A story about Green & White: What happens when Citizen Evangelism becomes too good?
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Hey its a cool world we live in: The YOU in Youtube has awakened, and people are now playing the roles of journalists, producers, designers and evangelists for themselves, on their own times.
When I write about Edge-Centric Marketing, I talk about the importance of finding customer evangelists who can go out and be passionate about your products and promote them.
But a recent incident at Green & White perhaps hints on the perspective we may all be carrying implicitly about the quality of citizen evangelism.
M. Asif, who writes about marketing and media issues for Green & White (and is a marketing consultant, not a journalist or PR rep) recently wrote and evangelised the HTC Touch mobile phone (you can see the post here).
A day after that, Ian Lamont from Computerworld (our distribution partner) emailed me to mention that that post seemed like a Press Release and might have been copied from somewhere.
After a couple of days of digging into this, I’m happy to say this is a small incident to smile over.
The content Asif wrote is original and made by himself — it uses facts about the phone which obviously overlap with other people talking about the same phone, but the enthusiasm, optimism and evangelistic nature of the post is Asif’s alone.
The funny bit is that we might expect citizen evangelist to write informally — Asif wrote the post cohesively and well that it prompted and alerted Ian to come back and ask me to double-check the post.
Like I said, its a cool world we live in — the boundaries of where professional marketers end and citizen evangelists start are thinning. No one paid Asif to spend his time researching and evangelising the HTC phone but he did it because the PHONE itself inspired him to do so. What’s more, it inspired him to TAKE ACTION at the EDGE — The Edge is a market that isn’t even on the HTC radar (i.e. Green & White’s readers). HTC doesn’t even know we exist, yet they already have a citizen evangelist talking about his passion with their products here.
That is about the best summary I have about Edge-Centric marketing and product design. Have you begun waking up to this growing reality, or are you still considering you brand to be whatever you dictate it is through press-releases?
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