Janakiram MSV » Evangelism

Personal Branding and Evangelism

Jani — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:58:38 +0000

After covering the key traits of a technology evangelist and why technology evangelism matters, I want to discuss personal branding in the context of evangelism.

Before the interweb took over the print media, I grew up reading the tech. columns written by Yashwant Kanetkar, Dr. Nitin Paranjpe, Dr. Vijay Mukhi in Express Computer. In the mid 90s, I found the articles written by Atul Chitnis and Kishore Bhargava in PCQuest pretty interesting.

After I entered the college, it was Ray Duncan, Jeff Prosise, and Dan Appleman who caught my fancy. Their works really impressed me and motivated me to enter this field.

During the early days of my career, I started following Roger Sessions, Don Box, David Chappell and Charles Petzold.

In the current context, I admire Scott Guthrie, Mark Russinovich, Steve Jobs and Guy Kawasaki.

And, of course I have my own contemporaries and ex-colleagues like Vinod Kumar M, Harish Ranganathan, Raj Chaudhuri, Sanjay Vyas and Daniel Ingitaraj who mesmerize the audiences and walk away with best session ratings in any tech. conference.

So, what is common across Yashwant Kanetkar, Atul Chitnis, Jeff Prosise, Scott Guthrie, Don Box, Mark Russinovich and others in my list?

Apart from being authors, consultants and subject matter experts, all of them have a very strong personal brand that they have created over a period of time. All of them are also evangelists for the technology or the platform that they strongly believed in.

Not convinced? Watch Scott Guthrie’s keynote from Mix; catch Atul Chitnis in action during one of the FOSS.in events; Watch the video of Steve Jobs launching iPad or attend Don Box’s session on Distributed Computing. You will tend to agree with me.

Steve Jobs with iPad

So, what has personal branding got to do with evangelism? Remember that evangelism is all about influencing the decision makers. Influence comes with authority and confidence. Personal branding is an essential tool for reaching out to the world and positioning yourself as an expert in your subject.

There is a misconception that personal branding is all about ‘I-me-myself’ and shamelessly pushing the agenda. The truth is that personal branding is all about helping others and empowering them with the right information. In his book named Me 2.0, Dan Schawbel articulates this point very well. Personal branding is all about helping others to make them successful and not just promoting yourself!

If you carefully observe what is common across the personalities that I mentioned, you would notice certain attributes among them. Let’s discuss what those qualities are.

Top 5 attributes of successful personal brands

1) Creating a Niche – People with strong personal brands always associate themselves with a unique niche. You think of ASP.NET when you hear the name Scott Guthrie. Atul Chitnis is synonymous with the FOSS movement in India. Mark Russinovich is immediately identified with the Windows Internals. For most of the computer science students in India, it is Yashwant Kanetkar who created the ‘C’ programming language. It is essential that evangelists align themselves with a technology niche that will be strongly associated with them. In the longer term, this will help them gain the authority and establish their credibility in the community.

2) Being Passionate – Evangelists with successful personal brands always demonstrate passion for the product and the cause that they strongly believe in. Steve Jobs is extremely passionate when he launches a new product from Apple. Though it is tempting, they don’t attack the competition directly. Successful brands and evangelists know the art of being subtle in dealing with the competition.

3) Being Connected – It is extremely important to be connected with the audience. This could be through offline one-to-many presentations or online channels like blogs, podcasts and social networks. Scott Guthrie has 19K followers on Twitter and his blog enjoys a great subscription. Staying in touch with the community is the key thing to sustain the brand.

4) Being Consistent – It is important to be consistent in positioning and messaging your personal brand. Your blog, your tweets and updates should be speaking the same language. Evangelists should not switch their messaging often. If you are a web evangelist, be consistent in your messaging around web related technologies. If your blog has posts covering inconsistent content that doesn’t align with your niche, your brand value gets diluted. Each and every brand element of yours makes a statement and it is your responsibility to make them consistent.

5) Being Accessible – I once mailed Scott Guthrie requesting for a sample source code that he mentioned on his blog. I got an instant response. Mark Russinovich is equally accessible and responsive. Most of the individuals with a strong personal brand presence are surprisingly more accessible than we think. Successful evangelists with personal brands don’t let the branding come in their way in being accessible to their customers and audience.

So, evangelists and aspiring evangelists – start taking your personal brand seriously! It will not only add value your employer and the product, but will also give a big boost to your career!

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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Why Technology Evangelism Matters?

Jani — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:22:35 +0000

A decade back only a handful of folks carried the title of an ‘Evangelist’ on their business cards. This role was predominantly found within software product and developer platform companies. It is Apple, Microsoft, Sun and Google that made this title sound very cool. Today it is common to find Evangelists in the corporate world. I have also seen a few companies giving the title of an Evangelist to the honorary roles and external profiles associated with them. It is not uncommon to encounter sales folks, marketers and consultants in the guise of an Evangelist. I sometimes found that when the HR team cannot find a suitable title, they park the newly defined profile under the Evangelist title.

I want to touch upon the sensitive aspect of what evangelism is and what it isn’t.

First, let me start by calling out what doesn’t qualify to be called as Evangelism:

1) Sales – Evangelism is never about closing a sale. Sales folks are shrewd business people with a single-minded focus on clinching the deal. They are less emotional and sentimental about the product that they are selling. They can pretty much sell anything to anyone. On the other hand, an Evangelist would go any length to convince the customer about the value proposition and focuses less on the transactional outcome. Organizations should never treat Evangelists as pre-sales resources. They always help the company acquire and retain loyal customers who will be the advocates of the brand in the longer term.

2) Marketing – Evangelism is perceived as a marketing technique by many. Marketing is all about accelerating the sales cycle. It involves running the right campaign involving the customers, partners and the company with a goal to create a ‘pull’ for the product. A typical marketing campaign has a defined life-time and the success metric is always the market share. Evangelism is a long term investment and goes much beyond the time lines of a fiscal year. The success metric of Evangelism is qualitative than quantitative. If the effectiveness of a marketing campaign is measured through the market share, the real impact that Evangelism brings is the positive mind share for the product. Marketing Managers cannot replace passionate Evangelists. Period.

3) Consulting – This is another common misconception. Few companies project the Evangelist as the best-in-town technical expert and will put him through the scariest fire-fighting exercise at a customer. Not a good idea! Evangelists are generally good at a breadth of technologies and great at articulating the value proposition. Evangelists are at their best when put in front of 100 audiences and they walk out leaving the hall thoroughly impressed and completely convinced. They need not have the technical depth of a consultant who focuses on one and only one technology. Evangelists are not billable resources. They need their own space and the freedom of speech to excel!

4) Training – No doubt! Evangelists are the best story-tellers in the town. They simplify complex terminologies and explain the concepts in a lucid and easy manner. But that doesn’t mean Evangelists are the best trainers. Evangelism is all about influencing and not hand-holding the customers. They hate spoon feeding and delivering ‘courses’ based on a fixed curriculum. They paint the big picture and are great at instigating the desire to use a product. They are too impatient to stand up and deliver a day-long lecture.

5) Program Management – Sure! Evangelists are disciplined enough to run their mission like an independent business. They love to strategize, plan and execute to achieve their goal. But that doesn’t turn Evangelists into Program Managers. The force that constantly keeps the Evangelists on the move is the passion for the product and not the milestones, strategy meetings and long conference calls. I have seen some Program Managers at Microsoft who are the best Evangelists for their product or feature. But it is an exception! Evangelists who are forced to be Program Managers will lose the sight of the long term mission and end up being glorified coordinators.

So, you are wondering how the existence of an Evangelist is justified! If they don’t belong to any of the mainstream functions that are essential for the survival of a company, why should they get paid in the first place? Having a team of Evangelists is a luxury and not every company can afford it. But companies who have a long term vision and strongly believe in making customers an integral part of their journey do invest in them.

I want to point you to what Jonathan Schwartz, President & CEO of Sun said about Evangelism. In his blog post, Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps, Jonathan puts Developer Advocacy as the number one priority.

“1. Recruit every developer on earth to use our software or services.

This is a strategic activity, not a financial one, so don’t look for revenue here. I’ll devote an entire entry to understanding the motivations and mechanisms driving technology adoption, and to discussing the varied audiences we target. As the head of developer technologies from a very large customer said to me last week over dinner, “I haven’t visited Sun in five years, but all of a sudden you seem to matter to my developers.” I’ll help parse that statement in my next entry.”

The above statement has a lot of inner meaning. It tells us that even after owning the most successful and a mature platform called Java, Sun still puts developer evangelism in the forefront of their strategy. The other fact that it highlights is that when you engage with the right set of technical audience within a customer account, you will start influencing the most crucial management decision. Read the interesting and impacting post by Jonathan on technology adoption and how evangelism influences it. I completely connect with it as I had the opportunity to be the first Microsoft Academic Evangelist in India to run the academic evangelism initiative that had a positive impact on the academic ecosystem and Microsoft.

I also covered the 7 key traits of an Evangelist in one of my earlier posts.

Now, let us see what value Evangelism brings to the table:

1) Trust – Evangelists are the biggest catalysts in building the trust around the product that they believe in. They naturally become the trusted advisor for the customer because they know the intentions of an Evangelist and believe in his conviction. No other role is as strategic as an Evangelist to win over the customer trust!

2) Credibility – This emerges from the trust element that I discussed earlier. Through honest and passionate discussions, an Evangelist will demonstrate that he is genuinely interested in the customer realizing the value of the product and get the best of it. There are more chances that the customer will involve the Evangelist before finalizing the next big bet.

3) Influence – The best thing about Evangelism is that it is viral. A good Evangelist not only drives the adoption of the product, but also turns the customer into his Co-Evangelist. Together they soon create an army of influencers, advocates and brand ambassadors for the product. No other job function can do this so effectively.

4) Community – This is a logical climax to the above. A successful Evangelist will herd all the influencers together to form an active community. He takes charge of keeping them excited and motivated all the time. The organic growth of this community is a positive sign of successful evangelism and the popularity of the brand.

5) Advocacy – An Evangelist is the first and the best advocate of the product. He is the default spokesperson to stand up and responsibly talk to the press or the critiques. He wouldn’t loose his cool when attacked by the competition or the hostile audience. He would have an objective yet meaningful discussion and walks out unscathed.

Evangelists are uniquely positioned to deliver unmatched value to the company. Organizations and managers should learn the art and science of managing the evangelist teams to get the best out of them.

There is an interesting post on Evangelism Beyond Boundaries by my ex-colleague and a good friend Vinod Kumar.

I want to conclude this article by recalling what Guy Kawasaki told me when I asked him about differentiating the fanatics from evangelists. Fanatics forcefully push their agenda whereas an Evangelist always puts the customer first.

Do share your experiences of interacting with an Evangelist that you have come across.

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FOSS.IN/2009 – A Brilliant Event!

Jani — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:44:13 +0000

I have been following this event every year for the last decade (I still remember the very first event where it was called Bang!Linux). I managed to present at foss.in in 2002 and 2003 (It was called Linux Bangalore at that point). Since then this event has become a phenomenon and raises the bar year on year! Kudos to Atul Chitnis (@achitnis) and his team for turning this into a cult.

My first experience of foss.in was through a talk on Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure in 2002 along with my colleague, Tarun Anand. To be honest, The very thought of presenting .NET to a set of hardcore OSS geeks made me pretty nervous.

I also managed to convince the event team to include my talk on Microsoft Windows & Linux – Side by Side in 2003. I still remember this session as one of my best sessions as all the demos worked like a charm and the audience connected with me very well!

The talk that I submitted in 2004 was rejected by the team as they felt it was indirectly pitching and marketing Microsoft products. Though I tried convincing them, to my disappointment, the talk didn’t make it to the final list.

After a long gap of 6 years, I was thrilled to see my talk getting shortlisted for this year. Few things changed from 2003. I don’t work for Microsoft anymore and I turned into a neutral technology evangelist focusing on a broad spectrum of technologies including OSS. The crux of the session is how the tux on the Cloud delivers value.

Because of my hectic schedule at work, I couldn’t make it to the event for the first 4 days. I managed to reach the venue at 11AM on Saturday and attended 2 sessions on CPU hard limits and Incremental Development. Lunch needs a special mention. The food was refreshingly different and tasted very good. This was catered by the rural restaurant, Hallimane which specializes in authentic Karnataka cuisine. My session started at 2PM and the hall was almost 70% full. I realized that most of the audiences had a good understanding of Virtualization and Hypervisors. I spent few minutes establishing the concepts of Cloud Computing and then started to map OSS contributions at every layer. I briefly touched upon the OSS Hypervisors like XEN and KVM, setting up the LAMP based apps on Amazon EC2 and Hadoop case study of The NewYork Times. I did an end to end demo of launching and customizing a LAMP AMI on Amazon EC2. I had interesting questions from the audience on Hypervisors, load balancing on Cloud, Web Hosting vs. Cloud and security on Cloud. This talk is based on my article that I have written sometime back. You can download the slide deck from the Talks section of my website.

My Session

I spent a lot of time answering and interacting with the participants after my session. I also got the opportunity to meet Tinu Cherian (@tinucherian) and Kiran Jonnalagadda (@jackerhack) in person and we discussed few community related initiatives.

When I went to meet Atul Chitnis, he was sitting in the middle of tangled CAT-5 cables and a bunch of Macs in the Network Operation Center. It was also amusing to see like minded developers huddling to hack Linux Kernel.

The Network Operations Center

Hacker Session

I missed the evening party due to some personal commitment. I was following the Twitter stream and looked like the party rocked!

Having been a part of many technology conferences as an organizer and as a speaker, I very clearly understand what it takes to deliver an event of this scale. FOSS.IN stands out for just one thing – It is driven out of genuine passion for sharing and spreading the knowledge. This element is visible everywhere and starts right at the registration desk. Every volunteer / speaker is sincere, passionate and tried to add value to the event. It set an example of how a technology conference can be run by the community. I feel proud to be a part of foss.in and look forward to contribute to it in the coming years!

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Business Technology Summit 09 – Trip Report

Jani — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:36:05 +0000

Today I delivered my talk on Cloud Computing and Open Source at the Business Technology Summit 09. I reached the venue just before my session. JN Tata Auditorium at Indian Institute of Science is my favorite venue to present. I delivered many of my talks here in the last 10 years. Particularly, Hall-1 is very special to me as I happened to deliver some of my best sessions including the talk on ‘Linux & MS Windows – Side By Side’ at Foss.in in 2003.

My talk is based on the article that I wrote a week back. In fact, that post emerged during my preparation for this talk. I had the hall full with very interactive audiences. My biggest challenge was to cover all the aspects in 50 min. Surprisingly I finished on time and could also take a couple of questions. You can download the presentation from the Talks section of my website.

Business Technology Summit 09

Later in the day, I joined Jinesh Varia, Technology Evangelist from Amazon for a deep dive on Amazon Web Services. I volunteered to proctor the lab session. This was a paid workshop with the concept of ‘Bring Your Own Laptop’. Due to connectivity issues, most of the attendees couldn’t download the tools required for the workshop. Jinesh covered the concepts of S3, EC2, SimpleDB and EBS. I found the discussion around migration and architecture very interesting and useful. I am inspired to write a white paper on migrating a classic LAMP application to AWS.

I thoroughly enjoyed being a part of BTS 09. Congratulations to Dilip Thomas, CEO, Salt March India.

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NASSCOM Product Conclave 2009 – Trip Report

Jani — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:37:29 +0000

I attended the NASSCOM Product Conclave 2009 on 27th and 28th October. Here is my trip report and key take-away from the conference.

The only reason why I decided to attend this conference was Guy Kawasaki. I admire him for more than one reason. I like Guy because he paved the way for the new profession in the complex world of IT – Evangelism. He set industry precedence for software evangelism. I heard about Guy way back in 2003 when we were in process of forming the budding evangelism team at Microsoft. One of my managers pointed me to Guy Kawasaki’s blog and that’s what laid a strong foundation for my passion for evangelism. Since then, his books and blogs always inspired me. I follow some of his tips to deliver impacting presentations and compelling demos. Even today when someone argues with me on the value of evangelism, I point them to the book – “Selling the Dream”.

As I expected, Guy Kawasaki did a great job as the keynote speaker at the event. It was quite refreshing to see a keynote speaker in an informal dressing, casual and relaxed body language and finally a keynote that made sense for the audience. Guy’s message was clear – use the current technology trends and economic conditions to your benefit.

Here is a summary of the key points:

Think like your customer and build a product that you use. This is so obvious yet many startups miss this point. His example of Ice 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 is very apt. Look at the slides to get some context.
The OS, development platform and tools are absolutely free and there is no point in spending money on expensive tools and technologies. While my friends at Microsoft will vehemently disagree with this fact, I partially agree with him. LAMP + Eclipse are a great combo to deliver pretty powerful and real world products.
The next point is huge – Don’t over spend on your marketing! By leveraging the social media and social networking appropriately, you can reach to a customer who wouldn’t care to watch the most expensive ad campaign that you are running on the TV. His AllTop.com is a proof that this model works. All you got to know is the right way of using them.
Suck Down and Suck across – I had to jump out for a quick call and missed his explanation for this
Make Twitter and TweetMeme your platform for market survey and analytics. He explained a scenario how TweetMeme can help you get deep insights into the market and customer mindset. Incidentally, I put the TweetMeme button just a day before I attended this keynote.
Again, this is a well know fact. Some of the college interns are the brightest and have the caliber that can put certified professionals to shame. Hand-pick those interns and enthusiast students who enjoy working for a very nominal salary.
The next point is my favorite and I had a wicked smile when I saw that – Put everything in the Cloud. He gave my favorite example of the development team at a startup using inexpensive notebook PCs to develop the next killer app for the web. He very clearly articulated the Pay-By-Use model. I was thrilled to hear that!
Ship then Test – According to Guy, the current generation of users are impatient to wait till you stabilize your product. He advocates the crowd-sourcing model where you treat the world as your beta tester.
Next point is a clear dig at the VC community. With the free tools, cloud, and a bunch on interns, do you still need a VC?
The last point is all about niche. You and your startup got to spend enough time to identify what you are good at and how your product is different from competition. Once you figure that out, use all the above tools to conquer the world!

I agree with most of the points that Guy made in his keynote. A disclaimer here – before you debate, argue and flame me, these are not my views and I am only summarizing what I heard from him.

Right after the keynote, I had the opportunity to be a part of the Q&A session with Guy. This was covered by ET Now channel. My question was how do we separate evangelists from fanatics. There were few instances where I was branded as a fanatic rather than an evangelist. Though I toned down my aggression, I still feel sometimes I am more of a fanatic than an evangelist. I absolutely loved his answer – An evangelist puts the customer first and empathizes with him whereas a fanatic is all about I, me, myself and my product. That was a very hard-hitting response!

Right after the Q&A session, I had a photo op with Guy and I got my bible of evangelism, ‘Selling the Dream’ autographed by him.

Guy & Jani - Selling The Dream

I was also a part of the Bangalore TweetUp that few passionate folks like @amnigos and others organized. This was at 7:30 PM and Guy was still as energetic as he was for the keynote.

I went back for his workshop on ‘Evangelism through Social Media’ on the second day. The hall was overflowing but surprisingly most of the attendees were not on Twitter yet. He demonstrated some of the free tools built on Twitter that empowers entrepreneurs to track, monitor and monetize their products.

Apart from the sessions by Guy, I attended the panel discussion on ‘Telecom Innovations for Emerging Markets’ in which my boss, Vishy Poosala, Head, Bell Labs India was a panelist.

Overall, I found the event to be good but my feedback to organizers is to include a track on technology. Though this was meant for startups and entrepreneurs, a dedicated track for technology to discuss the latest trends would have been extremely useful to the attendees.

I want to conclude this post with a great quote by Guy Kawasaki – “An evangelist who cannot give a great demo is an oxymoron….”

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Janakiram MSV » Evangelism

Personal Branding and Evangelism

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