The path to becoming a (successful) evangelist is next exactly well trod or understood yet, so I asked a couple people I know who have Evangelist in their titles if they
had any tips / reccomendations / other about it.

David Crow

David is a fixture in the Toronto tech
community and as one of the originators of Demo Camp is quite possibly the best
connected person in the city.

His two main points on evangelism are

  • You need to educate people about how to use the product. How to integrate it in to their development stacks and processes.
  • This is technical marketing. It’s about market reach. It’s about acquisition, conversation, and retention of customers.

The following things also got added to my reading list as part of the discussion

  • Creating Customer Evangelists – Authors Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba explain how to convert already loyal customers into influential and enthusiastic evangelists. The year-long research project that led to “Creating Customer Evangelists” outlines the framework for developing evangelism marketing strategies and programs. The ultimate goal is to create communities of influencers who drive sales or membership for your company or organization.
  • The Whuffie Factor – Whuffie is ‘social capital’ btw.
  • Creating Passionate Users – Kathy Sierra, please start blogging again
  • Developer Evangelism – Chris Heilmann’s site on the subject. It even has a handbook! (And was mentioned by others as well)

Christoper Blizzard

David mentioned that the Mozilla team as a good example, so I asked Tim Riley (Director of QA for Mozilla and Beautiful Testing co-editor) to put me in touch with Christopher Blizzard who run it. Here are his ‘advice-y’ bullets.

  • Be explicit about the audience your targeting. If it’s developers, build something for them. If it’s for influencers, build something for them.
  • Understand that you probably need separate programs that are both high-touch and low-touch.
  • Build a set of influencers / customers that you can talk to on a regular basis who will give you honest product feedback.
  • Don’t underestimate the value of docs – this can make or break a project.

Patrick Foley

Pat is an ‘ISV Architect Evangelist’ at Microsoft and co-host of the Startup Success Podcast. I bump into him at GLSEC usually, though not this year as I didn’t end up going. Hopefully next year. His three factors for success in evangelism are

  • Organization / time / task management – and reccomends the GTD system for tackling it
  • Presentation skills – join Toastmasters (or similar) and ‘practice, practice, practive’
  • Listening – Talking is preaching; if you want to evangelize, you have to listen.. To that end, he reccomended Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg

One other point that he made, which I’ll end this part of the series with, sums up a lot of the mindset of evangelism and is why you sometimes find them in the dev part of the org chart, but more often in the sales / marketing part.

Evangelism is a kind of sales, because you are trying to influence people’s behavior, just not necessarily with an actual exchange of funds (no quota). You have to have a technology background, but recognize that you are ultimately in sales now.