Just a little something to make you smile today.

In November I spoke at nextMEDIA: Monetizing Digital Media. I got some major props for my talk, and a lot of people who heard about it have asked me to write it all down and share it online for everyone. I’m still working on that, taking my time because I want to do the subject justice. In the meantime here is my 20 minute talk edited down to 7 minutes. I hope you enjoy it! Please feel free to post any questions in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them.

If you’d like me to speak at your organization, please drop me a line.

I love when a high placed, respected marketing person comes along and validates what I’ve told hundreds of companies over the last few few years. When they boil it down into a simple, inarguable point, it’s all the better. James Stengel, Global Marketing Officer at Procter and Gamble, recently said this brilliant little quote.

Market share is trust materialized.

This is something a lot of companies frankly are not prepared for. Earning and keeping people’s trust is not an easy job. You can’t do it with glossy marketing and a token Corporate Social Responsibility rep, it takes company-wide commitment to deserving people’s trust. Having a community manager or ambassador is just the start, they’re a membrane - not a magical antibody that creates a healthy organism.

Consumers have no reason to trust you, so it is you who must open the relationship by placing your trust in them.

Collin Douma sums up radical trust for companies so well in this infographic. We’ll have to get him out to the next VizThink.

tags: business, marketing, transparency

It’s always been hard to put a label on the big bag of things I do for my work . At Flock I was the “Community Ambassador” (a term I made up), lately I’ve been talking to some people lately about “Director of Emerging Technology” roles and such…but “Technology Evangelist” is growing on me. The only catch is that my focus is more on people than technology, but I’ll try not to get too semantic about it.

A technical or technology evangelist is a person whose job or role is to promote technologies, usually new technologies. This may be, officially or unofficially, on behalf of a company or organisation, or on a personal basis, for instance open source evangelism. An evangelist promotes the use of a particular product or technology through talks, articles, blogging, user demonstrations, recorded demonstrations, or the creation of sample projects. The word evangelism is taken from the context of religious evangelism because of the similar recruitment of converts and the spreading of the product information through the ideological or committed.

Technology evangelist - Wikipedia

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