Partnerships, Community and Events

Partners: overlap and adjacency

A good partner serves the same buyer for an adjacent job. An agency reporting tool and an agency billing tool share a buyer and solve neighbouring problems; each can recommend the other without competing. The two questions that matter are: how much of their audience is in your ICP (Lesson 1.4), and does recommending you make them look good to that audience? A large partner with little overlap is worth less than a small one whose whole list is your target.

Start with the smallest useful exchange — a co-written guide, a joint webinar, a mutual listing in each other's integrations page — and expand only when it produces conversations. Write down what each side gives and gets. Partnerships fail most often not from conflict but from nobody owning them after the launch announcement.

What a community actually is

Albert Muniz and Thomas O'Guinn's 2001 paper Brand Community in the Journal of Consumer Research defined the term: a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand. They identified three traditional markers of community in these groups: shared consciousness (members feel connected to each other, not just to the brand), rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility to one another.

That definition is a useful test of most 'community' initiatives, which are really audiences: a Slack workspace where the company posts and members read. An audience is valuable, but it is not a community until members talk to and help each other. A company can host, seed and moderate; it cannot manufacture the member-to-member bond. The practical implication is to invest in what produces those links — introductions, member-led sessions, recognition for people who help others — rather than in more company announcements.

Communities are also slow. Treat them as brand work in the sense of Lesson 1.1: their returns arrive over years and are hard to attribute.

Events: the follow-up is the event

An event — a conference stand, a talk, a dinner, a webinar — is mostly cost until the follow-up happens. The common failure is a stack of conversations captured on a phone and followed up a fortnight later, by which point the warmth is gone. Plan the follow-up before the event: who owns it, the deadline (within days, not weeks), the message for each type of conversation, and where the contacts will be recorded.

Decide in advance what the event is for. A talk to a room of category buyers is brand work; judge it by whether people remember you and mention it later. A booth scanning badges is activation; judge it by qualified conversations started and the meetings that follow. Judging a talk by badge scans, or a booth by applause, leads to the wrong conclusions about both.

Disclosure: the rules for borrowed trust

The FTC's Endorsement Guides apply whenever someone with a material connection to you — payment, free product, commission, employment, family — speaks about your product. The FTC's plain-language guidance is that such connections must be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, close to the endorsement and ideally at the start; that a single free product can be enough to require disclosure; that employees endorsing their employer must say so even if their profile lists the company; and that affiliate links need a clear label such as 'paid link' beside them, while vague tags like '#partner' or '#ambassador' are not clear enough. '#ad' or 'Ad:' at the start of a post is generally effective.

Since 2024 there is also a binding rule. The FTC's final rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, announced in August 2024, prohibits creating or buying fake reviews — explicitly including AI-generated ones and reviews from people with no real experience of the business — buying positive or negative reviews, undisclosed insider reviews from employees or their relatives, suppressing negative reviews through threats or intimidation, and buying fake social-media indicators such as followers or views. The rule lets the FTC seek civil penalties against knowing violators.

For a small team the operational rule is simple: every partner, affiliate, employee or incentivized customer post carries a clear disclosure, every review is from a real customer and is never paid for a particular sentiment, and nobody — including an AI agent drafting on your behalf — writes a testimonial in a customer's name.