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