It's very interesting to me, given how advanced the HN community is in terms of programming and business strategy, how inefficient most of the marketing strateg

It's very interesting to me, given how advanced the HN community is in terms of programming and business strategy, how inefficient most of the marketing strategies suggested here are. (with the notable exception of: "make an incredibly useful product") Indeed, the notion of "make something awesome and it will market itself" is a useful heuristic for guiding a deeper, sustainable marketing strategy. It's a meritocracy out there, folks, especially in terms of media. ("Media" meaning the layer of communication that connects services and users) That media you create also needs to stand alone as useful information. Traditional PR is based on leveraging connections ("beating the meritocracy") on behalf of clients to expose a product to an audience. One business strategy equivalent of this might be Facebook forcing users to return to Facebook.com to reply to an inter-profile message; it's unnecessary coercion that ultimately degrades the quality of the product. I advise businesses to begin creating an unfair advantage that is based on the preexisting expertise of the management team. Toyota's marketing channel within Twitter Japan and Miller Brewing's BrewBlog.com are stellar examples of how you can begin to create a marketing channel that attracts attention on its own merit (and has great SEO effects...and scales like a mother). There's a number of other issues to grok here, including viral mechanisms and transparent outreach tactics, that I unfortunately don't have time to get into at the moment. I did get into some of this a little bit on my blog here: http://www.ethanbauley.com/post/34550190 http://www.ethanbauley.com/post/34550190 Great question!