Reflections on Evangicamp!

Though it ended up being a bit more philosophical than I think Tara and I had expected it might be, I'm pretty sure everyone who attended last week's Evangicamp at Lijit found it successful and intellectually engaging. I certainly did.

We had a great group of people including: Tara, Kevin and Barney (Evangelists from Lijit), Emily Driscoll from Fuser, Dean from Me.dium, Karen Hersh, Micah Baldwin (now of Lijit), Andrew Hyde, Ari Newman (from Filtrbox), Rob Johnson (from EventVue), internet marketer Brett Borders, myself, and several other people from outside the Evangelism Community whom Tara had connected with previously. (My apologies if I've mistakenly left anyone off that long list!)

About two hours of discussion brought about some very interesting concepts -- a few of the more intriguing ones for me I'll note below:

• the importance of evangelists knowing their demographic
• the importance of end user happiness
• the importance of properly differentiating your company from others out there
• what's the explicit added value of your service?
• the potential for those "wanters"/"believers" to discover your company on their own
• the problem of "unfindable" startups due to poor SEO of their front pages
• the relevance of a sense of humor in evangelism and connecting to users
• the idea that there still is a time and place for "old school"/print media
• but be sure to know your demographic before embarking on that path
• the importance of user engagement as opposed to just page views
• the need to break through the "noise" of Web 2.0 to reach your users

As I said, I thought the most of our discussion was from a more philosophical, global point of view. I do think that there's considerable potential -- at the next Evangicamp -- to get much more down and dirty in the more local, concrete issues. Such as specific evangelism and marketing strategies and leveraging our relationships with other evangelists/Boulder startups as well as with our investors to get the word out their about the companies we evangelize for.

All and all, though, I was very impressed with the participation, level of interest, and depth of the discourse that was Evangicamp 1.0. Let's try for Evangicamp 2.0 in January!