Peer 1 Racecars and "Community Evangelists"

Last week the hosting provider Peer 1 ran an entry in it's blog about a couple of system administrators from the company that had put together a team to compete in the awfully amusing race "24 Hours of LeMons" the weekend of July 26-27 in Kershaw, South Carolina.

The blog post, made by Peer 1's "community evangelist" Charnell Pugsley is a follow-up to another earlier blog post that describes a few more of the details and rules of the event.

The event itself seems like a pretty cool race (there's a long list of rules and other various insights at the race's website). It's a two-day endurance race for which entrants have to buy and prepare a car for under $500 (the race title being a reference to the "24 Hours of Le Mans" endurance race and "LeMons," as in "lemons," as in a car that begins having mechanical problems immediately after you buy it).

Peer 1 sponsored employees Kevin Lee and Elson Rodriguez, and their team, to enter the event. They don't say specifically what that means, but if I had to guess I'd say it involved putting up some or all of the money to build the car and enter the race, putting a Peer 1 logo on the side of the car and making a video to post on the company's blog.

By the way, there's a video posted in the blog entry. It's about 10 minutes long. I didn't watch the whole thing, because there are a couple lengthy sections of somewhat-confusingly-cut-together race footage. I skipped ahead, and there's plenty of fun stuff in there too.

According to Pugsley, Kevin Lee and I share a determination to never visit another junkyard. Though, his comes several months spent sifting through junkyards looking for parts for his racecar, whereas mine is based more on a technically-unconfirmed suspicion that I just probably don't like junkyards.

The larger, more interesting, point here is that sponsorship, and the related blog postings and video are pretty bang-on "community evangelist" content. And I put the job title in quotations not to belittle it, but to sort of highlight the fact that quite a few hosting companies are currently working to define this role (The Planet, for instance, has a "web hosting evangelist," Kevin Hazard).

It's not something every company is doing, but it's definitely out there. And things like Peer 1 getting involved in the race, and the subsequent self-referential blogging, serve the dual purposes of making the company seem (to employees) like a cool or fun place to work, and giving the company a more personal public image, particularly among its customers, who might appreciate knowing that the people administering their servers could be doing cool, fun things.

Also interesting is watching the hosting companies work toward defining the roles for these evangelist positions. In Puglsey's case, a recent example is the work she did in communicating the status of the company's network to customers (via the Peer 1 forums) during the massive downtown Vancouver power outage that brought some of the servers under the company's management offline.

While that incident was a pretty big problem for the company, I think it was a pretty excellent illustration of the kind of positive impact the evangelist can have.

I'd be very interested in hearing from hosts. Do you have an evangelist on staff? Are you the evangelist for a hosting company? What's in his or her (or your) job description? Is the evangelist a blogger and message board poster? Facebook group operator? Twitter...er? What other venues for evangelism are there, exactly?