Update: Steve Rubel says a very similar thing here in AdAge.
Way back when This All Got Started, Guy Kawasaki was the only "tech evangelist" I knew of, and he was doing it for a hardware company. Then, it started to spread to internet companies. People like me who could talk a good game started spending part of our time as "consumer spokesperson" as well as our regular role, speaking at consumer expos (remember expos?), being interviewed by journalists and helping craft online marketing communications that were more than marketingspeak and jargon.
Now its Web 2.0, and evangelists and their relationships with customers and the industry are vital to a startup. Marketing Web 2.0 companies is mainly about direct relationships with the kinds of customers who will introduce their friends to your product or service. I'm thinking people like
Luke Watson at Bluepulse,
Tara Hunt in all her guises, and
Mick Liubinskas at Tangler.
So I was delighted to see that IM startup Meebo is recruiting evangelists in such an explicit and planned way.
Meebo has an impressive product that illustrates an intuitive grasp of the new web and they have a buzzing community of users. So they can really benefit from having the right people evangelising to create more and deeper relationships with their customers.
It would be a great role; how I wish I were 25 again!
Customer Engagement Superevangelist How you’ll contribute: *Be a passionate advocate and enthusiastic conduit between meebo and our members
*Talk, IM and email with members and help the meebo team improve our service
*Equip our members with the latest information about our service so that enthusiastic meebo fans can help spread meebo around the world
How you’ll be measured: *Increase the excitement and involvement in being a meebo member
*Increase the number of times meebo’s blogged by others
*Drive widespread adoption of meebo badges and other blog bling
*Increase adoption of meebo among popular members of the leading social network sites
*Build ongoing dialogs with members, potential members and influencers through blogs, advisory panels, beta groups, forums, newsletters and the site www.gomeebo.com
*Gather trend information, market and customer feedback and competitive information and feed it into meebo product and business development
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