Guy – the evangelist

Guy Kawasaki - the evangelist

_

First off. This is not some lame attempt to get many hits to my blog by using Guy Kawasaki’s good name and reputation. This is a sincere and honest blog post on how Guy inspired me from the beginning of my career and continuing to do so even today.

Guy Kawasaki is a bestselling author, an insightful blogger, an entrepreneur and the brains behind Alltop, the “online magazine rack”, He has both feet planted firmly on the ground, and is a true inspiration.

Let me explain.
I started – as you can read in my first post – my career in an advertising agency in Oslo back in 1992. I remember the job as an art director assistant was a lot different from today. Back then I had to use a Xerox machine to copy images from the different idea and photo-books from gettyImages and other companies alike. Every sketch was hand drawn from the art director and I had to assemble all the elements and order originals from the Image agencies or use a photographer. All the text was ordered from companies that was producing letter-type that I then had to manually paste up on the original. Then ship all elements to the repro-agency that made all original films that then was sent to the print-shop or newspaper. The process to make an advert was a lot more work than what it is today.

But – we actually did have Mac’s – 14 Mac Classic II standing in a 100 square meter large room. In the beginning we didn’t even know how to use them. The investment was huge – they were totally awesome but couldn’t use them in production (then) and still after using them for about a year – the only thing we  used them for, was simply sketches. The reason for this was because our suppliers couldn’t handle the files we produced.

“I believe in God because there is no other explanation for Apple’s continued existence.’’ Guy Kawasaki on Apple

In 1994 things were a little different – and I had become pretty confident with the Mac platform and was getting more and more into the concept of «Mac-evangelism» which was introduced by Guy. I had been working with both platforms – Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows – and my choice then, and now was totally clear. I bought all the Mac-Magazines and read all the articles by Guy. After 6 months in my job at Jan Andersen Advertising Agency – I became the system administrator, and in charge of all Macs and software. Of course I tried to evangelise the Mac to as many people I could and using the knowledge I obtained from him.

After his period ended at Apple – Guy disappeared from my radar, but my loyalty for the Mac was strong and I just continued being the more than average mac-evangelist.

This leads me to my intro to the social medias, where I first started off with the classic Facebook page about 20 months ago… and slowly linking up to more and more people. At first it was my colleagues at my own agency, followed by colleagues from the other agencies and friends and family from around the country, mostly younger cousins. (the age issues…hehe) and then finally – I stumbled upon twitter, mostly by mistake. After asking my good friend @tornsuits what twitter was for, i started my account 19’th of November 2008.
I started out with 56 friends the first day, and was not completely grasping the idea of this social media channel.

So I started to google around to find information, and who other than my evangelist guru popped up in the browser – yes – Guy Kawasaki. I got a complete flashback to the early 90’s. I started to read his blog – «How to Change the World» – and the first article was «Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter» and there it was – everything I needed to know about how to build my social network on twitter, and what I can use it for.

Here is a small part from this article: (read the whole thing here)

Tip 1: Follow the “smores (social media whores*).” They are the folks with large number of followers and seem to be the opinion leaders (and perhaps even “heros”) of Twitter. You can get a good idea of who they are by viewing Twitterati.alltop, TwitterCounter, and Egos.alltop. There are three reasons to follow them: first, many have scripts that will auto follow you; second, you might learn something from watching what they tweet about; third, when people look at your profile to see who you follow, you want to appear that you have a clue. (*originally coined by @worleygirl who passed it to @pauladrum who passed it to me)

Tip 2: Send @ messages to the smores. They probably won’t answer you, but that’s okay. All you want to do is appear like you have a relationship with them to enhance your credibility. The theory is, “If she is tweeting with @scobleizeer, she must be worth following.” Bull shiitake logic, admittedly, but it helps. To bastardize what a famous PR person once told me, “It’s not who you know. It’s who appears to know you.”

Tip 3: Create an effective avatar. Your avatar is a window into your soul, so you need to create one that doesn’t look like you shot it with a camera phone while you were drunk. In most cases, use a simple, informal straight-up photo of just your face—not you and your dog, car, kids, or surfboard. Increase the exposure to brighter than you think it should be. Fix the red-eye. Crop the photo because Twitter is going to display it as a postage-stamp size image. If you can’t fix up your photo, send it to Fixmyphotos. Upload a large version of it (approximately 500 x 500 pixels) and let Twitter scale it down, so that when people zoom on your photo, they can see your gorgeousness and not an ugly pixelated image.

Tip 4: Follow everyone who follows you. When I first started on Twitter, Robert Scoble told me to follow everyone who followed me. “But why, Robert, would I follow everyone like that?” The answer is that it’s courteous to do so and because when you do, some people will respond to you and eveyone who follows them will see this—which is more exposure for you.

Having said this, when you get to more than fifty or so followers, it’s impossible to read what all your followers tweet. At that point, you have to focus on direct private messages (“Ds”) and direct public messages (“@s””).

Tip 5: Always be linking. The fact that your cat rolled over or your flight is delayed isn’t interesting, so get outside of your mundanity and link to interesting stories and pictures—you should think of yourself as a one-person StumbleUpon. The Twitter pickup artist’s mantra is ABL (“Always Be Linking”).

Now – almost 2 months later I’m wondering how I didn’t know about this before and all the knowledge, friends and sharing I have missed. But I’m getting there. I’m not any kind of expert, I look at myself as an apprentice – learning new and cool stuff every day, and I try to share all I can to my followers, cus’ thats what it is all about. I have passed 1800 followers, and I follow more than 1900 tweeps. Even more, I am ranked #2 in my country – and I am truly enjoying this new area of knowledge, information and sharing.

Conclusion
I’m really getting into the Social Media community, getting a lot of new friends, and try in my best way to share the knowledge and love. I’m following the advice from Guy – and follow those that follow me. I notice that there are some that has a lot of followers, but that follows just a few… I don’t get that. And I kinda agree with Guy that it is in someway disrespectful to do this. It is almost like saying – «I’m so much better/more important than you»  I disagree with this attitude. Of course there is some exceptions, but when someone has more than 20.000 followers, but only follows around a hundred people – it tells me something.

one more thing
Lately I have taken the time to read some books; Blink and the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, (which I highly recommend) and the book I’m reading at the moment is Reality Check, by Guy Kawasaki. I find the book most interesting, and I really like the blog’ish style of writing – makes it easy to grasp the content and message of the book. I have just started to read it, so I will have to come back to you with some more thoughts on this later.

But I would like – again – to send great gratitude to my lead evangelist – for sharing his knowledge. I truly like the positive attitude and the principles that he conducts his sharing and his business. – I look forward to follow him and all of you in the future.

- arnt

Tagged as: advertising, Apple, facebook, Guy Kawasaki, Mac, social media, twitter