e-commerce and marketing for the next generation of the motorcycle and powersports industry

Here was the LinkedIn:Answers question:

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

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

I just discovered this pretty cool feature on LinkedIn called LinkedIn:Answers. It’s a public forum where LinkedIn members can post questions and then other LinkedIn members can post their answers. Now one would hope that (at least for now) the LinkedIn community is a little higher class of people than the general unwashed masses out there on the interwebs so the quality of advice you’d get would be a little better as well.

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 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?]

I just read an article in the June 2008 Motorcycle Product News magazine titled: More Than A Free Lunch by Dean Kelly and Chad Wiggen. The basic premise is that motorcycle and powersports retailers need to start running more events and to be more creative in how they run them.

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.

I’m about 1/3 of the way through Groundswell , and unless the book goes seriously off the tracks I whole-heartily recommend that anyone that wants to get a clear(er) picture of how all this MyFaceSpaceInBookWikiBlog stuff works, relates, and impacts your business buys this book and reads it ASAP.

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!

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!

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.