Surely, if there were a professional body for evangelists, this would be their motto, because that’s what we do as evangelists, we gather together like minded people and introduce them to the great new technology that we have found. That is why evangelism is important to us at DevExpress, but I’m writing about it here because it’s important to you too. That’s right, it’s important to the customers of DevExpress too. Why? Well you use our tools to create great products; once you’ve done that you have to sell those products, evangelism is one of the tools at your disposal to do that; and yes it’s even important to you, yes you, that guy at the back reading email on his iPhone instead of listening to me. Just because you work in the enterprise and don’t actually sell your product to the public, doesn’t mean you don’t have to “sell” your product; where do you think the funding for your project came from? Yeah, that’s right, internal stakeholders and you better believe you have to “sell” them on the benefits of it.
Over here I wrote a blog post about the channels available to you, our customers, through which you can contact us. However, that is only half the story. For some reason, there will always be the customers who prefer to make their comments known via their blog or by other such means. Because of the fact that they don’t channel that comment to us, there is a danger that we may never become aware of their issues. That is where the comment at the top of this post comes in. It is up to us, as evangelists, to trawl (or fish for) those comments; and in this post we’ll look at some of the ways of doing this.
Firstly, and most obviously perhaps, there the general Internet search. By clicking the advanced search link on the Google homepage you can configure your search to enable you to drill down to some fairly specific information. The advanced search will let you filter on: the text of your search, either including or excluding specific words or phrases; the domain, only searching particular web sites; the date, narrowing the search to a specific time period; by usage rights, filtering the search to a specific license and you can also specify where on the page your search criteria shows up.
Next there is the, slightly more specific blog search from Google. This search will allow you to search for your product within blogs, instead of the Internet as a whole.
Sticking with Google for the time being, there is also the very powerful Google Alerts which will allow you to search for your products, either within news, blogs, videos, groups, are comprehensively (which is all of the above). Google will then collate the results for you and email them to your inbox; either as it happens, once a day or once a week.
Of course there are more specific places were your customers may hang out, Twitter for example. Twitter is a “microblogging” service where you, or your customers, can post micro blog posts (of 140 characters or less) on what ever topic they like. Hopefully, your product. Now, Twitter also offers a search service and you can use this service to search those micro posts for mentions of your products. Of course, the great thing about Twitter is that if you do find a post mentioning your product, you can reach out to the author, by preceeding your comment with the “@” symbol and their name, thus giving you a level of feedback that you don’t have (necessarily) with other blogging tools.
Well those are some of my favourite tools to make me a “fisher of men”. But of course, my readers are far smarter than me. So what’re your favourite tools / techniques, leave them here in the comments.