While it’s nice that WordPress has the ability to export and import posts so that I was able to move all of my old Dealernews articles from my personal site to this new site that I’ve set up for consulting to the motorcycle and powersports industry, it didn’t go perfectly.
Most of the “ and ‘ punction marks came over as wacky code like the euro currancy symbol and a lot of other gobldygook. So I’m going through and fixing all of that. There’s also a lot of issues with broken links, odd tags, etc. that I need to manually clean up. So for the next few days, please pardon the mess. It will be fixed ASAP.
Tags:move, site, status
The old ways of doing business in the powersports industry (no matter how successful dealerships, retailers, OEM’s, and distributors may have been up to this point) are dying, if not already dead.
- Customers are changing.
- Technology is changing.
For the swift and the smart willing to embrace the required radical changes necessary, these changes will represent the best thing that ever happened to them.
Times of radical change are always an excellent opportunity for the smart and the swift. But it helps to have a guide!
For the dealers/retailers that don’t change, they will be left with a small local service business.
If I’m right, the powersports industry in 5-7 years is going to look nothing like it does today. [I'll write more about my ideas on this in the future]
After writing my column for Dealernews and presenting at the large DealerExpo in Indy for the past few years and talking with so many dealers, retailers, and OEM’s I’ve come away with the simple observation that it’s not that the people in the industry do not sense the need to change, or don’t want to change, they just don’t know how or what to change. Especially the dealers/retailers. They have the experience and knowledge of how motorcycle and other powersports dealerships have been run in the past, but they don’t have the exposure or experience with how to make the leap into the 21st century and really take advantage what the internet has to offer, or compete with those that do.
My columns and my sessions are a good start, but I’ve recognized that there’s a large number of retailers and OEM’s that need more hands-on help to get where they sense they need to be.
Simply put, there no one else out there with the background, expertise and abilities better positioned to help lead the powersports industry out of the old ways of doing business (with a focus on e-commerce/multi channel retailing and next-generation marketing and advertising) and into the age of the Internet, social networking, word-of-mouth marketing, and radical changes in the supply chain.
If your dealership, powersports retail business, or OEM business is ready to make radical changes, let us know. Radical Powersports Sales and Marketing is here to help.
Last month I introduced the idea of social networking on the Internet and gave a brief overview of what social networking is all about and how it can play a role in the promotion of your e-commerce operation. This month I’m going to give a 40,000 foot overview of the different types of social sites out there.
General, high-level social sites: The best examples currently are MySpace and FaceBook – These act as a sort of catch all “home” for people on the web. People can create “profiles” there and host content with basic blogging and content management tools, as well as upload other types of multimedia content (pictures, graphics, video). The key to these sites from a marketing standpoint is to create a compelling persona for your dealership, and then participate and contribute constantly to keep the activity level up.
While these high-level sites like MySpace and FaceBook are currently getting most of the attention when it comes to social networking, there’s many other types and sub-types of social sites out there that you can participate in.
Forums - Forums are the oldest form of social networking that I can think of. They are essentially the modern incarnation of the old fashioned BBS (bulletin board system) from the pre-Internet dark ages. Successful forums primarily exist around a singular aspect of life that has a large enough population that cares about it so you get enough participation, but that is narrowly focused to actually be about something. A perfect example of an amazing forum would be one that you are most likely aware of, advrider.com. (An interesting aside that demonstrates the value of the mixing of various social networking sites or technologies is how tightly integrated the social photo site SmugMug is integrated into Advrider.com).
Forums are a great place to participate at the dealer level because most of the stuff posted on them is typically ill-informed, third-hand information that may or may not be intentionally misleading just to mess with people. That’s just the nature of the Internet a lot of times. However, if you post clearly as a trusted and knowledgeable source of information, you will be loved. A side advantage is that typically you can have a link to your site in your signature on each of your posts so it acts as a bit of search engine fodder. Just remember to only post valuable information, and try to avoid arguments or flame-wars as those are pretty much no-win situations that will make you look bad.
Groups – Groups are essentially the modern incarnation of UseNet Newsgroups (not that Newsgroups have totally disappeared). They are typically hosted on a larger site like Yahoo!Groups or GoogleGroups. They are sort of like the gated community version of a forum. Because of their somewhat closed nature they are almost not in the social network ecosystem, however, they are worth mentioning especially if there are groups that you can participate in
Blogs – Blogs (short for web log) are basically online diarys or newsletters. There are stand-alone blog sites where you can set up a blog for your shop as well such as Google’s Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress, or you can install and run your own blog on your own server, or you can take advantage of the blog-like features of the high-level social sites like The Wall on FaceBook. If your resources are limited, I’d suggest creating a profile on a high-level social site like FaceBook and use The Wall instead of spreading yourself too thin across multiple sites.
Video sharing - Two good examples are YouTube and MetaCafe. These types of sites exist as both a destination where you can watch, upload, and comment as well as a platform that you can use to distribute your video. While a stand-alone site like YouTube may be pretty cool, it’s the ability to embed your YouTube video on another site that makes them truly the killer application. There’s a lot of potential marketing benefit if you can manage to create what’s known as a viral video. That’s a video that’s so cool, funny, or otherwise catchy that hundreds of people watch it and send it to their friends. More on that in a later column.
Photo sharing – The biggest player in this space is Flickr and a site that’s a distant second but that I personally like a lot more is SmugMug. These sites work pretty much the same way that the video sharing sites except obviously focus on images. One thing worth pointing out is how Flickr has so many ways to leverage the photos you put up there on other sites and in other applications. An example is how you can create a photo album on Flickr and then embed a little slideshow plugin on your site that shows those images just like you can do with videos from video sites like YouTube.
Social Bookmarking sites - Sites like StumbleUpon and del.icio.us (del.icio.us yes, that’s a real URL) are sites where people can publicly create, share, and tag (provide a series of keywords that describe the bookmark to make them easier to find) sites. The goal is to have a site that is valuable enough, or at least attention-worth enough to get a lot of people to create and share the bookmark to your site.
Socially-driven content aggregation – The current big-daddy is Digg. They are sort of like the social bookmarking sites on steroids. These sites are basically news or what’s cool type sites that are not driven by an editorial team, but are instead driven by users submitting a “story” with a link to a site, and then all the other users of the site will vote on the submission. Submissions that for one reason or another are deemed “interesting” will get more votes and move up in the rankings. The goal is to get on the front page of these sites. If you are fortunate enough to get on the front page of these sites, be prepared to watch your web server break into flames from what is known as the “digg-effect” where the sudden barrage (upwards of a 3000% increase in a lot of cases) of traffic brings your poor dealership’s website to its knees. That’s what’s known as a good problem.
There are literally hundreds of other categories, mash-ups, and sites out there in the social networking space. What I’ve done is to just scratch the surface and try to expose you to the possibilities and the major players. Wikipedia has a pretty complete list of social networking sites if you want to dive in a little more.
Next month I’m going to go into more detail on the the pure social networking sites like MySpace and FaceBook and give some thoughts on why your should care about them (or not), how you may be able to use them, and what else might be coming around the bend in the Internet’s tubes in the near future.
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Tags:blog, Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, facebook, flickr, internet, metacafe, motorcycle, myspace, powersports, Powersports Industry, selling-online, social-networking, web2.0, wordpress, youtube
