Understanding the role of an Evangelist at a Web 2.0 Company

I’ve been having several conversations with C-level folks at Web 2.0 startups.  While they’ve got a clear vision on their product roadmap, market segments, costs and revenue structures, they’re often not sure of how to market their company in today’s social media landscape.

The most common questions I get are:

• How should I get the word out?
• Who should I talk to?
• Should I use blogs?  I don’t fully understand them, why shouldn’t I just place banner ads?
• Should I hire a full-time evangelist or a part-time evangelist?
• What do I do after I get TechCrunched?
• Do I need forums and blogs? Or just blogs?
• What should my blog talk about?

Understanding the role of your Evangelist
An evangelists role is to go beyond understanding and get others to ‘believe’ in your product or service.  This is beyond just communication and advertising and gets to the fundamental root of human communications, building trust.  Unlike “traditional marketing”of crafting messages and clever advertising, the evangelist often affixes their name and face to the company.

Noted evangelists
Just a few that spring to mind would include; Robert Scoble for Microsoft, Guy Kawasaki for Apple, Tara Hunt for Riya, Brian Oberkirch for Weblogs Work, and Will Pate for Flock.  There are many, many others, those are just a few that spring to mind.

Having a great product is not enough
Obviously having a unique and a product that addresses a s business need are important, that’s a given.  However, the barriers to entry for the Web 2.0 space are very, very low.  While you may have a unique technology you probably only have a 6-9 month lead time on a copy cat.  The key differentiator is having strong program and evangelist that can get to your key adopters and influencers in your specific market place.  Nearly every company I talk to has been TechCrunched or Scobalized. This leads to a spike in traffic, raised awareness but doesn’t guarantee user adoption over a medium or long term duration.

Barriers to entry are low in Web 2.0
Most companies don’t have a “Purple Cow”.  (A Seth Godin term for a very unique and remarkable product). Frankly, there are too many Web 2.0 companies, there are nearly 3-5 companies in nearly every niche. Consistent, persistent evangelism is needed to increase adoption levels over a steady period of time after you get Tech Crunched or Scobalized.

Great products and Great Marketing
Aside from building a great product, companies should consider developing or hiring an evangelist to be the face of your company, get in front of key audiences, develop a social media strategy and/or a business blogging strategy and connect with your audiences quickly and fast.

Need to know more?
If you need recommendations for folks that do this type of work, please contact me, I’m happy to refer you to my trusted peers.  Specific folks have unique backgrounds and skill sets that perhaps I can refer you to the right one.  Typically they all know each other so you can easily tap their network (they’re often ‘super connectors’) and by just knowing them you’ll benefit.

Related Thoughts
A long time ago I wrote about how to be a corporate blog evangelist, and also the difference between an evangelist and a leader.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 7th, 2006 at 11:06 am and is filed under Community Marketing, Social Media, Web Marketing, Web Strategy, Word of Mouth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.