Evangelists have a term for important people: "influential."
Why are influential important? They give you free advertising in important places. Example? Tonight, on the way to pick up some In-N-Out over by Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara, I was listening to KGO Radio, AM 810in San Francisco. Aside: I've been listening to KGO since I was about my son's age. Best talk show radio station. Funny thing is that Jeff Sandquist tells me he listens to KGO up in Seattle. KGO's signal reaches all the way to Alaska. That's what happens when you have three radio towers by the Dumbarton Bridge spraying 50,000 watts into the air.
Anyway, tonight Kareldid an hour on the Macintosh and who was on air? Jim Heid. Jim and I worked together on conferences back at Fawcette.
Jim's an influential. So is Karel.
Together they spent an hour giving free evangelistic coverage to Apple computer that Apple could never be able to buy. Both of these guys are an evangelist's dream.
How do you get to be an influential?
Karel is on the radio every Saturday night. Automatically an influential. But, in addition, he also owns his own Web design firm.
Jim wrote an influential book on Apple's "iApplications." He also plans conferences and used to write technology for the Los Angeles Times.
These two guys are the kinds of people that companies love. Not just in technology business, but in all kinds of business.
One thing I've been thinking about is how to grow influentials like Jim and Karel.
One way is not to compete with them. A few days ago I told you that I was getting book deals, due to my position in the industry. It's a very compelling argument that says "if you want influentials to be excited about your product, you must not compete with them by doing books and or other things."
It's something I'm going to spend a lot of time thinking about. Longhorn is exciting. There's a lot of business opportunity. But, I don't want to scare off the influentials.
After all, who is more impartial to most people? Someone like Jim or Karel, or a Microsoft employee? And, if I do a book I'll keep an influential from being created.
The strategy behind creating influentials sounds like an interesting article idea for the "Creating Customer Evangelists" website.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]
