Selling Online #25 : Social Networking : Part 4

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