Vespa Blogs: 404

It appears that Vespaquest and Vespaway have both been shut down, either because PiaggioUSA and CooperKatz were embarrassed by bad press, or too disorganized to pay hosting or domain fees.

I want to make it very, very clear that even though I find perverse joy in Piaggio’s dismal marketing failures;

  1. I’d find even more joy if they did something right. (I’ve seen the new MP3 print ads, and they’re fantastic, I hope they make the most of that opportunity.)
  2. It’s 100% inaccurate to call the blogs “failures” (as I have) because both were entirely successful, despite Piaggio’s lack of involvement. A child abandoned by her parents that ends up going to Harvard is not a failure, but the parents deserve none of the credit. The blogs were raised by wolves, Crystal and Neil specifically, and they did a really amazing job. I looked forward to both sites daily. Crystal’s Girlbike is among the best scooter sites out there, and I check it religiously. In the past, I’ve credited them with “making the most of what they had to work with,” which sounds negative, but it was meant as a compliment, they did a lot for Piaggio for just about nothing in return.
  3. Both blogs were important resources that should have remained on the web. Even though the most recent post on each was a bit embarassing for Piaggio, the other 99.9% of the content was good stuff, and good marketing for Piaggio. The content will be missed, and I hope Crystal and/or Neil can repost it on their own sites, or otherwise make it available once again (It’s still cached in Google).

Scooter Swag

I don’t mention Scooter Swag nearly enough, it’s a definite must-check-weekly and saves me the trouble of posting every…scooter…thing I see, because I’ll never keep up with them. Tracy Ball has added Cassie Maringer to the ScooterSwag team, and Cassie’s recent burst of activity is astounding. There’s so much scooter stuff out there it makes you wonder if it’s not time to find a new, less hip hobby.

Scooter Diva’s Buyer’s Guide

Some of the photos are stretched funny, some of the lineups will probably change in February, and a few brands I might have included are omitted, but all in all, Scooter Diva’s 2007 Scooter Buyer’s Guide is a lot better than most of those fancy magazine buyer’s guides. And if nothing else, they weren’t pressured by advertisers into listing the 2004 Bajaj Chetak as a current model.

MBI Awards Nominations open

MBI70.gifYou might have noticed the “Motorcycle Bloggers International” logo on my site. MBI is mainly a forum for motorsports bloggers, but the public face of MBI is the annual “MBI Awards,” awarded to people, organizations, websites, and manufacturers related to motorcycling (and scootering, of course.) This year, the nominations have been opened to the public so if you want to give someone props, or rip someone’s head off, please do. You can also sign up for an automatic reminder when it’s time for voting, I’ll post reminders here, too.

VespaUSA, the internets, and missed opportunities

Ex-Vespa-blogger Crystal Waters points out at Girlbike that even the marketing community has picked up on Piaggio’s failure to support the official Vespa blogs. ClickZ’s headline, (“Two Years After Launching Brand Blogs, Vespa Forgets Them,”) is misleading, they were forgotten about ten minutes after CooperKatz patted themselves on the back for inventing the idea. Still, even though both blogs were frozen in time with a depressing lead post about Vespa’s lack of enthusiasm, the VespaUSA site linked to them until yesterday (presumably the links were removed as a result of the ClickZ story).

Another punchline comes from a VespaUSA visitor who requested a catalog online and waited three months for it to arrive. As of today (January 3, 2007), the VespaUSA site launches a pre-Christmas promotion popup page. The front page features four “news” stories, two dating from June 2006 and at least one (possibly two, it’s unclear) featuring an expired promotion. Neither PiaggioUSA nor VespaUSA’s site mention a 2007 lineup, or the most-anticipated scooter of 2007, the MP3 (which amazingly remains without a name for the American market). One has to imagine that the majority of hits to a motorcycle manufacturer website in January are going to be people looking for new model info.

Canadian Scooter Corp. announced their 2007 Vespa/Piaggio lineup in mid-December (featuring the MP3, but no Vespa S!), but their site is also woefully out of date, featuring “news” from May 2006 and nothing about the new models.

If Piaggio as a corporation doesn’t have the reaction time or resources to keep their own sites up to date, (simply a fact of life for some bureaucratic corporations), the two Vespa blogs were a perfect way to spread information –on their terms–in a more timely manner. That’s why it’s even more depressing to see that they couldn’t muster the little effort required to communicate with their own (volunteer!) bloggers. With so many scooter bloggers, “official” and otherwise, doing their work for them, you’d think PiaggioUSA would be able to capitalize on their own hype, rather than abandoning every initiative they start. Once again, I ask, what the hell do Vespa’s marketing people (in-house and at CooperKatz) do all day? There’s very little evidence of marketing at the national level, in the past year they mustered nothing but an occasional PR-fluff newspaper story, the “Open Letter to Mayors,” the Vespetition (their master opus, maybe a week’s worth of work) and a handful of ads in national scooter magazines. Meanwhile, they’re awarding dealerships to anyone who asks, so they can say their “sales” are up. Perhaps their “marketing” is all at the dealer level?

Goodbye, Vespaway

Blogger Crystal Waters retired from Vespaway today, pretty much bringing an end to the “official” Vespa blog project that started in May 2005. Waters left Vespaquest, her original official Vespa blog, to join Neil Barton at Vespaway in March, after their blogging partners lost interest. Barton has posted only seven entries since April, (vs. 500+ posts on 2strokebuzz, brag brag), so Waters’ departure — and her frank admission that Vespa and their marketing firm, CooperKatz have lost interest in the blogs — seems to spell the end of Vespaway. Like many Piaggio marketing initiatives, the blogs seemed woefully ignored by Piaggio after a bright start, and the bloggers’ frustration even snuck to the surface a few times. Luckily, Waters’ better personal blog will continue, and I would link it up, if she hadn’t snubbed the world’s first and best scooter blog (that would be us) in her list of other resources. OK, I won’t be petty, ha, it’s girlbike.com. Best of luck, Crystal, ride on.

Viva la Vespa (the podcast)

Trevor from Southern California wants a Vespa, and has decided to document his journey into scooterdom in a podcast. He’s still trying to sell his car, and doesn’t have the bike yet, but he’s determined. It’s sort of the podcast version of the Scooter Snoop blog. Trevor will thus be happy to learn that Scott from Scooter Snoop finally passed his test last Wednesday and has his GT200 on the road! (Thanks for the link, Rye.)

Two new Asian bike blogs

Two great new-ish blogs about Asian motorcycles and scooters, for those of you that can’t get enough Hyosang, Hero Honda, and SYM news: The Bike Chornicles [sic] of India has been doing a great job documenting the Indian motorcycle industry for the past three months, and Two-Wheeled Asian Invasion offers a “view of the motorcycle industry in China, India, Taiwan and elsewhere,” mostly from a U.S. powersports-dealer perspective.

Scooternista does the math

Scooternista, a new scooter blog, follows “Modelcarguy” and his quest for two (or three) wheels. The perspective is interesting as he’s not really sure what he wants (he’s leaning towards an Ape or Bajaj threewheeler at the moment) and he’s not entirely sold on the scooter concept to begin with, so his indecision is our gain. Like us, he was dubious of the “scooter economy” promised by Piaggio’s Vespanomics site (and every other scooter company, dealer, and newspaper article). He did the math related to his situation and found what we suspected– in most cases, there are better reasons than economics to buy a scooter.

We’re working on a story outlining the successes (we’re happy to report there are some!) and shortcomings of Piaggio’s “Vespanomics” and “Open Letter to Mayors” PR campaigns, look for it later this week. Please get in touch if you have any insight.

Vespatude

Jonathan Pait’s blog, Vespatude, started about a year ago when he bought a Vespa on eBay. Surely he planned to write about his travels and adventures, but unfortunately he’s spent the year learning why you should never buy an Asian restoration on eBay. Currently, he’s trying to raise some money for a new engine (“Million Dollar Homepage”-style), if you’re in the market for a vintage scooter, throw a few bucks his way to thank him for saving you the trouble of finding out the hard way.