Microsoft Hires Michael Gartenberg as New Evangelist
Marshall Kirkpatrick
30 comments »
The Vista marketing challenge saw an interesting new development today with the announcement that Microsoft has hired Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg as Enthusiast Evangelist. Gartenberg says in a blog post on his move that he will “find, engage and work with enthusiasts and other influencers and show them all the cool stuff that Microsoft is doing. In short, it’s our [department's] job to act as the bridge between Microsoft and end users.”
The experiment with Robert Scoble as Microsoft’s blogging point man must have worked well, as the company has now hired two very high profile commentators to carry out functions similar to what Scoble did. Bringing Jon Udell over from InfoWorld in December was the first of two notable coups.
Gartenberg has served as the Jupiter Research vice president and research director for the Personal Technology & Access and Custom Research groups. He’s a highly respected analyst who was quoted extensively by press upon the release of Vista. ”The challenge,” Gartenberg said about Vista two weeks ago, “is that it’s the only product on the market that has to appeal to the CIOs of Fortune 500 companies and my mother all at the same time.” Presumably Gartenberg’s mother is now more favorably inclined than she might have been before.
The announcement has been received warmly but a few questions have been raised. It’s a perfect example of one of today’s leading questions: is the benefit of bringing a respected public figure onto the payroll greater than the potential loss of credibility that person risks?
Hiring social media power users to evangelize for your company’s product is becoming an increasingly common practice. From Microsoft’s hiring Gartenberg and Udel to startups like Revver, who has Micki Krimmel, and Pluggd - who recently hired Drew Olanoff. (Disclosure: post TechCrunch, I took a job doing similar work at SplashCast and I feel great about it.) The pioneer in this field, Robert Scoble, sometimes faces criticism for an alleged lack of clarity in the business model and editorial independence of the startup he joined, PodTech. Here’s one of Scoble’s responses.
Pure editorial independence may have always been an illusion. Full disclosure may solve the problem all together. What better way is there for a tech company, whose own executives are unlikely to be skilled in the use of new social media, to embrace the possibilities? Consumers want corporate transparency but you’d better believe that companies are going to hired skilled practitioners if they are going to engage in the conversations that blogging and podcasting make possible.
Most pertinently perhaps, can an All-Star communications lineup make up for the PR mess and widely known problems that Microsoft and its software already face?
Here’s some more of Gartenberg’s thoughts on the position.
Why Microsoft? There’s a revolution going on. A battle for the hearts and minds of consumers in terms of their digital lives. I firmly believe that Microsoft is the only company that will enable the seamless transition for users to move in and out of the different aspects of their lives. In short, no one else comes close to presenting a complete, unified and integrated view of the digital home of the 21st century.
Whether it’s work, school or home, Microsoft has the potential to change lives even more than they already have. Who else could deliver mission critical technology to the business world, create the best Smartphone operating system, build a successful platform for console games (and pioneer online and connected play) and take on the iPod. All at the same time.
Funny, as far as i remember, didn’t Sega pioneer online and connected play?
“Why Microsoft? There’s a revolution going on. A battle for the hearts and minds of consumers in terms of their digital lives. I firmly believe that Microsoft is the only company that will enable the seamless transition for users to move in and out of the different aspects of their lives. In short, no one else comes close to presenting a complete, unified and integrated view of the digital home of the 21st century.
Whether it’s work, school or home, Microsoft has the potential to change lives even more than they already have. Who else could deliver mission critical technology to the business world, create the best Smartphone operating system, build a successful platform for console games (and pioneer online and connected play) and take on the iPod. All at the same time.”
it’s gonna take a lot more than self-aggrandizing talk to create microsoft goodwill, at least among techies. walk the walk, microsoft.
Evangelists for Fortune 1000 companies ( not startups ) are highly paid windbags whose job is to catapult the propaganda and apply ‘lipstick on pigs’
As somebody who got hired four years ago as a (moderately) well-known blogger asked to be an evangelist for a tech startup, it seems to me a lot of these efforts are putting the cart before the horse. I can’t imagine *anybody* has ever said “Joe Smith, that great blogger, works at StartupCo. — I’ll use their product!” Nobody is going to change their opinion of Microsoft’s technology merely because they’ve hired Jon Udell, even though he’s one of the best bloggers on the web.
Over time, they *might* start to recognize some of Microsoft’s technological leadership if Jon acts as a voice for it, but Microsoft traditionally has not been very strong at publishing original content. I don’t think any one (or two, or three thousand) bloggers can change that.
It makes a lot more focus on the people who are great bloggers, writers or podcasters, period, separate from who their employers are. Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo is a great example — he’s interesting, personable, opinionated, and honest. There’s nobody who reads his site regularly who doesn’t know he works for Yahoo, but he’s not seen as *just* a “Yahoo blogger”, and that’s important.
As excited as I am for the increasing respect and attention being paid to the need for technology evangelism, I’m frustrated that there’s still a focus on the horse-trading aspect of nabbing a “big” blogger. These aren’t sports teams — the only thing that matters when a tech company hires a blogger, journalist, or analyst is if that person’s work helps grow the company, increase customer satisfaction, and move the industry forward.
The disclosure fixation is very often a loud distraction, shifting focus from the hard question of whether all of us are helping our companies succeed. And all the debates about “is this a conflict of interest?” often act as a topic of discussion when the things we’re blogging about weren’t interesting enough to attract attention on their own. We should try harder.
Not sure where the benefit to them lies with hiring well-known industry insiders. The virtue of Scoble was that he was a no-name grunt like the rest of us who was genuinely enthusiastic about MS. That bought them credibility with a generation of geeks who openly loathe the company.
They’d do better to fire their entire PR division and start fresh. I’m astonished at how passive they are in the face of *relentless* sniping from Apple, IBM, Sun, their front groups, astroturfers, etc., etc.
They even botched the Vista launch.
What Anil said. Throwing money at acquisitions is sort of lame; I’d rather see them doing more to throw the spotlight on the guys who are under the engine with their products and bringing their blogs more recognition. What I’m hearing is, “Sure, you guys built this stuff and are blogging about it pretty well, but what we really need is a glorified PR team to blog about how great you are.” It just doesn’t make much sense in the context of the new web, and feels a lot like a company that’s stuck in PR 1.0 (PR as an industry having moved up to v1.5 at best).
Anil: people come up to me all the time and show me Microsoft smartphones and Tablet PCs they said they bought because I wrote about them. So, this stuff does work at some level. Maybe not enough to change Microsoft’s stock price, but it does change things.
Channel 9 is refered to by a lot of hires, too. So it sure changed recruiting at Microsoft.
I’m glad he took the job — I went from having zero people I could have a straight talk with at MS to one. That’s a huge improvement.
Scoble - with all do respect I think you have seen that reaction because people can relate to you really well. You do a good job of communicating, “hey, i’m a normal guy, just like you…” Let’s face it, although it’s only been a few years, blogging is not what it was in the early days of Channel 9. Bloggers like yourself that became popular during that time are able to still maintain that credibility, therefore people have and will continue to trust their opinions.
Keep in mind I know nothing about Gartenberg, so these comments do not necessarily relate to this *particular* instance
Whether it’s work, school or home, Microsoft has the potential to change lives even more than they already have. Who else could deliver mission critical technology to the business world, create the best Smartphone operating system, build a successful platform for console games (and pioneer online and connected play) and take on the iPod. All at the same time.
Wow, I wish I had enough money to hire him to spew this crap for my company. Disclosure: I’ve made a lot of money because Microsoft exists. And I still say that they are (or were) one of the smartest strategists out there for their relentless support of the developer. MSDN License and giving everything easily and readily available to developers kicked Borland’s Delphi to the ground, C++ remains a difficult language and while VB is waning, Microsoft has upped the ante with C# and .NET tools. They are the biggest tech company in the world so I would hope that their R&D budget is bigger than the per capita income of combined small countries.
But (maybe with the exception of online connected play via a console ‘pioneering’ and Gates’s VB) please name me one thing that Microsoft has created independently. They purchase, use or steal everything they do from somewhere else.
OS= “improved” from DOS
windows =- “improved” from Apple
Sharepoint = “improved” from IBM Rational
Smart*cough*phone = “improved” from ?? everyone else
XBox = “improved” from Sony
SQL Server = “improved” from frm Sybase
Zune = duh
CRM3 = “improved” from SalesForce
IE = duh
Caller ID for E-Mail -”improved” from Failsafe Designs
Outlook -”improved” from Eudora/
LiveSearch = duh
MSFT Spaces = duh
on and on
I know that Lessig says that without a method of tracing each production of an individual, there is no method of tracking stolen ideas, or stolen works. But still. I still think they are a monopoly. Thank god for VCs willing to take risks with start-ups and fostering an environment where they have at least a fighting chance.
obviously, i’m not in the same league as mr. scoble, dash, and others mentioned here. but i do know that for the technology that pluggd is developing, it was important for them to have someone reaching out to content creators, and those who will actually use the technology. having been a blogger/podcaster/vlogger for a few years now, i take my role very seriously.
as we build pluggd from the ground up, i’m excited to have been involved from the start. i have the unique opportunity to make sure that the people who visit our site have a say in how we’re developing our technology. so evangelist, bridge, ambassador, resident geek? whatever the title is, i’m here to listen and interact.
“Microsoft traditionally has not been very strong at publishing original content. I don’t think any one (or two, or three thousand) bloggers can change that.”
Anil, what do you mean by “original content” in this context? And, what (if anything) do you think /could/ effect that change?
- Jon
Why Microsoft? There’s a revolution going on. A battle for the hearts and minds of consumers in terms of their digital lives. I firmly believe that Microsoft is the only company that will enable the seamless transition for users to move in and out of the different aspects of their lives. In short, no one else comes close to presenting a complete, unified and integrated view of the digital home of the 21st century.
Whatever credibility the man had, he completely lost it with that sell out statement. No company is more responsible for foisting an incoherent computer-centric digital mess on the consumer landscape than Microsoft. The only thing it has shown the ability to do is to make matters worse. Look no further than the massively anti consumer DRM they are forcing down the throats of the unwitting and unknowing public by pre-loading Vista on the clone computer boxes at every computer store.
It will be interesting to see what comes of Vista and its recent hype.
In a blogosphere this big, and for a company with as many products and audiences as MS, it makes sense to have a variety of people out talking — via blogs, ch. 9, 10, MSDN, etc.
Anil’s point:
As excited as I am for the increasing respect and attention being paid to the need for technology evangelism, I’m frustrated that there’s still a focus on the horse-trading aspect of nabbing a “big” blogger. These aren’t sports teams — the only thing that matters when a tech company hires a blogger, journalist, or analyst is if that person’s work helps grow the company, increase customer satisfaction, and move the industry forward.
Is exactly the right one — it’s not about the name, it’s about the work product.
I’m glad he took the job — I went from having zero people I could have a straight talk with at MS to one. That’s a huge improvement.
This is a great point, Dave — I’m not by any means saying Microsoft didn’t get a good hire in Robert, and I think between Scoble, Len Pryor, and a lot of those early bloggers at MS, there was a fundamental shift in the sense of “oh, there are *people* there!” What I think is frustrating is the idea of “well, if we hire someone who’s a popular blogger like Scoble was, suddenly that will make people like our products!”
And the truth is, not all popular bloggers are going to be good at telling the story of a company in a credible way. Much of Microsoft’s recent improvements in their perception comes from, well, just making better products. After *that*, having a good voice and persona to tell the story is key.
Anil, what do you mean by “original content” in this context? And, what (if anything) do you think /could/ effect that change?
I’m just happy you’re asking the question, Jon!
What I mean is, the majority of what MS has published over the years has been, to one degree or another, core technical documentation and explanation. For example, I’m a *huge* fan of MSDN, and have been since the Windows “Chicago” days, but I think, relative to the huge adoption of blogging at MS, there’s been a relatively slow move towards making the messages of MS bloggers part of the experience of interacting with MS. I run Vista and Office 2007 on my laptop here — but there’s no way to get to the (excellent, in the case of Office) product blogs run by those teams.
If I had Jensen Harris blogging for me, I’d damn well build him into the application. I realize I came across above as more negative than I intended — my frustration stems from 1. there generally not being enough focus on bloggers as a key part of *building a company*, not just spreading the word and 2. seeing the talent/art/skill/whatever of blogging being treated almost as if it’s a physical attribute. Many popular bloggers work very hard at their craft, and businesses are recognizing it’s a skill that has value — that’s why you’re seeing bloggers becoming part of building a business.
Frank Shaw sent me an email asking what I thought of the situation with the Edwards bloggers, and this seems as good a place as any to comment.
When you blog on behalf of an organization life gets more complicated, and that’s what happened there. I don’t think the bloggers did anything wrong, and I don’t think Edwards did anything wrong, and I doubt if it’s going to have any lasting impact on the campaign.
The politics in the blogosphere itself are intense. I have been in the center of some pretty horrible shitstorms, and the people who perpetrate them are cynical mofos, they know how confusing things get and use that to hurt people. That’s clearly what happened here.
I don’t think Microsoft has been vicitimized by this yet, they’ve been pretty lucky, not sure why.
I thought Scoble was off the wall when he went after Ballmer the one time that he did (it had something to do with a Seattle religious leader and some employment issue at MS, not recalling all the facts). When someone blogs from inside an organization they accept limits that people who blog as individuals don’t have. I don’t think Scoble played fair on this when he worked at Microsoft, and I felt the same way when he blogged when he worked at UserLand (when I was CEO) and I made my feelings known to him. I said when he joined MS that I enjoyed his company more when he didn’t work for me. Later I came to enjoy his company more when he didn’t work for MS.
I blogged for a while on the home page of Harvard Law School, and when I did that, I used a very different voice from the one I used on Scripting News, and accepted limits (self-imposed, I had no editorial constraints or guidelines from the law school or the university) on what I would write about. But I didn’t stop writing Scripting News then, nor did I stop writing Scripting News when I was CEO of UserLand. You have to wear all these different hats. The right-wing bloggers interfered with the Edwards campaign and that wasn’t cool. We could have all done more to protect them, and in retrospect I think we should have. And the MSM got involved there too, kind of a conflict of interest, and pretty nasty.
I’ll probably expand on this tomorrow on my own blog. Please cut me some slack here because this is totally off the cuff, unedited and unrehearsed.
I agree with some of the other comments posted earlier. Scoble, like him or loath him, came from within Microsoft as part of ethos of blogging and earning the audience’s trust. Scoble and Channel 9 did wonders for Microsoft PR in the Tech/Geek community.
These latest two hires, although respected and trusted by large audiences, will not have the same positive effect as Scoble had. Simply because you cannot buy trust, you have to earn it.
I wouldn’t call it pay-per-post but its heading in that direction. Its no different than product endorsement by Tiger Woods or Tom Cruise.
“Interfered,” Dave?
Are you saying that Edwards’ bloggers and/or the Edwards campaign were somehow coerced?
Or perhaps you’re saying that the right-wingers should not have expressed their opinions of Edwards’ bloggers’ expressed opinions?
Also, please explain how you could have protected the Edwards campaign.
I’m very much afraid that his first much-quoted post about his new job has already set the tone: this pure marketing-droid evangelism, nobody who is even remotely critical (but still open-minded) about Microsofts offerings would bother to have a *conversation* with such a near-religious zealot.
This is exactly why I always dread talking to MS-people. I can live with their products (though it rarely has my preference), but sentences like “no one else comes close to presenting a complete, unified and integrated view of the digital home of the 21st century” just make me want to puke.
For any MS-blogger to be credible he first has to stop using MS-speak.
Why is the assumption that enthusiast evangalism = blogging with a pro-MSFT voice for blogging insiders? If I had someone of Michael’s talents working for me, that’s not the way I’d use him. I wonder how fuzzy the job definition can get, but I’d focus on the following four tasks:
1. Seek out and engage new users and new uses of technology (Microsoft technology, sure, but also Mac users, Symbian fans, Wii players, mesh networkers, mashups, web 2.5, etc.). People who can do this — and know how to differentiate interesting dead ends from what’s genuinely important and worth exploring further — are quite rare.
2. Bring those nuggets back to MSFT product development teams and communicate internally the urgency of meeting the needs of those users and use cases.
3. Take stories about hidden MSFT gems back to those users and the press (you have no idea how many press contacts someone like Michael has).
4. …and blog about it. (Why not?)
-avi
Not so warmly taken:
Michael Gartenberg sells out, joins Microsoft as ‘Enthusiast Evangelist’
http://macdailynews.com/index......nts/12647/
Computerworld’s Michael Gartenberg asks, “Want to see what the future of personal computing looks like? Don’t wait for Microsoft to show you; go out and get yourself a copy of Apple’s latest operating system release, OS X Tiger. It’s that good.“
As MDN pointed out, this quote is on Apple’s site ( http://www.apple.com/macosx/reaction/ )
The guy is clearly a tart, but how he can prostitute himself to this degree? Beats me.
- um, this is simple.
- “Why microsoft?”
- Becuase they offered more than I currently make and for a longer term.
- Rbowles
p.s. this is economics 101
“…They are the biggest tech company in the world…”
what happended to IBM …..
I wouldn’t call it pay-per-post but its heading in that direction. Its no different than product endorsement by Tiger Woods or Tom Cruise.
Doubtful. The talent the bloggers have is writing about the specific products. There is an inherent contradiction. Tiger Woods is respected because of his talent off the ‘product endorsement’ platform, and of its own nature. Same for Tom Cruise. When they endorse products they’re supposedly bringing their good taste and “skill” to get you to believe in the product too. When a blogger whose skill is WRITING about the product then he’s being paid to write about it inherently suspect. It doesn’t mean the conclusions the writers draw are incorrect, just that it would be more apropos to compare Tiger Woods being paid by the PGA to tout the PGA as being ‘better’ over the LPGA. While you still respect his talent as a golfer you’d have to wonder in the back of your mind whether the sentiment is sincere or purchased/ obligatory. To me it just taints the sincerity and objectivity of the voice, no matter how much freedom they are given to appear to be biting the hand that feeds them.
>>I can’t imagine *anybody* has ever said “Joe Smith, that great blogger, works at StartupCo. — I’ll use their product!”
anil, i usually agree with most of your comments, but i think you’re way too humble / way off base on this one…
celebrity endorsement has long been accepted as a reliable method of advertising (and if you don’t believe me, check out Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, the de facto primer on the subject), and hiring notable bloggers to do PR & communication is certainly borrowing from that playbook.
now i’d agree there’s also incredible value in having someone skilled in blogging & other forms of social media on staff, as well as “cluetrain” skills such as transparency and quick acknowledgement of mistakes.
however, you’re wrong if you don’t think a company can boost product visibility and adoption (or at least the first beta test) by hiring a notable web personality. in fact, you yourself are one of the most significant cases in point.
- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/