Image by sdk via FlickrDangerously Awesome drops a very small article (nothing much more than the four points below) on what is wrong with paid product evangelism. In thinking about this one, and looking at systems like Izea and paid book reviews, and other ways that we all incorporate paid product evangelism into our daily lives, including taking a problogging job, we are all involved in paid product evangelism if we take a dollar for what we are doing.

The good part is many companies don’t need to worry about this, most of their advertising that really matters is going to come from word of mouth, and not necessarily based on the word of a product shill that may or may not be suited for the job. As Dangerously Awesome points out, there are four things a company needs to think about before they get deep into paid product evangelism.

• Companies that need it the most think they can’t afford a good evanglist
• Companies who can afford evangelists ultimately don’t benefit from it on the scale of their expectations, or don’t hire with the right criteria
• People who charge exorbitantly for evangelism aren’t any good at it
• People who are qualified candidates for evangelizing aren’t meeting the companies that need them
Source: Dangerously Awesome.com

Overall, we would have to agree with him, there are many companies out there that have no real idea what to do with their blog, only that they need one. There are many companies that also don’t get why it is good to have a community moderator, a facebook fan club, a profile on myspace, a way to engage a community, and that works if you are Ford, Dell, or a Steel Fabricator, all these new ways of communicating can really help out someone when they need to find someone.

Yes, there are many bad hacks out there that charge tons of money for doing little to nothing, and the good ones are busy off doing the things they need to do to keep in touch with people and maintain their own communities. Finding the right evangelist or even person that can relate to other people is difficult. We often do not hire based on how well we get along with other people, we hire based on skills, you might be brilliant and a pain in the butt, but you should not be a community manager for the company. You want a social person, someone who can get along with anyone to run your community and be your community manager, you want that in an evangelist for your company.

We can hire anyone we want to do any job; the hope is that they will be good at it. If you are looking at product evangelism, then you need someone who is using the tools already, have them show you their friend feed, twitter, digg, blog, and stumble upon accounts. They need to use the tools to understand them. Then check how they write, is it plain 8th grade English or is it all jargon? If you are selling video games, you need someone who speaks video game slang, if you are selling Coca-Cola, then you need someone who speaks plain every day in use English.

Hire well, hire wisely, and see what the audience is doing. If anyone wants free advice, hit me up, we can talk about how best to go about setting up your social media evangelist, without running into a ton of problems that will be difficult to undo if you get your social networking strategy wrong.

Tags: evangelism, dangerously awesome, community manager, dialect, dialogue, viewpoint