“Hey, you can trust me — I’m an Evangelist,” I joked at the dinner table on Christmas Eve. “I thought you were raised Catholic,” my father-in-law said. That misunderstanding had stopping power for me.
How do I describe this new job to my family?
What is a technology evangelist?
Here’s how Wikipedia defines a Technology Evangelist:
A technical or technology evangelist is a person who attempts to build a critical mass of support for a given technology in order to establish it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects. Professional technology evangelists are often employed by firms which seek to establish their proprietary technologies as de facto standards or to participate in setting non-proprietary open standards. Non-professional technology evangelists may act out of altruism or self-interest (e.g., to gain the benefits of early adoption or the network effect).
Er, thanks Wikipedia, but there’s no way my family will understand that. Let me decode the definition for people who speak tech as a second language.
I’ve moved up to my third position with the leading automotive digital marketing company in North America. Exciting times for a tech obsessed guy like me. I started out as a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Analyst, was promoted to Digital Marketing Director, and graduated to the Evangelist position this week.
My job is to help people have better conversations. Some of those conversations start on websites, others occur on networks like Facebook or video forums like YouTube. I’m a teacher and a field marshall. That means I get to educate people about the beginnings of the modern web (i.e. Mosaic and Netscape) up to the current Interwebs. The goal is examine trends, identify the formation of profitable relationships, and continue pushing our platforms harder in order to deliver the best for our customers.
The leaders of my company have tasked me with helping build a digital curriculum and working closely with our valued stakeholders — coworkers and customers — to fail harder.
Wait, what?
Yeah, we want to fail more quickly to identify the most productive ways to start killer conversations on the web. We’re excited about breaking things. When I write ‘Breaking Things’, I don’t mean taking a baseball bat to a monitor. I’m discussing things like running A|B tests on technology platforms, finding out which method is most successful and then pitting the winner against a new competitor.
It’s fascinating to work at a place that values progress and innovation so devoutly.
I’ll continue to speak at industry events and technology forums. Next up is a visit to Atlanta. If we have the chance to meet up, please shoot me a message, my email address is joe [dot] mescher [at] dealer [dot] com.
The journey continues…