What Did Marshall Do for SplashCast?

As I noted last night, Marshall Kirkpatrick has left his post as Director of Content at SplashCast to join RWW as a writer. What did Marshall bring to SplashCast and where would SC be without him?

Last month Beckham came to the U.S. to play soccer (football) and immediately all of the sports analysts said that not only was he a great soccer player but he also would bring in a new audience of soccer fans. They suggested that he alone would fill the stadiums and get more U.S. kids interested in soccer. Marshall was SplashCast's Beckham.

Marshall brought with him a black book of bloggers, contacts and readers that followed him on his blog journey over the past few years (including a stint at TechCrunch). And more than that: Marshall is well liked and respected. That combo got SC major press on almost any news. Would SplashCast have been able to reach as many without him? And he understood the technology making it easy to understand what the updates were in real terms not just a standard press release that many PR people normally send.

While Marshall's title was "Content Director", I always thought of him as the company's PR VP. As blogging becomes more professional, we will see more of these hirings as companies leverage the name and online reputation a blogger has built with their brand.

Will bloggers and journalists care (as much) about SplashCast now that Marshall is gone? I think so because the product is very good and they now have at least a semi-loyal blogger following. But the management needs to reach out to the bloggers and journalists now, introduce themselves and start to build relationships of their own leveraging those that Marshall has left behind.