'E-Commerce' Entries ↓

Here was the LinkedIn:Answers question:

Who is the BEST SEO Consultant out there?

I am looking for the best SEO consultant out there, to work with me on a content driven lead gen property we are working on.

This can be paid in Cash / Cash + Equity

This was my response:

There are some good recommendations here obviously, but I think it’s very important that you understand the scope of your question. I’m not trying to be pedantic, and if you already know this stuff then that’s great.

Fundamentally good SEO (and to a large extent SEM) is based around having a good site to begin with. That all comes down to having good content.

From there all the rest of the “stuff” comes into play:
-On page factors
-Intrasite link structures
-quality links to your site from outside with good anchor text
-Properly managed server infrastructure with all the appropriate redirects (if necessary)
-Good site hygiene (lack of duplicate content, etc. etc.)

In addition to that basic fact, SEO is VERY market dependent. If you are trying to compete in an area with highly sought after keywords, it’s a much harder row to hoe. If you are in a niche or long-tail market, it can be much easier. Obviously the nature of the market and the inherent difficulty of the SEO effort in each will determine how “best” you need.

Keep that in mind when you get recommendations as well. Someone with a niche site could have used Person X and gotten great results, but that same person in a more competitive market could have failed miserably.

As you’re evaluating an SEO consultant just be VERY careful of anyone that promises a certain result or rank. They can do all the “correct” work and it can still take a long time to see the results on your site.

That said, if you have the bank account to support it, the two heavy-hitters I’d look at are:

Bruce Clay (www.bruceclay.com)
Stephen Spencer (www.netconcepts.com)

Both of these guys/companies have a much more comprehensive outlook and toolset than a lone SEO consultant can provide not to mention the years and years of man-hours of experience that they can bring to bare on your problem.

I don’t work for them, and I’m not paid to shill for them. I’ve just seen them talk numerous times at shows like Search Engine Strategies, Internet Retailer, eTail, etc. and I’m always blown away by their presentations, and I’ve yet to meet a client of theirs that was not amazed with their results.

I write for and consult to the motorcycle and powersports market (www.radicalpowersports.com) which is a pretty niche space, so perhaps my outlook is different than say a large consumer goods space.

But I’d suggest starting with these top guys and if they don’t work for you, I’m sure they can point you a good, trusted company that would fit better for you.

Good luck, and my the Google gods smile on your efforts!

Links:

• http://www.bruceclay.com
• http://www.netconcepts.com
• http://www.radicalpowersports.com

Tags:consulting, LinkedIn-Answers, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO

I caught a news story over Times Online about a new venture by none other than Peter Gabriel called TheFilter.com (It should be noted that Peter is the most consistently talented, brilliant and visionary artist alive today. Especially when you look at the incredible longevity of his career. Seriously. It’s unfair really to all the other artists out there that Mr. Gabriel has laid claim to so much of the artistic energy out there all for himself. This is not my opinion. It’s a fact).

I’ve always liked the idea of a solid recommendation engine ever since the first one I ever played with called Firefly. In the world of e-commerce a bullet-proof recommendation is the holy grail of personalized selling online. The smartest, most patient, and valuable sales person in the universe!
Anyway, as I was reading about this ambitious sounding project I was really excited to find out if someone had finally created a music recommendation engine that would solve two problems I have. When I see one of these music recommendation engines, I always try it with a few real world tests.

1) I really, really like non-vocal jazz that features vibes and/or flute. But I don’t know squat about the who’s-who of that sub-genre and I’m too lazy to dig into it. I’ve tried to, but not knowing anyone that knows anything about it I don’t know who to ask or where to start. When I’ve tried stuff like Pandora and Last.fm I’ve gotten no where. It never gives me more than one song in a row that does not have vocals, or features flute or vibes. Weak.

2) The next area I want to get more good recommendations for is Soul (funny enough the reason for this is because I love DJ Shadow and he scratches a lot of old R&B and Soul, and because I’m currently totally digging Gnarls Barkley which sound like some kind of time-bending mix of old Soul and modern electronica). Once again, all of the other recommendation engines out there have failed miserably at recommending music in these genres that I like. Maybe I’m just too picky or my taste band is too narrow. I don’t know.

All I know is that when I hear certain songs in these genres I love them. Then when I hear other songs in these genres I hate them. But I don’t know enough about the genre or the artists to really deconstruct why I love or hate them.

To me, that’s where these engines should be focusing on! I want something that will take my direct input on stuff that I like and use some kind of deep, dark, electronic voodoo and figure out why I like what I like and match that up with other stuff that has the same mystical qualities that I should like.

But other than Netflix for movies (on occasion), nothing that I’ve tried for music has even come close. Most just seem to work as a way to reinforce the user’s tastes and at best add a few more bands/movies/books that they might have stumbled across anyway.

That said, I really wanted TheFilter.com to be the kick-ass solution I was looking for. Sadly, it’s not. At least not yet.

Problems with TheFilter.com:

The initial rating process is really flawed. And it seems to me that if the process that is intended to create the seed is this messed up, I don’t see how the recommendations can be any good.

There needs to be an option to indicate that you have no idea who the band/artist is so that they stop showing it to you over, and over, and over again. I don’t want to have to listen to some clips of some band called New Found Glory only to determine that I think they are horrible when I have literally thousands of other bands that I do know that I can tell you about.

Also, why is it when I press the more artists button it doesn’t actually shuffle the artists that are presented unless I’ve rated them?! Point #1 above about being able to create something like a NULL rating might fix this.

Also, it’s totally not random… I went through the signup process several times and it always offered the same bands initially and offered them over and over if I didn’t rank them. Like Sum-41, Blink-182, etc. I felt like the system was trying to lead me too much.

Next, the level of ranking granularity is way to course. It asks you to rank an artist. Huh? How can you accurately rank at the global artist level? Here’s some examples or artists that it offered me:

Sting

What Sting are you talking about? Early Sting when he was still pretty good, perhaps feeling a new-found artistic freedom to do what he wanted without The Police, or later/recent Sting that’s doing stuff that makes Sarah McLaughlin (who I like) sound like a heavy metal act?

What songs by Sting? Some are great, some are horrible (note, since I’m talking about art here, all value judgments are totally subjective and represent my feelings and opinions. Which should be the whole point of this thing! It’s suppose to figure out all the random, sometimes mutually contradicting data points and project what I should like)

U2

Again, what U2? I love early U2. After Joshua Tree they fell off for me until their album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb which I really like, but for completly different reasons than why I like early U2!

If the recommendation engine can not capture those kinds of nuances, then how can it offer recommendations that are better then me just randomly picking something from the same genre?

What I’d like to see:

I’d much rather have a way to tell the system what music I have/know about and why I like it or don’t like it.

I’d like to be able to choose (from a list) an artist, album, or even a song and then deconstruct what I like about it.

I want to rank it on multiple axis like style, tempo, lyrics, mood, feel, technical musical virtuosity (for instance on this one… I’m a drummer/percussionist so I like drums and I like some bands that have really, really talented drummers. But just because I like or admire the drummer’s ability does not mean that I like the music they play or the band they play in. I love Neil Peart and I love Rush. I also love and respect Mike Portnoy as a drummer, but I can’t stand to listen to more than like 4 bars of Dream Theater (which may be odd because I like a lot of other progressive metalish bands like Marillion (early Marillion back when Fish was still with them and they sounded like an angry Genesis))

It seems to me that to really get a recommendation engine to do what I want it to do it would need to offer me a way to feed it this level of understanding. I want a system that acts like the ultimate, non-judgemental, musical genius friend that looks at my iTunes collection and knows me really well and says, “Dude, you like Marillion and Genesis?” and I say, “Yea, but only early Genesis and I don’t like the stuff that Marillion did after their singer Fish left and for some reason I don’t like what Fish did on his own either for some reason. So I have no idea why I like Marillion so much, but I do!” And then my friend goes, “Oh well in that case you really need to listen to ___” and when I do it’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. [For some reason you could substitute a lot of pairs in the above sentence like Van Halen/David Lee Roth, The Police/Sting, Pink Floyd/Rodger Waters. To loop back to Mr Gabriel, he’s about the only person that was in a band that I loved that went off on his own and was still amazing (while Genesis floundered in my opinion after he left, which again is really odd as Phil Collins seemed to have been pretty cool and a really rocking drummer when he was in Genesis but then went totally poofy on his own and as the frontman for later Genesis… Except for Trick of the Tail which is a pretty darn good album and Phil is just nuts on the drums in that album… No idea what happened to him after that though…)

I want a system that does that.

TheFilter.com is nowhere near being able to do that. At least not yet. It’s in beta apparently so perhaps there’s still hope.

[note that I didn’t really get into other stuff that seemed pretty weak about the site like navigation, errors, bad layouts, etc… Although it seems like with close to $8MM in funding they could be doing a lot better job…]

[EDIT: Hmmm… I wonder what’s up. All of the emails to the addresses listed on their contact page bounce… Hello… Hello… Is this thing on?]

Tags:Music, peter-gabriel, recommendations, thefilter.com

I have a brilliant idea for an e-commerce platform design that would blow away just about every other platform out there. Now I just need to figure out a way to get it built! Google? Want to see my idea for GCommerce?

I just read a blurb about a company called Cartfly in the E-Commerce Times. After checking it out it seems that a concept that failed the first time around may have another chance at life.
It’s fascinating that the old adage that everything old is new again, even if in the internet age that progression happens more quickly, is as alive as ever!

It seems to me that what Cartfly is doing is in many ways very similar to the concept that was attempted by a company that I worked at as a sales engineer/evangelist during the dot-com boom/bust period. That company was called CrossCommerce [RIP] and their idea was to take e-commerce out of the walls of a typical “store” and instead embed buying opportunities within content-rich sites.

The concept was called “contextual commerce.” There were all kinds of studies that showed that the conversion rates were much higher for products that were displayed inline with interesting content. For example, if you ran a site about snowboarding and had a story about a recent trip, you could display small product display “shelves” in the story that would allow people to buy the products you were talking about right then and there.

It was a compelling idea, especially at the time, because for the most part there was nowhere near the opportunity to monetize a content rich site other than banner ads. It was before Google’s AdSense had established the strangle-hold on the ad world. This was back in the day of roll-your-own banner advertising, or relying on folks like DoubleClick.

One of the hugely significant things about CrossCommerce that was different was that a large portion of CrossCommerce’s operations was taken up with developing the business relationships with the OEM’s and distributors of literally millions of products. From the old stand-bys like CD and Videos to golf and sporting equipment.

It was literally a one stop shop for content producers. Once you had an account with CrossCommerce (which was free as CrossCommerce made money off a vig/transaction charge) you would go to your CrossCommerce site, choose the products you wanted to sell from the massive catalog, create the little shelf, copy the javascript code that was generated and put that code in your content where you wanted to the products to appear.

In my opinion, it was bloody brilliant (which is why I worked there and stayed around too long even after the writing was on the wall, the rats were leaving the ship, etc. etc.)! It was one of the few ideas to come out during the dot-bomb time that was actually a really, really sound idea. And it worked! CrossCommerce was even developing methods that would scan the page that held the shelf and based on that content analysis automatically generate appropriate products. AdSense, but with products instead of ads. And again it actually worked!

Now why in the world would such a brilliant idea, that was backed up with an actual working execution, built on an insanely robust and expensive technology platform, with strong implementation with product suppliers (which even handled the drop-shipping and logistics!), and financed to the tune of like $60MM+ fail?

Well, for one thing this all happened around 2000. The dot-com bubble was bursting so there was a general downward momentum. What was amazing to witness first-hand as I was on the front lines in sales was the number of these content sites that had zero plans on how to make money and as far as I could tell didn’t care if they ever made money! It was pure insanity and obviously most of them died unquiet deaths.

Next, this was before blogs and other sources of easily-generated content. It was still the days of build your own websites or large, expensive content management solutions. So there were nowhere near the number of sites looking to make money with a completly turn-key, self administered e-commerce solution. And it also did not have the amazing phenominom of the social-networking tidal wave going for it either.

Then the complete and total mis-management of just about every possible opportunity that came up didn’t help either. Ego and hubris don’t work well during crisis times. I won’t go into that in any more detail because it was the same story pretty much as every other dot-bomb during that period of time that was run by people with more money that sense. That and people that were promoted from being receptionists in a prior job to a VP of such-and-such. that never helps either.

So anyway, I hope that Cartfly can make a go of it. I believed then, and I still do, that the idea of embedding buying opportunities within content makes an amazing amount of sense. And now that you have the opportunity to leverage the relationships created via all the social-networking platforms, I can see why Cartfly is feeling like they’re onto something big!

Tags:cartfly, contextual commerce, social-networking

Wow! It seems that my timing for the social networking focus for the last few months was timed perfectly! It seems you can’t open a newspaper or magazine or watch TV without someone mentioning FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or Twitter. 2008 seems to be gearing up as the year that social networking goes mainstream. Hopefully if you’ve been following along closely at home, you’re getting geared up to take advantage of this tsunami.

This month I’m going to focus on customer participation on your site, specifically Forums.

I’ve mentioned forums previously, but as a reminder, forums are sort of an online community centered around the discussion of various topics. If you don’t know what a forum is, check out www.advrider.com as a good illustration of a motorcycle-centric forum. You’ll notice that the forum (i.e. advrider.com) is composed of several topics (i.e. Ride reports and pics, pics, pics…) and those topics are then further divided into what are called discussion threads, or just threads for short, (i.e. Death Valley). A user (most forums require that a user be registered and issued a user id/handle) will start a thread with an initial post or question and then if it’s interesting enough more people will comment on it and it will then evolve into more of a discussion.

Then as more and more people post on it, you will notice them behaving in a manner they would never do offline (especially when some poor, unsuspecting soul started the thread by asking a question like: “What’s better for offroad touring, BMW or KTM?”). Insults will be hurled, intelligence will be belittled or at the very least questioned. Angry emoticons will sprout like toad-stools after a rainstorm and it will then typically devolve into an incoherent babble and/or what’s known as a flame war. In spite of this tendency of most on-line discussions to eventually succumb to misanthropic social entropy, forums are still one of the most useful and entertaining things on the Internet. Isn’t the web wonderful?

Now, as to having a forum on, or linked to, your site, the big question you need to ask yourself is, “does it make sense for me to do this?”

The biggest reason to do it is that it can provide a reason for people to come back and interact with your site on a regular basis and hopefully buy something every once and a while. That’s pretty obvious.

Some of the things you need to think about as to why you may not want to do it are as follows:

1) Would your forum provide a place for an online community to aggregate that does not already have a really popular place to do so? You know how when you go to a party and by you showing up you double the number of people in attendance? You know how that indicates that the party is most likely going to be really, really lame? Same thing with forums.

If there’s not a large active community posting and reading, it’s hard to get anyone to pay any attention to it. Classic chicken-and-egg problem. Unfortunately as it’s now 2008 and the Internet has been around a while, there’s typically already pretty good forums for just about every demographic. That’s not to say that they are good forums and that you could not produce a forum that could displace two or three of the more inferior ones, nor does it preclude the opportunity for you take advantage of an under-served niche (a quick glance at Google indicates a glaring absence of forums catering to scooter-trike riding, post-op transsexuals).

2) Administering a forum can be a lot of work, especially if it generates a lot of posts. You’ll have to moderate posts to remove inappropriate or illegal language, ban/punish trouble makers, do periodic maintenance of the topic/thread hierarchies and so on.

3) Probably the biggest reason to think about not running your own forum is that now that your forum is operating under more of a commercial umbrella, it’s possible that you may come under more scrutiny for what’s posted. Most forums out there are single entities that make their money off advertising. There’s nothing more there there than the forum. However, we’re talking about your forum being a part of your larger company.

For instance, a ticked-off customer could post a acerbic rant about how evil you are and how your service manager belongs in GitMo. Now if you leave that post on there, it’s possible that people will read it and cast a disparaging eye toward your business. But if you remove it and word gets out that you’re censoring (ignore for a moment that censorship and the first amendment only apply to governmental entities because the Internet take no pause for common sense with it gets a whiff of “censorship”) your forums that can result in a huge negative PR backlash and the demise of your forum’s vital future.

And don’t forget that you may be sued (regardless of the merit) by vendors that read a post on your forum by a customer that takes a spectacularly ill-informed stance on a particular product or service. Both of these types of issues typically are diffused if you post an intelligent, well-worded, and even-handed response instead of deleting the posts. If you are in the right, most of the more rational users will back you up and eventually the crazy person will relax or just go away. You can also protect yourself by having your lawyer help you draft a clearly worded terms of usage that spells out the limits of your liability.

While #3 may seem to be scaring you away or making the point that the forum is not worth the trouble or the risk, it should be noted that a lot of large e-commerce companies do indeed operate vital forums that contribute significantly to their sales.

A good example is the electronics supplier Parts Express (www.partsexpress.com). Here you have a company that sells parts to enthusiasts that are basically commodity parts that can be purchased anywhere that also runs a forum (www.pesupport.com/cgi-bin/config.pl) where people can talk about what they are doing with those products and ask technical questions that the forum community tries to answer together.

Sound familiar? Substitute electronics with motorcycles you should be able to see that e-commerce and forums can form a positive symbiotic relationship for your business if you do it right (as always, the devil is in the details)

So how do you do it? Like most things Internet-related you’ve got a lot of options.

You can go the route of using a hosted (or software-as-service) solution such as ProBoards or HyperBoards but as with most things 3rd party when it comes to running an online business, I’d recommend you run your own show.

So, if you are going to set-up and run your own forum; go free! There are several free (or pretty close to free) forum software packages out there.  Two of the best/well regarded forum packages are (in no particular order): vBulletin, phpBB. It’s a safe bet that the hosting company you are already using for your site actually provides one of these packages just waiting for you to turn it on configure it.

For a much more detailed information on pretty much all the forum software out there, check out the comprehensive forum comparison site ForumMatrix.

Now if all of this sounds like too much work, hassle, or risk, one option would be to think about acquiring a large  established forum that serves your demographic and roll it into your operations. The risk here is to do it with a close sensitivity to how the forum population will react if they see this as too much of a commercial usurpation of their community. For some reason forums see corporate involvement in their community as anathema to free expression.

A less severe step would be to become a major sponsor/benefactor or business partner to an established forum and in return get prominent links or product placements on the forum.

Stay tuned because next month I’m going to go into the big daddy of e-commerce related social tools, Product Reviews!

Tags:Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, forums, internet, motorcycle, powersports, selling-online, social-networking

First off, I want to thank everyone that showed up to my Dealernews Live! sessions at Indy. Both sessions were packed and there were a lot of good questions and some lively discussion. In fact, one of the discussions prompted to me to slightly alter how I’m going to present this next piece in my Social Networking. I’m going to talk a little about blogging and how having a company blog can be a good thing. I want to reiterate the context to emphasize why all of this social networking stuff matters.

The question was (essentially), “with all of the other sites out there, why would anyone want to buy from us?” Well, there’s hundreds of potential reasons from obvious things like price, selection, and so on, but a big piece really is who you are. What kind of personality does your site (and by extension your dealership) project?

Social networking and related marketing activities are your chance to create a face and a personality for your dealership (design is another huge piece that I’m going to go into after the social networking series that really needs to be addressed after looking at some of your sites). It’s how you begin the relationship with potential buyers of your products.

Let’s move onto the subject of blogs and blogging. To review, the word blog is an odd contraction of web + log. They are typically like a kind of journal or diary that is published on the web. There are in fact several popular bloggers on various topics that make well into 6 figures or more just from writing a blog site (the money comes from advertising like Google’s AdSense).

While most likely you’re not going to make money off your blog per se, you can use it bring people to your site if you make the content useful, compelling or funny and they feel the need to come back often (an aside on this: most blogs have the ability to publish what’s called a site feed using something called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This allows readers to stay up on new postings without having to actually go to the site. Personally, I don’t get that. I can see sending out a message with the title and a “click here to read more” kind of link, but publishing the full post in an RSS feed seems to defeat the whole point of using a blog for it’s marketing value to draw people to your site).

The first thing you need to do is set up your blog. You can do this using any number of free blogging tools and software. By far the most popular (and in my opinion the best) is WordPress. You can let WordPress host the blog for you, or you can download and install it on your own server. I recommend the latter option as you will have more control. Another strong contender comes from the 8,000 pound gorilla, Google. A few years ago Google bought out a company called Blogspot and created Blogger. Blogger is only available as a hosted option. The last tool I’ll mention is TypePad. Typepad is also a hosted solution. Personally, I would almost always recommend against software-as-service solutions (for blogging, e-commerce, etc.) because if the company that runs your blog goes under, so does your blog. Sometimes overnight without warning. Say bye-bye to all your hard work if that happens!

All of these blogging tools allow you to apply a theme/template to your blog. There are thousands of them out there, however, I strongly suggest that you create (or have someone create it for you) a custom theme so that it matches your corporate branding and integrates with your primary e-commerce site. Again, we’re trying to portray a sense of personality. If your personality is the same as a few thousand other sites, then by all means use a canned template. I recommend you follow the snowflake route. Be special!

As far as integration with your main site goes, I also suggest that you create a sub-domain for your blog, as opposed to a separate and distinct domain name. So if your site is www.vroomvroommoto.com, then set up your blog so it’s address is blog.vroomvroommoto.com. Then you will get some SEO benefit from the primary domain name. There’s still some debate about if Google ranks a sub-domain as a totally different site, but for my money there’s no reason not to do it this way in case there is a benefit. It’s also easier to market and remember the simple convention of adding blog. to your base domain name.

So what are you and your employees going to blog about? Well, start with what you know! Post reviews of bikes and gear. Write about rides and events. Write about industry news, race results, etc. Just remember that your purpose is to not just repost news from somewhere else. You need to have your own take on the stuff. Make it interesting. Or Funny. Or controversial.

Keep in mind that there are some potential risks associated with opening up blogging to your employees. You can lose some of the central control of your brand messaging and there may be occasions when the language is a little more colorful that you may be comfortable with. Keep your knee-jerk response in check however. Especially if your market trends toward the younger, GenNext crowd and the writer is in that generation. You may have to put some faith in the writer knowing their audience and knowing where the line is. You may also want to consider having a dedicated person write your blog as part of their job. That will help ensure a constant stream of fresh content and provide a uniformity of voice.

It’s important that you go into this with a clear idea of what you want to get out of it. What are your goals for having a blog? How exactly are you going to leverage the blog to increase traffic and sales? Are you really prepared to take this all on and keep it running smoothly? If you can’t really
provide good answers to these questions, then perhaps you’re better off letting the blog thing go for now. However, if you decide to really take it on it can be very useful.

For much more in-depth coverage of the power of a corporate blog in general, I recommend you check out this book: Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.

Tags:blog, Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, facebook, internet, motorcycle, myspace, powersports, selling-online, social-networking, web2.0, wordpress

Will you be my friend?

In my last column on how to use social networking as a marketing tool for your e-commerce efforts I laid out the landscape of social sites and hopefully gave you a few ideas about how you could use the various types to help in your Internet marketing efforts. This month, I’m going to focus on the pure social networking sites and how they could be used to help create interest (thus traffic, thus hopefully sales) on your e-commerce site.

These pure social networking sites don’t focus on any particular type of content. That is, they are not just photo, video, or blogging sites, although they will typically have the ability to create or share all of those media types (I’ll address some of the more specialized photo, video, and blogging sites next month). The two big-hitters in this space (at least in US or North American markets) are MySpace and FaceBook.

MySpace’s demographic skews very young and it’s primary (although not exclusive) draw is music. MySpace gives you a rudimentary ability to customize your “profile” page with graphics, videos, a sort of blog, a list of your friends, and a few other things. Because of the fairly limited, non-user friendly nature of the customization ability on MySpace, and because most people on MySpace are not web designers, are not artists, and apparently lack anything even close to taste, most of MySpace is ungodly ugly (there are new 3rd party tools like www.lovemyflash.com percolating through the web that are helping this). The main point of MySpace is to convince as many total strangers as you can to be your “Friend.” The more friends you have, the more “cred.” I’m bringing up MySpace because it’s the thousand pound gorilla, and I’m pretty sure it’s the one most of you have heard of. And while I’m sure it’s possible to use MySpace as a tool in the context of social network marketing, unless you really spend a lot of time (or money as it’s possible to be a sort of elite member of MySpace, for a fee, and have a really nice looking MySpace profile and get some other advantages) I find MySpace to basically be worthless in attracting good leads, or driving quality traffic (most search engines totally discount links to your site from a site like MySpace because of all the SEO spam that goes on). That’s not to say that it can’t be done of course as plenty of people have, and I’m sure someone reading this is going to prove me wrong.

However, my recommendation is that you set up a Myspace profile, populate it with some relevant content, get a few hundred friends, and use it every once and a while, but it would not be where I’d spend most of my time. Although even with all of those caveats, if your dealership really focuses on youth culture aspects of the powersports industry (stunting, freestyle MX, etc.) MySpace can be a great fit, especially for things like videos and getting the word out for any stunt shows or other exhibitions that you may be putting on.

If MySpace is sort of the sinkhole on the web, what’s better? Well, it looks like it’s shaking out that FaceBook may be the new King Of The Web. FaceBook began as primarily a social network for college students. In fact, in the beginning you had to attend one of the official schools (initially Harvard) that had a FaceBook site. Since September of 2006 however, anyone can join. FaceBook still seems to skew more toward college age users, although recent reports seem to indicate that one of the larger areas of growth are actually women in their 30’s. One area worth taking advantage of on FaceBook are the Groups. While perhaps not as plentiful or as populated as other groups sites like GoogleGroups or Yahoo!Groups/Yahoo!360, they are within the FaceBook ecosystem so you get a little more bang for your buck.

Conventional wisdom seems to indicate that FaceBook seems to be pursuing a strategy of becoming something of an operating system for the Internet. And while conventional wisdom may think that, most real people don’t really know exactly what that means in terms of putting it to practice. It has something to do with the ability to create and deploy widgets/applications that use the technical underpinnings of the FaceBook Platform (known amongst the pocket protected as an API or application programming interface). What this really all comes down to is that not only does FaceBook have a lot of attention pointed at it, it’s also developing a strong underpinning in terms of technology that will allow it to evolve and grow. So much so that Microsoft (perhaps sensing a challenge to their desktop operating system that an Internet operating system could pose) invested $240MM recently. So FaceBook has a pretty decent quality of user, has a lot of good social networking functions and feature out of the box, it has technology that can be leveraged to create custom applications or features, and it appears that it’s going to be around for a while. If I was going to make an all-in bet on one site to really focus on, it would be FaceBook.

So what’s the next up-and coming site? Well, I don’t know for sure (if I did, I’m sure I would be making an insane amount of money working for a venture capitalist rather than running a website for a motorcycle dealer), but there seems to be a lot of buzz around a site called BeBo. Another site that just launched to the public is called Pownce that is all about sharing stuff like video, photos, invites to events, and so on. One thing you can be sure of, because most of the buzz and the money out there is stampeding in its typical herd fashion to social networking sites there’s going to be a lot of new sites coming out in the future. And because of the nature of the way the web works, each new social networking site is going to rip off, or at least riff on, what’s good or what works on the sites that are out there, and ditch the stuff that doesn’t work. That’s one of the things that makes the Internet so cool, and so frustrating. The rate of change is insane and next to impossible to keep on top of, but it typically seems to change for the better.

Another site that is really taking off (but I have a hard time figuring out how to leverage it from an e-commerce perspective) is LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com). LinkedIn is sort of one of those six degrees of separation ideas with a business and employment networking focus. It’s a stunning way to get in touch with people you used to know, and get to know new people that you need to know by way of people that you know in common. It’s very cool on a personal level. I’m just not sure how valuable it is as a social networking site with regards to e-commerce marketing.

A good place to go to see a pretty large picture of what’s out there in the social networking space is this Wikipedia page on social networking.

To really leverage these and pretty much all social networking sites you need to participate. A lot. I’ve read enough case studies, and heard enough presentations at Internet and e-commerce conferences to know that social networking absolutely can pay dividends when it’s used right, and most of what makes it right, is constant, dedicated participation. I can easily make the case that just the social networking aspect of Internet marketing (social sites, forums, blogs, etc.) require at least one dedicated person. You need to have someone that does nothing but come up with good ideas, and has the time to devote to executing them. It’s very time consuming, but it can pay off.

My profile pages (I seriously need some more friends…):

• MySpace
• FaceBook
• LinkedIn

Tags:blog, Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, facebook, internet, motorcycle, myspace, powersports, selling-online, social-networking, web2.0, wordpress

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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quit aardvark

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quit aardvark

Tags:blog, Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, facebook, flickr, internet, metacafe, motorcycle, myspace, powersports, selling-online, social-networking, web2.0, wordpress, youtube

Welcome to the first column for 2008. I hope those of you out there with e-commerce on your sites enjoyed a successful holiday selling season. I’m going to kick off this year by not talking so much about e-commerce directly (e.g. the nuts and bolts of building your site), but rather talking about how to use the environment e-commerce exists within (the Internet) to get the most out of your e-commerce efforts.The first topic I’ll dive into is one of the hottest areas of the Internet, Social Networking. Out of everything I’ve written about over the past two years, this topic, and the series of columns that will cover it, are the ones I’m the most excited about presenting to you. Why? Because in terms of the potential bang-for-your buck when it comes to getting people to buy stuff from you, successfully and effectively jumping on the social Internet band-wagon should be one of, if not the most important things you do this year. The keys being successfully and effectively, because if you don’t really understand the lay of the land you can’t really envision your strategy and you’ll end up spinning your wheels, wasting a lot of time and money, and not getting any return on your efforts.

While you’d need to be living under a really large rock to not have heard the names MySpace, FaceBook, or YouTube you may need an explanation of what social networking actually is (especially if you don’t have, or socialize with, kids of any age). You may hear it referred to by a number of other names, and you will most likely never hear two people (even people that ostensibly know what they are talking about) give the exact same definition. This is due to two factors: 1) It’s still pretty new thus it’s still shaking out, and 2) it can mean different things to different people or within different contexts. But one central tenant of the idea is that it is driven by user generated content (written word, graphics and pictures, video, etc.).

Instead of the old way of doing things (Web1.0) where a site is created, and a staff of writers or other content producers populate the site with stuff (typically static content), and then people come to read the stuff, now (Web2.0) someone creates a site that has the tools and technical infrastructure for the people visiting the site to actually create content on their own, share the content, and comment on other people’s content.

So what’s the point? Why am I blathering on about goofing off on sites like MySpace and YouTube in a column under the title of Selling-Online? Well, from an Internet merchant’s point of view the main reasons that you should care about being involved in social networking pretty much comes down to the following three things:

• Drive people to your site (so they hopefully buy something)
• The lowest level of pragmatism with regards to being in the social Internet ecosystem is that it works great for your SEO efforts. Most of those social sites you either create or participate in out there all act as potential inbound links to your website which in turn helps your Google and other search engine rankings.
• Give people a reason to stay on your site (so they hopefully eventually buy something even if that’s not why they actually came there)
• Social elements like product reviews, product discussion forums, or video product merchandising all make your site more engaging and can act as sales tools
• Extend commerce beyond your site (so they hopefully buy something from you while they are on some other website)
• There’s only a certain percentage of potential (the key is the word potential because active customers should be able to find you if you are doing well on the SEO and Internet advertising fronts) customers that are ever going to find your site regardless of how good you’re doing in the search engines. However, there’s typically bound to be a large number of people that would be interested in buying what you have to sell if you are hanging out online where they are hanging out. There are motorcycle and powersports related groupings on pretty much all of the major social networking sites. If you are not there too, you’re missing out on potential sales.

As I said above, to really make your efforts worthwhile you need to understand the social networking ecosystem. That starts with making sure we’re on the same track with regards to the terms and concepts I’ll be using in this and follow up columns. First, what is a social site? Social sites typically share the same three important attributes:

1. A way for a user to create a home or profile page that represents their identity within the framework of that site [ex: MySpace profile page, or LinkedIn profile page]. There’s no reason that your dealership can’t have it’s own profile or identity. I’ll go into this more in a later column on how to actually pull all of this off.
2. A way for the user to either create content [ex: a text editor to write a blog], or upload and share content that was created somewhere else [ex: photos (flickr.com or smugmug.com), video (YouTube.com or MetaCafe.com)]
3. Most importantly and universally the ability to comment on, interact with, alter, or share what’s on the site. A way to be social! While #1 and #2 may be present in greater or lesser degrees, it’s the ability for people to throw their two cents in and share the content that make these sites live.

While a lot of people have a hard time saying exactly what Web2.0 is (even if they are able to create an entire conference about it), they all pretty much universally recognize that it’s the social aspect that makes up the foundation.

Next month I’m going to go over what the major types of social sites are, who the major (and minor because if history has taught us anything, today’s up-and-coming internet player is tomorrow’s powerhouse), and give you some ideas of how you can use them in your social networking efforts.

Here’s a little head’s up for all of you going to Indy this year. As last year it seemed that most of the value people got out of my presentation was in the Q&A portions, I want to make this year’s even more interactive. You know, social! So start shooting me any topics you want to discuss or any questions that you’d like to have addressed in the sessions so I can gather up the good ones and have something remotely intelligent to say prepared.

Tags:Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, facebook, internet, motorcycle, myspace, powersports, selling-online, social-networking, web2.0, youtube

OK class, this column marks the end of the series on SEO (search engine optimization), as well as the end of my columns for 2007. First I talked about the what’s, last month the how’s, this month I’m going to finish up the SEO stuff with a short list of some of the biggest how not to’s. And because even in three months I’ve only begun to be able to scratch the surface on SEO, I’m going to provide some really good SEO resource sites for you to dig into in the future.

First, as you will recall, when it comes to SEO, content is king. That means that the content on your site needs to be readable by the search engine spiders. What this primarily points to is that you want to make sure that your text is actually text! That seems amazingly obvious right? Well, when I look around at a lot of motorcycle dealer sites, I see quite a few sites where the text on a page is actually an image. Sure, by placing the text in an image it might look a little nicer, and you have infinite control over the formatting, but Google and the other search engines don’t see text, they just see a picture! You really, really don’t want to have any text as an image. And if you do have text in an image (for instance as a button, etc.) you want to make sure that you take advantage of the accessibility parameters I talked about last month like ALT and TITLE so that they mirror the graphical text in the image.

The other place where a lot of sites fail in terms of SEO is using Flash. Flash is an interactive, rich-media technology developed by Macromedia that was recently acquired by Adobe. While Flash can have a great place in your Web toolbox (for instance the one place where most people are interacting with Flash is via YouTube’s video player which is distributed as a Flash asset) you should be very leery of developing an entire site in Flash. Currently most of the search engines don’t have any way to crawl into and index a Flash site so your SEO results are going to be total crap.

If there are some real propeller-head types out there (especially if you are a Flash fanatic) you will no doubt be yelling into the magazine that it’s all libelist, anti-Flash propaganda and it’s entirely possible to develop a Flash site that is SEO-worthy. I concede that you can develop a SEO-friendly site in Flash by jumping though a lot of extra hoops, doing a lot of extra development work, and so on (for more on this topic, you can check out http://www.jehochman.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml). But why would you want to? Considering that most of the dealers I’ve interacted with over the past year or two barely have the resources to do e-commerce at all, I just don’t see the point in making it even more work by using Flash extensively on your site. Besides, most of the cool Flash-like stuff can now be done with standard-compliant technologies like DHTML and CSS. I know that this is going to generate some nasty emails from “web developers” that seem to prey on the naivete of some in the dealer community by locking them into complete Flash-based sites. Oh well…

The final thing I’ll tell you to avoid, and I know I’ve stressed this before, is what’s called black-hat SEO techniques. Don’t buy into webspam providers, or SEO/Marketing firms that talk about setting up hundreds or thousands of dummy sites full of keyword-rich links that link to your site. You may see an amazing impact in your SERP results or Page Rank in the short term, but you risk getting totally de-listed or even black-listed from the search engines for your troubles.

Stick with the tried and true real-world SEO techniques that I’ve written about over the past few months and you should be on your way up the SERPs!

Finally, here’s a good list of SEO related sites that will show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes:

• www.searchenginewatch.com - I think this is the best place there is if you’re only going to pick one site
• www.searchenginestrategies.com - Want to attend a conference where people that make SEO their life (I honestly can’t imagine why you would when you could go to Indy instead and have a heck of a lot more fun)? This is the conference arm of SearchEngineWatch. It actually is a very useful thing to see if you have the time and resources.
• www.mattcutts.com - Matt (an employee of Google) is sort of the man on the mountain for SEO types. He sort of cryptically hints at some of the deep, dark, inner workings of Google. Totally worth reading, as well as the comments of others in his blog.
• www.seomoz.com - A great site for SEO. You need to pay to be a member to some of the more advanced stuff, but it’s a place where all kinds of SEO folks hang out.
• www.seobook.com - The site for a pretty good SEO book (obviously) as well as some pretty decent blog posts
• www.seoroundtable.com - Great place to go for advice and a good launching point to other good SEO forums

Tags:Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, Search Engine Optimization, selling-online, SEO