Meet Chris Blatnick - An Employee Evangelist

[Judy McLeish]

Do you have any employee evangelists at your company? An employee evangelist is someone who believes so much in the company they work for and the products they sell that they passionately commit themselves to them. The evangelist becomes both an internal advocate and an external sales force with the sole purpose of promoting the product or service that they love.

Meet Chris Blatnick, an employee evangelist! We think you will be astonished at the passion, energy and commitment that Chris has put into promoting Lotus Notes.

We were very fortunate in that Chris agreed to do an interview with us. We asked Chris a series of questions to help better understand the mindset of an employee evangelist.


Background: Chris now works Lotus Software. Lotus is part of IBM, within their software group. Chris was a user of the Lotus products for many years and became the de facto evangelist at each company he worked at. Being in this role has served him well and he believes that it was one factor in him obtaining the job at IBM. Besides his day job, Chris runs the Interface Matters blog, where he write posts and shares code that helps Lotus Notes developers learn about best practices around user interface design.


We asked Chris five questions to help better understand the mindset of an employee evangelist. Here are his answers to the questions.


1. What does it mean to be an evangelist?
2. What do you think companies can do to create employee evangelists?
3. Are there any companies out there that are fostering employee evangelists? If so, which company and what are they doing?
4. What has Lotus done to help foster your continued evangelism?
5. Do you believe that employee evangelists have common traits? If so what do you think they are?

Click on this link to view Chris's responses. We know that reading his responses will inspire anyone to foster a culture that supports employee evangelists!

Do you know any evangelists? If so, what are you doing to foster their passion, energy and commitment?