What does an Enthusiast Evangelist do?

How does that sound for a cool job title?  I was reading Jeff Sandquist’s blog yesterday and found his entry about Michael Garternberg joining Microsoft and the Channel 10 team as a Enthusiast Evangelist.

I got to thinking … When I was working for Microsoft, I remember all kinds of different titles like developer evangelist, technical evangelist, etc. I never once recall hearing anything about an enthusiast evangelist.  No offense to my old colleagues, but Technical Account Manager or TAM, doesn’t have the same ring to it as Evangelist.

What does an Enthusiast Evangelist do? Michael explains in his blog entry:

“Our job is to 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 job to act as the bridge between Microsoft and end users.”

Sounds pretty fun.  Sounds like a good opportunity to potentially make an impact with the user community.

The funny part of Michael’s announcement is all of the comments to his post.  A few good, but a lot of “Boos” about him making the switch to Microsoft.  You can read the comments below his entry here.

About the time I was reading through the comments, my RSS feeds updated, and into my Outlook popped an entry from the blog of Michael Garternberg.  The title of his latest entry is “And Back To Analyst…“  Funny enough, Michael has decided to resign from Microsoft and return to Jupiter Research as an analyst.  Maybe the ribbing from colleagues and subscribers alike was too much?