I have been developing a service (Bouldr) for a few years now – something I have been doing as a passionate hobby whenever I found time – and I have recently been granted the opportunity to work on it full time.

Despite my little project being a hobby, I’d love it to become popular among the community that it is targetted towards (climbers), but the marketing aspect has always filled me with dread. Knowing that by building something that is useful gives one as much of a shot at the big time as hiring an expensive PR company is certainly a weight off my shoulders.

Thankyou for the insight!

I think one of the most unexplored areas of Geek Marketing come when the technology/product/etc. moves from the world of the geeks to the mass market. I’ve seen a number of companies, large and small, stumble because they either tried to apply Geek Marketing techniques to a mass market audience that didn’t quite know what to do with them, or because in the transition they went too far and lost the sense of why their marketing and their message was special in the first place.

Whether it’s a construct like the blogosphere, which is really just starting to break through into the mass market consciousness; or a great product like Slingbox or Tivo that geeks understand inherently but have had difficulty gaining mindshare among “normal” consumers, this is an area in particular where companies could use some good advice.

“Doing well by doing good” should be a key part of marketing in general; for many years in the late 80′s, Apple’s internal mantra, for example, was simply to change the world. But harnessing that in a way that works for mass market consumers and wall street investors while remaining true to the geeks that believed in you at the beginning – that’s a balancing act we could always do better at.