It’s not really all that surprising to me to be honest. I’ve gotten so many sales calls from Mercado over the years trying to sell me their insanly overpriced offering that it just seemed unsustainable. Not only that, but their advertising was everywhere! Like Dot-Com boom-everywhere in the e-commerce space. They were prime sponsors or significant sponsors of so many shows that I’d attend. They had to be paying an insane amount of money for all that advertising and sales effort.

It always seemed to me that they must be overcharging for their software to keep the marketing and sales machine chugging along and now that suspicion has been proven correct.

I’m willing to bet there will be a lot more providers like this falling in this little e-commerce dot-com 2.0 bubble burst. The business and revenue models of so many of the companies that I see at shows like Shop.Org and Internet Retailer are straight out of 2000 before the bubble burst. They all seem to be built around going after the big guys (the 20% in the grand e-commerce market) in the Internet Retailer Top 500 and charging top dollar to do it, when the same solutions could be offered to the remaining 80% if they would have a decent pricing and servicing structure.

Although this time it’s worse because most of these companies are run by suits from the East Coast that are totally clueless beyond anything but the deal.

At least during the dot-com era the jokers driving their Titanics into the same iceberg over and over were a lot of time nerds, geeks, or other variety of egghead that actually knows something that were inadvertently elevated to the position of businessman. This time it seems that it’s being driven by empty suits with a smile and a handshake from the beginning.

I’m still amazed that anyone is investing any money in these companies, let alone $65 million!

Fools and their money.

There’s a lot of big hitters out there who’s CIO’s have got to be getting a pretty interesting presentation ready for their bosses!

It does seem to have happened pretty quickly considering it was only back at the end of July that the MIC said it was evaluating if it should issue a request for proposal for a new sanctioning body. In only two months the MIC was able to complete their evaluation AND issue the request for proposals, AND get the proposals back, AND evaluate those proposals, AND then organize, set up, and announce this new organization. Maybe if they can do all that so quickly they can actually pull this off. Amazing example of organizational dynamics it would seem.

I just wish it was someone’s job to tell the OEM’s to think about the larger picture as it relates to expanding the motorcycle market in the USA and not just whine about losing their own little patches. Get out of the box a little and try to think a little more creatively and strategically.

DMG/AMA Pro Racing (apparently) has the goal of making motorcycle racing more exciting and interesting to a wider audience. Think NASCAR for motorcycles.

That might be part of the problem I guess. The motorcycle community (at least the people I talk to) all seem to think that NASCAR=BAD. It’s insane. They all are like, “DMG is going to turn motorcycle racing in the US into NASCAR.” They apparently think this is a BAD thing?!

The MIC and ostensibly this new USSB organization seems content to have one of the largest countries in the world with one of the worst street bike racing series as measured by things like mass-market, non-motorcycle specific sponsor involvement, media viewership, race attendance, etc.

Seriously… has anyone from the MIC been to an AMA race lately? The stands are empty. It’s TV coverage is totally limited to SpeedTV (not that there’s anything wrong with SpeedTV.. I watch it constantly. But for the industry as a whole to grow it needs to be on the majors like Speed’s parent FOX). It’s the same old tired crop of motorcycle/powersports centric sponsors that are there race after race.

There’s no appeal to the old AMA superbike formula outside of hard-core motorcycle enthusiasts and of course the OEM’s (especially Suzuki who essentially dominates the Superbike class).

It seems that the motorcycle and powersports industry prefer to keep their blinders on and fight over pieces of a tiny little pie instead of making a REALLY, REALLY big pie instead!

The argument goes that the new DMG formula is going to have limited/formula spec bikes that have little in common with their street-going siblings other than some decals. The poor manufacturers are going to be left without the “test bed” to develop new bikes if they can’t put their best foot forward. Right.

Hmmm… It seems to me that there is a racing series that involves vehicles with four tires that follows a very similar strategy and they seem to do pretty well.

Has the MIC or the motorcycle industry as a whole never heard of NASCAR? Have they not looked at the amazing success that has been possible with the NASCAR formula?

Win on Sunday sell on Monday still works pretty darn well for the OEM’s that play in NASCAR’s game and those cars have absolutely, positivly nothing in common with the street going variations. Especially now that NASCAR has the Car Of Tomorrow (COT).

This is just stupid, short-sited thinking on the parts of the OEM’s and the MIC as far as I’m concerned.

What does the MIC know about creating a racing series from scratch. Promoting it. Getting killer media deals put together? Do they know more than the folks at DMG? I’m going to guess… No.

How are they going to model it? What are they going to base it on? What should they base it on. The AMA model that was so uniformly hated by pretty much every single racing fan I’ve ever talked to? Or NASCAR, that EVERYONE knows about even if they never have watched or wish to watch cars go ’round and ’round.

I’m willing to be that these guys are getting a bunch of traffic that they have no idea where it came from.

Here’s why this is such a big deal to me. I want more, more, more people to watch motorcycle racing on TV and in person. I want to see motorcycle racing on FOX. I want soccer moms driving around in their giant killer cages to have a #69 Repsol Honda sticker on their bumper right next to their #88 Jr. NASCAR sticker.

Why? Because now those same soccer moms that were once content to run down motorcycles left and right in their mini-vans now like motorcycles! They know what they look like! They might even end up SEEING them when they try to turn left.

In fact, the same day I get this announcement I get the print version of PowerSports Business that has an article about how the Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF) wants the Feds to start looking into motorcycle crash data more because fatalities were up in the US in 2007 by 6%!

Now explain to me again how maintaining a failed, fringe racing series like the USSB is bound to become (vs. a larger, more well funded, and popular series that the DMG was trying to put together) the catalyst to expand motorcycle’s visibility in the USA?

You can read this article that has some comments from Roger Edmondson (head of DMG) that indicate that he’s probably not a real happy camper right about now.

Mark my words that this may be a death knell for street motorcycle racing in the USA in the same way that the IRL/CART split killed off open-wheel racing here. Of course, maybe I’m totally wrong and the MIC will be able to create the kind of series that the motorcycle industry in the US needs.

[edit: i just came across this news that even though KTM is on the board of the MIC, it will NOT be racing in the MIC/USSB and will stick to the AMA Pro Racing/DMG gig]

Now obviously Google is a fickle lover and a day, a week, or a month from now the same search could result in drastically different results. But for now I’m pretty happy that I’m at the top of the industry that I specialize in.

And now, for posterity’s sake, here’s a screen-grab of the SERP in question:

I’m so easy to make happy! 

If you have any examples of a blog or other social media tactics that have worked with gritty B2B markets–particularly where complex buying processes are involved–, I’d like to hear about them.
If you have an opinion about the value of social media communications aiming to reach executives in the B2B sector, please share it.

Here’s my response:

I think that the biggest hurdle that you’re going to run into is the “chicken and egg” problem.

1) Typically a legitimately recognized expert is a pretty busy person doing “real work”
2) A new blog takes quite a while to build an audience without significant marketing expenses (in the B2B space that can mean a lot of off-line advertising in things like trade journals, etc.)

So now you’ve got the issue of trying to convince an expert at your disposal to spend a lot of time writing a blog that for quite a while no one is going to even be reading.

Yet without a lot of good, targeted content no one is ever going to find or read the blog!

It’s like having someone with the gravitas of Einstein giving a lecture to an empty hall.

So I’d say that if you really want to make it work in a B2B space you need:
1) A writer that people really are going to want to read
2) A significant marketing budget to “prime the pump” until the blog starts catching on it’s own.

The good thing about this is that if you are in a very specialized / targeted industry it should not take long for your particular blog/site to start ranking well due to the long-tail, niche nature of what you’re writing about.

For instance, I’ve been involved in e-commerce and internet/next-gen marketing in the motorcycle and powersports space for over 4 years. I’ve recently started focusing on providing consulting services on a more formal basis.

It’s a total B2B play where I’m writing to/for the OEM’s, disti’s, and retailers/dealers in that space.

Because of the sort of mom-and-pop nature of this market, I have the distinction of currently being sort of one of the only “experts” that’s focusing on this niche.

Good news: if you Google “motorcycle e-commerce” my site www.radicalpowersports.com is #1 after only like 8 months in existance

“Bad” news: there’s not a lot of people looking for this stuff now. So I sort of feel like I’m talking to an empty room. the upside is however that when someone does stumble across my little site, they are VERY targeted, and VERY interested.

But I also write for the leading offline trade publication for the motorcycle and powersports dealer community so I’ve got that offline leverage that helps drive qualified traffic.

So, there’s some general info from my own experience. Without more specific information on what market you’re looking to play in or what your specific goals are with regards to providing the information in question that’s about all I can offer now.

If you wanted to provide more information on what you’re looking to do specifically you might be able to get some more actionable ideas.

I’ve provided a link to a pretty good SearchengineLand post on B2B blogging that you might find useful.

Links:

• http://www.radicalpowersports.com
• http://searchengineland.com/080213-115436.php

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

I’ve decided that it might be kinda cool to try answering a few questions that I think I can offer a valuable viewpoint on and see what happens.

I’m creating a site tag for LinkedIn-Answers where I’ll cross post the questions and my answers.

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?]

Amen. But I want to take it even further. Like to a whole new level!

I came to the same conclusion a little over a year ago when I started doing marketing work in addition to running e-commerce for the dealership that I’m responsible for.

When I was asked to take over marketing and advertising I looked at the budget, and I looked at what they were already spending and decided (in typical Radical fashion) to do something outside of the box. I said to myself, “Self, you need to get people into and involved with the dealership. We don’t have anywhere near the budget to do that via traditional advertising or marketing tools, what else can be done?” I had run a few open houses and they were huge successes. What would it be like if there was an open house every month? I had also started doing some social networking outreach (forums, blogs, etc.) and could imagine that they were going to be useful. However, all of that stuff took a lot of time. None of it took a lot of money however. So I had the epiphany that I was going to essentially use a huge chunk of the advertising budget and spend the money on a full time position to do all of this stuff.

I pulled all but the most non-essential advertising, left enough to allow us to match CoOp funds and set out to create the position of Community Relationship Manager.

It was the single most successful initiative that the dealership had ever seen. Obviously most of the success came down to getting an outstanding superstar for the position that embraced it and made it her own. [Aside: At the risk of being non-PC or running afoul of the EEOC, I recommend staffing this position with an outgoing, attractive, female that rides and is passionate about all things motorcycles (or powersports, watercraft, whatever your niche is). Facts are facts. Most motorcyclists are men and most men like talking to women especially when the woman is an avid rider herself. Let the nasty e-mails flow :)] But the fact remains that using money that we would have pretty much wasted by advertising like everyone else does and doing something radical and creative (at least for the vast majority of the motorcycle industry).

This position handles setting up interesting and engaging events every month and using word-of-mouth marketing techniques to get the word out. Blogs, forums, e-mail marketing, local clubs, etc. And when we do our larger open houses they are even more large and even more grand because you have a person that can dedicate all their time and energy to seeing that they are huge.

This position is now the public face and persona of the dealership. People now know the dealership is serious, and real, and personal. It’s a place that does more than just sell stuff and do service. It’s a place that participates in a real and personal way with the local motorcycle community.

Tasks for this position include but are no limited to: chamber of commerce involvement, social networking (FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube, Forums, Blogs, e-Mail) adminstration, dealership representation and participation in any and all motorcycle/powersports clubs and events in the area.

It’s insane how successful it is and it’s amazing that every 20 group leader out there is not making this the number one priority for every dealership out there! It’s even more insane that I’m letting this out of the bag for free and not getting a huge consulting fee for offering up what could be the single most successful thing you will ever do in the marketing and advertising area! I’m just feeling generous today I guess!

Stop throwing money away on TV ads, full page newspaper ads, direct mail, etc. etc. when for way less money they could have a Community Relationship Manager dragging people in off the street. In the nicest possible way of course.