Evangelism is exhausting
As I wind down my second month of evangelism for Yahoo! Mail Beta, I’m coming to the realization that evangelism is exhausting work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying the work. But I think I was deluding myself when I said I could spare an hour a day to work on it. I wasn’t deluding myself into thinking I’d have an hour a day available. I’ve definitely been able to make that much time available for evangelism work. I was deluding myself into thinking I’d only do it for an hour a day.
I spent the better part of this week building my most recent post to the ymailupdates.com blog. It started with getting a dump of the code changes from source control. I can’t get into the details, but suffice it to say the dump was gi-normous. I then went change by change, building up a macro-picture of what those micro-changes meant. Once I had my list, it was time to start writing the post. I had to figure out what types of updates I was dealing with. I had some bug fixes, some new features, some performance enhancements and so on. From there I started building a framework for the post. It’s difficult to talk about certain things and have them make sense, so I also had to get some screen shots. Once I had those, they had to be fitted into the document so they didn’t look silly (something I’m not 100% certain I was successful in, but I tried).
Once the post is done, I had to (of course) read over it a billion times proof reading for typos, checking that everything made sense and looking to see if anything I wrote sounded odd (I have a tendency, at times, to use words multiple times in the same sentence, making for a strange reading experience). Then I post it and reload the blog in my browser to make sure the update took, being sure to test with both Firefox and Internet Explorer. So, I’m done at that point…right?
No, not so much. The ymailupdates.com blog isn’t hugely visible yet. We’ve been posting to it without doing a lot of promotion for it, so whatever readership we have right now is purely word of mouth. That means getting the word out. So I link to it from my personal blog because people used to come there first for news regarding Yahoo! Mail Beta updates. Then I post to the Y-Mail Group because that set of users loves being the first to hear when we do anything new. Then, I do something I haven’t done before. I put the word out to other bloggers. I take a list of bloggers who have talked about Yahoo! Mail Beta in the past and let them know that we’ve pushed out a new update. Perhaps that will help to generate a little more buzz for us since their readership is far larger and more diverse.
So is that all I do, blogging? If only. I sift through a bunch of mail every day. Most of it comes from the Y-Mail group but I also get a decent amount that’s sent directly to me by the users. I imagine many engineers would mind being contacted directly like that, I don’t. That’s why I haven’t been afraid to put my email address into past posts (something David Utter thinks I did on accident). Anyway, I try to respond to everything, although I can’t get to all of it immediately.
Once I’ve finished all that, I have to keep an eye on what everybody else is saying about us. I have several trackers set up with Technorati and Yahoo! News Search. Those are fairly noisy channels, so I really have to scan them carefully to pick out the useful nuggets. Depending on what I find, I may submit a comment to a particular post. Depends on whether or not I feel like I can be of use. Sometimes I post just to say, “hey, Yahoo! hears you.” It’s amazing to see the reactions of people when I submit comments. Particularly when their posts are harsh. It’s amazing what people will say about you if they think you aren’t listening. 
So I’m formally committed to 5 hours per week of this. I’d say I easily exceed that by 2-3x in a given week. But that’s okay, I don’t do it because I have to. I do it because I enjoy it. I don’t think you can be a good evangelist unless you enjoy it. But now I can see why someone like Robert Scoble made it their full-time job (back when he was doing it for Microsoft).
December 18th, 2006 at 6:01 am
I appreciate the work you do in keeping me up to date. Maybe Yahoo should have a few more people helping you out or relieving some of your workload? Having shingles due to stress/work (I recently had the same thing) is not fun! Anyway, I just wanted to say that your hard work is very much appreciated!
December 18th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
I hear’s ya. Been there, done that… aw heck, I’m still doing it.
Your evangelism will go farther and be more sticky than Y!’s paid advertising campaigns as far as reaching people who are most likely to benefit and then spread the “good” word even further.
Y! is in dire need of a groundswell of interest and that interest needs to be strong enough to generate word-of-mouth activity.
The only thing that could be better than your evangelism would be Y! customer days in various markets - not at industry events - at malls, fairs or convention centers and attended by the average Joe. Sessions about Y! Real Estate, Photos, Mail, 360, News, Music, Sports, Games, Search, etc. to provide the fundamental understanding from which evolves power users. School assemblies on best research practices are another means (the shwag handed out could mention Photos, 360, etc.). But that’s another soapbox entirely.
It’s not that Y! properties are lacking. It’s just the media is no longer going to ring the Y! bell and even when they do, there isn’t that many folks reading/viewing anyway. Folks are online sharing their opinions. So give ‘em something to talk about.
And that’s what you’re doing. Good on ya!
December 20th, 2006 at 7:13 am
Get Dueblin to help you. Now that he’s a product guy he probably doesnt do jack $%#&.
December 20th, 2006 at 10:06 am
Hey, be nice to Dave. I’m sure he’s having JavaScript withdrawal. Hopefully Excel and Word are filling the void for him.
March 5th, 2007 at 9:04 am
March 5th, 2007 at 9:16 am
April 6th, 2007 at 11:36 am
Keep up the nice work! It is appreciated!