Random thoughts on social media, blogging, and evangelism
It may be obvious to everyone else, but I’ve suddenly realized that social media and blogging is much more closely linked with evangelism than with personal expression. While blogging started out really as a way to communicate and express personal thoughts and ideas, it seems to me that blogging’s current incarnation is much closer to corporate or product evangelism–the process of convincing people to believe in a cause/effort/and/or product. In fact, I’d almost say that blogging and social media (whether that’s through social networking sites like Facebook, or communications services like twitter)–is the natural home of product and corporate evangelists.
Evangelism — in the corporate sense — really took off in the 1980′s with Apple Computer, which had a very organized program of user groups, support programs, free t-shirt giveaways, and–most importantly–product evangelists who helped get the word out about the firm’s Macintosh computers. In fact, that legacy — and process — continues today, with the company’s retail stores essentially storefronts for Apple evangelists, and a near religious following for the company’s products.
The entire idea of product evangelism at Apple was Guy Kawasaki, who wrote the book on product evangelism, and helped push the idea of evangelism into Silicon Valley. Not surprisingly, in this new world he’s a popular blogger as well.
I’ve been seeing this more and more. Instead of blogs, social networking sites, and other social media as being a means for personal expression, they are driven by primarily by product evangelists from companies, fans of certain products/companies, or by evangelism-savvy public relations and marketing folks. In fact, the most popular blogs — IMHO — are absolutely evangelizing specific causes. Hence, you see the popularity of Robert Scoble — an evangelist for cool new technology (once a product evangelist at Microsoft); TechCrunch – an evangelist for Web 2.0 startups; Guy Kawasaki, mentioned above, an evangelist for startups and venture capital; and Seth Godin, an evangelist for marketing. Evangelists have a natural affinity for convincing and advocating for their cause — an natural and essential trait for a blogger/social media guru. Social media is really the new home for the corporate evangelist.
