Somewhere in the shady world of sales and marketing and the cheery world of consumers is a role which transcends the paycheck: the evangelist
These are individuals who become fans of your product to the point that they will devote increasing amounts of time to the promotion of that product. Sometimes, like in a technology company, there may be a paid role for someone as a technology evangelist but they are often not much more than creative ways of saying ‘manager’ or ‘liaison’.
The biggest and most visible example of evangelism has to be in the Mac world. In all my years as a technologist I have never seen anything like the evangelism of the Mac. GNU/Linux has something of it but is hurt by the limited scope of the individuals (who tend to be technologists). With the Mac you might have an IT guy a teacher, a photographer, a civil servant, an artist and an athlete able to converse together about the same subject which they all enthuse about. The proliferation of Mac User Groups as shiny, happy places where you can meet like-minded individuals in a kind of social-network (years before the term gained such household acceptance) meant that even in the dark days of the mid nineties, when Apple’s future hung by a thread, there were still places to go and meet with other people (and to a degree, commiserate).
Other companies have evangelists too. Microsoft’s evangelists tend not to be as colourful or as interesting but they make their presence known by pushing through ‘homogenisation’ of networks and ‘standardising of operating systems when what they really mean is ‘move to Windows because it’s the only thing I know. Thankfully, apart from in straight IT disciplines, this breed is dying out.
Google has evangelists which is creates by giving out limited beta invites to some people and allowing them to give invites to their friends, creating cliques of application users who inadvertently give the service exclusivity (and therefore value) as well as acting as a scaling test for the service.
Another breed of evangelist is the guy who just invited you to join FaceBook/Bebo/Myspace/LinkedIn or any of the other sites where they encourage you to rat out your friends to their marketing department. They want you to join because it makes their network bigger, they seem more popular, they can keep track of you or remember your birthday easier.
These big companies absolutely need you. They need you to attract your friends to these services so they can charge your eyeballs to their advertisers and make money.
This is how Google is a $150 billion company, why FaceBook was valued at $15 billion. Because they own you, the individual.
Apple needed the individuals to ‘keep the faith’ so they would continue to buy the product and, at the end of the day they need people to buy the product. Google and FaceBook need you to just try the product as they give it away for free. As Web 2.0 is all about moving the content from the traditional providers to the end users, Web 2.0 also means the revenue source comes not from the end users but because of them.
