It was a big kick in the pants to be singled out yesterday on ReadWriteWeb’s “The New Robert Scobles: Seven leading Corporate Social Media 
Evangelists Today.” It’s funny, even though I come from big, traditional companies Jive’s culture and the fact we use Clearspace everyday makes my engagement in the market seem very normal. There are another 160 employees at Jive who are also doing what I do, just that they’re doing it inside Jive (though lots of them are on Twitter and have blogs, too).
Does the new Scoble need to work at a big company?
There’s room for lots more Scobles. I thought that a comment made on Silicon Florist’s post about all this was worth thinking about.
I’m not sure how much the environment has changed since Scoble started out 5 years ago but it could very well be that having the credibility of a large company would cement an evangelist in a bigger scale. I guess it depends on the audience we’re really talking about. I don’t do this to be a Scoble, an A-lister, or any other label. I do it because I love it.
Do we need a new Scoble?
Scoble works in media. The people he named, do not. The point of Marshall’s post was to note how companies are employing evangelists to drive business value. Those are pretty different things. And I see a ton of folks doing it.
Do you know these people?
Here’s a list of people doing just a good a job as me. Please add people I missed in the comments section and I can append the list:
- Elsua Suarez, Ed Brill and Gia Lyons from IBM
- Lionel Menchaca from Dell
- Craig Cmehil, Steve Mann, Marilyn Pratt from SAP
- Chuck Hollis from EMC
- Julio Fernandez from Oracle
- Oliver Marks with Sony
- Stewart Mader and Jonathan Nolen From Atlassian
- Aaron Strout and Jim Storer from Mzinga
- Mike Walsh from Leverage Software
