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Regular readers of my blog know that I am a big believer in empowering customer evangelists to act as a voice for your company.

It's not right for every organization. However, if you have a product or service that people just love, you can give your marketing an extra boost by putting your customers front and center  - whether it be through advertising, PR or online through blogging. It works really well when you can synergize it with a traditional PR campaign. This is our model for the Vespa PR program.

With this in mind, today the Micro Persuasion practice at CooperKatz is taking the wraps off Vespaway. Heather Green at BusinessWeek interviews our two customer bloggers - Jonathan Ogilvy and Neil Barton - on their Blogspotting blog. Like she says, we were fortunate to find four great customers to blog for Vespa. Here are the blogging guidelines (PDF) our bloggers all agreed to abide by.

Vespaway is the first of two customer-written weblogs we are rolling out for Vespa USA, a unit of Piaggio USA. The second will launch later this month. For background see my previous blog post as well as this article in the Wall Street Journal and the FAQ at Vespablogs.com.

Customer Evangelists

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Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.