Funding, Future, Corporate Life

As many of you know I currently work for IBM(have done for 18 years). I have since 2006 been driving forward the ideas and needs for everyone (us, customers, competitors, family, friends) to get involved in both virtual worlds. This made me a metaverse evangelist, and I still am. I have also for many years been exploring the impact of social media both inside and outside of the company.
The explosion in virtual world interest led one part of IBM, and one particular visionary to invest in my time. This was a complicated arrangement. I work for IBM UK at Hursley Labs in a cost recovery group. People often assume a corporate is a thing, a single structure with single decisions points. It is really a collection, an eco system of small units, many of them effectively vying for contracts with one another to deliver things to customers.
I effectively had a short term contract from a part of the US company to pay for my time to be a metaverse evangelist both inside and outside the company. It was originally a year, but ended up being 2 1/2.
That internal contract finishes, but I am still an IBM UK employee in cost recovery with a services group.
Ideally I would have like some other funding, contract, role or project to be able to simply pay for my time in one lump sum so I could continue my evangelizing with one less thing to worry about. I have not been focussed on me and my career though as this is about all of us and about the industry.
It is not the case for most people to be funded in this wat, and I have been incredibly lucky to have been able to push this and pursue it for this long.
I wanted to let people know that this is more about my personal situation than any plan or direction that may be inferred. I knew that come jan 1st when I may end up doing something completely different during the day to pay the bills for my department that I would not be able to officially attend the various events and share my thoughts as I have been doing.
It also indicates that we may well have moved past the need for pure evangelizing as so many people now get the basics. I will still be pushing and publishing thoughts and ideas, and going back into skunkwork mode.
I have learned a lot about who I am the past few years and what I can do. How to bring people along on a journey and dare I say it lead. Finding a career role somewhere to play to those strengths will take a little time, I am but a humble techie after all ;)
Evangelizing is a complicated thing to explain to people, it is not a department thing, it is something that spreads across lots of interactions with lots of people. It is by its very nature self destroying.
So, the future for virtual worlds, well they are not going away are they! There is a demand for secure behind the firewall enterprise level communications far in excess of simple IM and phone. There is still a huge cultural change, that may mean than evangelist roles become more obvious to more organizations for the next waves of disruption.
So no one panic :) It's just where the world is at the moment and this is all much bigger than one individual. I am still committed to this, as far as I can tell so is everyone else, but change is good.

Value of a personal brand

The last few weeks have proved very interesting in understanding perceptions of my personal brand inside various organizations and pieces of organizations. Some people say oh wow its you and you do that stuff, thats very valuable, we love it. Others say "meh" its not all that. The balance of great versus not so great is hardly a balance, its a 98% vote for me being president, versus a 2% get out of my face you are not all that. The odd thing is the distribution of that, and in a connected world the slew of influence that has over so many things.
Anyway, I am still busy enjoying the epredator and eightbar brand. Those that don't have had an impact on me and I am sure they feel wonderfully clever. I am nothing if not open, and openness is scary to many people. Oh whats he going to say now?
I know that some of the things I could say and could do might have a wonderful revenge quality, but in the long run its better to forgive and move on. Sh*t happens its would appear. No I have not got religion as such, still a metaverse evangelist, but I do live by a code of honour.
Enough of all that here is a brilliant article and film from Sky, featuring me and me for IBM's 50th celebration.
What I do for companies seems to generate press interest, and customer interest, maybe more so than a press advert. It is a bit unusual to be a walking personalized advert but maybe that is what evangelism is in the end. Just still hard to prove the value isnt it :) Of course the evangelist and strategist curse is, once you let people know what they need to do, they cant remember why they needed you in the first place.

The art of evangelism

I was just on a web ex conference listening to Guy Kawasaki talk about the art of evangelism. It was good to hear things packages up in 11 little rules.
I think these are all cornerstones of what I do :-) However its good to hear a fellow evangelist, with an awesome track record, speak and present.
1. Make meaning
2. Make a mantra (not a mission statement)
3. Roll the DICEE (An acronymy around depth and elegance and innovation)
4. Niche Thyself
5. Let a hundred flowers blossom (Dont assume non target audience is not interested)
6. Make it personal
7. Find the true influencers (seldom the big hitters at the top)
8. Enable test drives
9. look for agnostics, not atheists
10. provide a slippery slope - make it easy and obvious to get ivolved
11. Dont let the bozo's grind you down

The bozo's part is interesting as he told a story about him making the wrong assumption and thereby mot accepting an interview as CEO of yahoo at startup.

All in all the recipe sounded very familiar, and comforting. I am not sure if they make the recording public, I suspect not as they also hid us all from one another on the participant list. A bit silly in a web 2.0 world, but there you go.