Community marketing in a nutshell:

1. Find the people who are naturally interested in your product/service.
2. Reach out to them.
3. Inform them (don't sell them).
4. Excite them

They will take it from there. A little bit of work and a big impact.

Here's the evidence to back it up.

Ian Ayres is the NYT best-selling author of SuperCrunchers.

After reading the book, I reached out to him, brokered an intro to the SQL data-mining team. He got every excited about it.

Now, he's promoting Microsoft's BI solution on a Gartner BI webcast.

A million times more effective than an ad (much cheaper) and more credible.