In this interview, I particularly like Tara’s perspective on building community around a brand, in this case, Intuit.

Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton, and you’re listening to the Community Powered podcast series live at South By Southwest, and I’m with Tara Hunt, marketing lead for the partner platform at Intuit, a new roll for her. Welcome.

Podcast Here and Transcripts Below.

Susan Bratton & Tara Hunt

Tara Hunt: Thank you Susan. Great to be here.

Susan Bratton: Yes, I’m glad we were able to connect. And you’ve done a lot of work in the area of brand and community. Give us some of the background about some of the work that you’ve been doing there.

Tara Hunt: Well I, you know, I think my first brand in community project was with rhia.com, about four years ago now. And I joined the start-up, it was a little start-up, it hadn’t even launched in Silicon Valley, it came down from Canada. And they gave me the license actually to pursue the idea of building a brand through a community, through community outreach and inreach. And it was all experimental, but fantastically successful because we ended up, after six months of not being launched, of just being in private beta, at the end of the six months we opened our doors and had over a million photos uploaded and 20,000 registrants on the first day. It was a pretty good testament to how powerful online communities can be for companies.

Susan Bratton: So that was your early addiction to community?

Tara Hunt: Well I was already, I had been addicted to online communities personally for many years and started to think about them as a potentially really great way to spread word of mouth, especially if you are working or part of a brand that can give back to the community. And so this was my first real opportunity to apply that, that thought.

Susan Bratton: So now that you’re with Intuit, what are you focused on here at South By Southwest? Has it changed the filter of what you want to get done while you’re here?

Tara Hunt: Well I definitely have more meetings than my previous years at South By…

Susan Bratton: Are people trying to meet you and sell you things for Intuit and different products or what?

Tara Hunt: Not as, not as much that, but Intuit actually is more focused on being a more forward thinking innovated agile social company these days, because a lot of small businesses that have been using Nia QuickBooks and QuickIn for years, are starting to get interested in the online space, and starting to really be interested in connecting with other small businesses online. We have a really great community site at Intuit that’s very popular. And so Intuit in general is looking to reach out to a lot of the different software service applications that have come out through Web 2.0, and a lot of who are here featuring their products, whether in the trade show or they’re on panels or they’re just here enjoying themselves in Austin. So, I’d been talking to a lot of people through Twitter and email previous to being here and said, “Hey, we should meet up and talk a little bit about how we can work together.” So that’s more of what the meetings are about. So it’s a really positive fun thing, and nobody’s looking to sell, everybody’s looking to see how we can serve our customers better by working…

Susan Bratton: Has there been anything that you’ve seen that’s been particularly intriguing, some new product, technology, service, a new idea that you’ve heard about that’s got you going?

Tara Hunt: Well, I’m really enjoying Four Square, and I don’t know if you’re on Four Square…

Susan Bratton: I don’t know Four Square. Tell us what it is.

Tara Hunt: So it’s a replacement for dodge ball. Dodge ball was a location-based text messaging service that you could check into a location years ago that was bought by Google and just recently shut down by Google. So Twitter is awesome for, and has been really amazing for creating connections broadly, but the problem that occurs is when you come to a place like South By Southwest is that, you know, you’re following however many people, several hundreds of people, but they’re all around the world doing different things. So you’re wondering, “Where are people heading? What’s the part? What’s the part to not be at? What’s the panel to be at”, sort of thing, and Four Square has brought that back. So I can check into a panel and say I’m really enjoying this panel and all of my friends that follow me can know that they should come and check out that panel or, you know, there’s too long of a lineup at this party, so all my friends know not to come to that party and can tell me, “Come down to this place instead.” So it’s a really great service for that location-based.

Susan Bratton: So it’s a mobile app, it’s a mobile micro blog.

Tara Hunt: Yeah, it’s a mobile app. It’s also, so it’s on the iPhone, but I do believe they have a text messaging interface as well SMS interface.

Susan Bratton: And it’s called Four Square?

Tara Hunt: Four Square. And, play, I think it’s playfoursquare.com, is the name…

Susan Bratton: URL.

Tara Hunt: is the URL.

Susan Bratton: Okay, that’s great. Thank you. I would like to get some advice from you because you have done a number of communities for brands. If there’s someone who’s thinking about creating community as a brand, it’s a scary thing, you know, what if we build it and no one comes. Could you give us the one, maybe most dynamite piece of advice that you can for other brand people like yourself who are thinking about creating community? What should they know or be aware of.

Tara Hunt: Well it’s, it’s, when you, creating a community for a brand, it shouldn’t be about the brand at all. It should be about how you’re going to empower your community members to go further. This is what I, and I didn’t build the community for Intuit, it’s been around for a while, and I was really surprised to see that Intuit people actually don’t spend a lot of time in the community other than, you know, stepping in when they absolutely need to to help somebody out ‘cause another community member hasn’t come along, or if there’s a specific question about an Intuit product. Otherwise, they’re empowering and giving tools to the community members to help one another out. So, you know, if you have a question about, you know, what, should I be an LLC or a S Corp and what does that mean? There’re a lot of great conversations that are going on on that blog, or how to market my small local grocery store. There’s other small local grocery stores from other regions that are helping one another, and Intuit doesn’t step in and get in the way. Like, they create the platform and then get the heck out of the way so that their community members can really help one another out and go further. And I, you know, they talk about platform as a service and software as a service. I look at this as being community as a service, creating that platform for the community to really thrive.

Susan Bratton: Oh, I like that one. That’s one we have to Twitter; community as service, here we go. Well that’s great, Tara. Thank you so much. You’ve gotten to know Tara Hunt, marketing lead for the Partner Platform group at Intuit. I appreciate you being part of the Community Powered podcast.

Tara Hunt: Thank you Susan. It was great.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Alright. Thank you so much for listening to this, and I hope you’ll join us for more of the Community Powered podcast series.