Are you an Evangelist?
Someone I met at lunch last week asked me “So, are you an evangelist for Amadeus?”…
Then - in one of those mysterious coincidences - I picked this up on my feed reader this morning: “Under The Radar: Office 2.0” by David Hornik, which began,
“I want to be an evangelist. That seems like a great job. Your job description goes something like “run around and talk about what great stuff you do.” Sometimes you get to evangelize to big companies. Sometimes you get to evangelize to startups. And lots of the time, like me, you find yourself on the conference circuit, where there is critical mass of people to be evangelized.
Why this focus on evangelism? I was just looking at the list of panelists for the Under The Radar: Office 2.0 conference coming up next Friday and the first panelist listed is “Jeff Barr, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services.” Jeff is a great guy — needless to say, I’ve bumped into him at conferences. I similarly first got to know Robert Scoble on the conference circuit when he was still a tech evangelist and pontificating for a living (But that’s a big company thing. Now that he’s at PodTech, he has to do some work for a living.) Perhaps the best known evangelist was Apple’s Mac Evangelist, Guy Kawasaki. Now, best I can tell, Guy is an evangelist for Guy. But he’s damn good at it…”
Now, although I do sometimes speak at panels and conferences, that is not what I do for a living…and neither am I in the league of Guy Kawasaki (or Robert Scoble, for that matter).
I agree with David though, “it seems like a great job”!
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* By the way, Jeff Barr (the Amazon evangelist) has two incredible posts on presenting in Second Life – to be more precise, “virtually” presenting in Second Life which made my jaw drop: here and here
