinar with him before.)

Craig mentions a number of concepts in this post, but one intrigued me because it hit home - "Maven Marketing".  Craig says:

"Maven marketing: I just made this phrase up too, and I'm hoping it sticks. Today's marketer does two things with mavens:  (a) Courts and/or works with mavens to create helpful buyer materials that don't necessarily ever mention their product - that's right. Mavens get more downloads than you and are TRUSTED. Today's buyer trusts two people: their peers and their mavens. Those two groups far outweigh the vendor.
(b) Creates mavens from their organization. Here's one for all those people with social media budgets. Start by creating an internal maven. Here's an example from the marketing industry: Mike Volpe (@mvolpe), VP at Hubspot, has 15,872 people who follow his every move on Twitter. They read him, respect him and re-Tweet him. That's hipster marketing."

What I find interesting is that is isn't just me at HubSpot that we use as a maven to build community.  That would not be scalable, and would not be a smart way to build the company.  We're developing lots of people in the company as useful (not salesy) resources for the marketing community.  Some examples (and I left out a LOT):  Dan Zarrella, Kyle James, Rick Burnes, Ellie Mirman, Beth Dunn, Karen Rubin, Peter Caputa, Jeanne Hopkins, Rebecca Corliss, Prashant Kaw, Pamela Seiple, and many, many more.

What do you think?  Does your company develop mavens for your market?  Leave a comment...