'Evangelist' blogs his way to Redmond

Microsoft has hired JupiterResearch analyst Michael Gartenberg to act as a "enthusiast evangelist," Gartenberg said on his blog this week.

He explained his mission this way: "to find, engage and work with enthusiasts and other influencers and show them all the cool stuff that Microsoft is doing."

Many bloggers saw the move as a replacement for Robert Scoble, who blogged about the company and conducted interviews with employees on Microsoft's Channel 9 blog. Scoble left for a podcasting start-up last summer.

Many companies have hired in-house bloggers by now. But are they actually helping get the message across, or do enthusiasts see this as just more marketing?

Blog community response:

"I'm not sold on 'enthusiast evangelism' yet. To me, this is just a different way to describe our breadth marketing efforts. And there is certainly nothing wrong with that, but at the end of the day its still just marketing our products to the general consumer and/or end-user. What am I missing here?"
--Randy Holloway Unfiltered

"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."
--TechCrunch

"A lot of times, the debate people like to have about these kinds of hirings is about conflict of interest or standards of disclosure. But I think the more important question is whether the blogger and the company that hires him/her are both set up to use blogging as part of building the business, not merely as window dressing."
--Anil Dash