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I was recently questioned on twitter about the way I described former TV anchor and reporter Tom Tucker in this post.
I referred to him as a social media enthusiast and evangelist. I’ll tell you right now that I simply copied that from his bio and quite honestly, I don’t see anything wrong with that.
I had also spoken with him at length before we recorded this podcast, and he talked about his blog and his history of pushing hard for social media with his employers and his excitement about his new endeavor, Talk Social Media.
It is not his full-time job and does not yet pay the bills, (he’s a corporate trainer by day) but he is passionate as most of us are, and it may pay them one day, if he’s lucky. But someone on twitter wanted to know more, and that’s okay too.
Here’s the @reply:
@communitygirl How can you call Tucker a social media enthusiast and evangelist when he’s only tweeted 7 times since Feb. 2008? Where else?
Now, I don’t think that having only seven tweets in a year disqualifies you from being a social media evangelist. Perhaps it is an account that you decided not to use, or maybe you didn’t “get” twitter at first, much like I didn’t. Maybe you’re active on many other SM platforms. The possibilities are many.
I do recognize that this person only wanted to know more and I did oblige, because that’s what we do on twitter. But it got me thinking.
When can one claim this title without bringing criticism their way? Is it after 500 tweets, 1,000 followers, 2,500 Facebook friends, 348 blogposts? What? Maybe it’s once you’ve explained twitter to 134 people and got your mom active on Friendfeed and Flickr and convinced your company to start a corporate blog.
Here are the definitions of evangelist on dictionary.com:
e⋅van⋅ge⋅list
–noun
| 1. | a Protestant minister or layperson who serves as an itinerant or special preacher, esp. a revivalist. |
| 2. | a preacher of the gospel. |
| 3. | (initial capital letter ) any of the writers (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) of the four Gospels. |
| 4. | (in the primitive church) a person who first brought the gospel to a city or region. |
| 5. | (initial capital letter) Mormon Church. a patriarch. |
| 6. | a person marked by evangelical enthusiasm for or support of any cause. |
So, if we go with those definitions, evangelism can be all word-of-mouth. We can argue that you have to practice to be able to speak about anything with authority and I buy that to a certain extent. But you can also dabble, understand the benefits and spread the word.
Think about it. Aren’t we all evangelists of some sort?
I am a Coach Purse evangelist, a Little Gym evangelist, a lasagna evangelist and a Arm & Hammer Carpet Cleaner evangelist. I am also a PTA evangelist, a Lexus evangelist (don’t have one but I love them and I will get one some day) and an outlet mall evangelist. You could also consider me a Desperate Housewives and Mott’s Applesauce evangelist as well and I don’t think anyone is going to ask me how many bowls of applesauce I’ve eaten to clarify my status as an evangelist.
You may be laughing but it’s true. Anyone can evangelize. Yes, there should be some experience to back it up, but who’s to say how much or how little?
What are your thoughts?
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Stumble It!I often share my thoughts on this blog and in the comments area of other blogs about the importance of large corporations taking the time to interact beyond their own communities and reaching out to smaller niche communities where conversations about their brands are also taking place.
Yesterday I decided to perform a little test to see if I could facilitate that reaction.
I placed a call to Walmart corporate and followed up with this email at 3:20pm:
Hello. My name is Angela Connor. I manage WRAL.com’s online community GOLO.com and recently spoke to Ashley Hardee in media relations who suggested that I use this email address.
It is not uncommon for our community of more than 10,000 members to share their experiences and there have been several instances where Walmart has come up.
In one particular blog, which was posted today, the blogger is discussing poor customer service at one of your photo studios and will likely have great influence on other members with this account.
You can find the blog here.
It sounds to me as though there may have been a scheduling mix-up that caused the problem and I think if someone from your organization got involved in the conversation or issued a statement that I can post, it might serve you well.
I am sure it is not your practice to engage in all of the conversations taking place on the web, but this may be a good place to start.
Please let me know if I can help in any way. I do hope to hear from you.
Regards,
Angela Connor
I received this response just 30 minutes later, at 3:50pm:
Good afternoon, Angela. Thanks for the e-mail.
Obviously, the experience detailed on your site isn’t one that meets our expectations. That said, the PictureMe Portrait studios are an independent business which leases space from Walmart in many of our stores (much like a McDonald’s or Subway do from the convenience dining aspect of our store experience). Your inquiry would be better directed to PictureMe, which is a subsidiary of St. Louis-based CPI Corp. (cpicorp.com).
I don’t have any contact info for their press office and it wasn’t readily available at their website, but I did find a name and number attached to one of their investor relations news releases:
Jane Nelson, CPI Corp.,
+1-314-231-1575
Hope this helps!
Thanks!
Dan Fogleman, Sr. Manager, Media Relations
I then posted a blog in the community titled: A response from Walmart sharing the e-mail response from Walmart.
It was greatly appreciated and now the community sees me as even more of an advocate for them, and appreciates the time I took to send it. I sent Walmart a link to that blog so they could see the feedback from the community but I also indicated that there was no need to respond a second time.
I think we’re on their radar.
I will do this more often, and I think you should too.
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Think about fear for just a minute.
Is it always a bad thing? I would argue that it isn’t and what fear sometimes does is elicit courage, by default. Fear can make us find the biggest, brightest ideas of our lives. It can make us move faster, make quick decisions and throw caution to the wind.
Fear is a tool that, when used accordingly, can push us to greatness.
In my last post: Six ways to get social media buy-in from the boss, the underlying theme was scare the heck out of your boss if he or she keeps pushing off innovation and incorporating social media into the fabric of the organization. It was subtle in may ways, but present nevertheless. One of my suggestions was to accentuate the negative content found about the company through a Google search, and touting the social media efforts of competitors.
Richard Millington, a blogger I read regularly and respect a great deal, reminded me in the comments area that one should be wary of focusing solely on the negatives for participating in social media. He added: “I think it’s also important to have some great case studies from relevant industries, do some twitter searches for your industry’s subject matter and demonstrate how easy it is to reach so many poeple.”
Richard is right.
But some eggs are harder to crack than others. If you work for one of those eggs, you know what I’m talking about. So, consider fear as a tool and add it to your arsenal.
Show them that they are being left in the dust. Make them move faster, make quick decisions and throw caution to the wind.
Scared? Good. Courage is right around the corner!
I’m here at the inaugural Internet Summit in Chapel Hill and just left an interesting presentation called Blogging and New Media.
The panelists: Andy Beal of Trackur, Henry Copeland of Blogads.com, Brad Hill of Weblogs, Inc, Tim Schigel of ShareThis and Scott Gardner of Triangle Direct Media.
They all underscored the importance of something I believe in wholeheartedly: Creating a conversation and engaging users online. Andy consults on reputation management, so I was particularly interested in some of his comments because I always open presentations with this: “If you don’t manage your online reputation, Google and others will do it for you.”
Here are a few of the notes I was able to jot down during the panel. I’m also sending out tweets, so if you aren’t already following me on Twitter, I’m @communitygirl.
A few takeaways:
- The driving force behind blogs should be radical commitment to transparency.
- Blogging is a lifestyle, attitude and participation in the community. No blog is an island. There is a series of blgospheres. A swarm of people behaving as a group.
- It’s not about audience. The word is community.
- Principles of blogging:Post a lot, and succinctly. Be short and targeted. Be prolific and precise.
- If CEO wants to blog, ask what communities you want to participate in.
- Companies that treat bloggers like they would The New York Times will find success.
More to come…
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