Small Biz Watch: Preaching about your products
U.S. News: Still, having conversations and dialogue will require a huge shift in corporate culture for many firms.
Huba: The No. 1 concern that we hear from companies is that people will say negative things about them. But wouldn't you rather be in that conversation than watching it from afar, in fear?
U.S. News: Tell me about another company embracing evangelism.
Huba: There is a really good story in our book about O'Reilly Publishing, a technical book publisher. What they did a few years ago was go out and find these folks who loved their books and were evangelizing about them on their blogs. And a woman in their PR department named Simone Paddock started a program called the O'Reilly Evangelist Program, and she contacted them and said, "Thank you so much for telling readers about our books. We would like to invite you into our program, and we want you to help design our program. What do you need?" And the bloggers said they wanted galley copies of the books, early copies, and they wanted to be able to go to the O'Reilly conferences so they could report on them. So Simone designed the evangelism program based on that and even had a special newsletter for them so they were always informed.
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