Archive for the '16' tag

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

I’m finally getting around to posting my columns and articles that I’ve written for DealerNews over the past couple of years.

What you’re going to get here are the columns as written. So they may be longer, have more blather in them (deemed pointless by my editors). There may also be commentary associated with the columns that was not part of the original submission because I knew it would never get published and probably piss off any number of readers and/or advertisers. So nothing here is even remotely officially recognized by the good folks at DealerNews.

It’s worth pointing out that if anyone happens by here after a Google search of e-commerce or anything similar, keep in mind that these columns are targeted toward motorcycle and powersport dealerships. That means that there will obviously be a slant in that direction with regards to examples and so forth. Also, because I actually run the e-commerce operations for the #1 BMW Motorcycle Dealership in the country, I have real-world, hand’s on experience in what dealerships can and can’t do, as well as what they are capable of understanding (at the risk of sounding overly pedantic or condescending).

For some reason, the motorcycle and powersports industries, from the OEM’s to the dealers and all levels of the supply chain in between are fairly benighted when it comes to technology in general, and the web specfically (just this one aspect is so rant-worthy it’s not even funny). Amazingly I still talk to fairly successful dealers out there that don’t even have a website… It’s 2007 folks… Hello!

So without further ado, follow the tag named DealerNews to see them all.

All the posts have been back dated to their original publish date.

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

Last month I introduced some of the technical groundwork on the why’s and the what’s of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This month I’m going to talk about some of the how’s.

As I have hopefully (and pedantically) beaten into your heads by now, when it comes to SEO, content is king. The merchandising copy and product descriptions should not only sell the product to your customers, but it should be both keyword rich and relevant for your entire business. If you sell authentic Ducati apparel, when you mention a jacket make sure you call it a Ducati Motorcycle Riding Jacket. All of those keywords are very important. And make sure you use keywords that your customers would look for and use. While the OEM may use the term brake friction block, people are going to be looking for brake pads.

If you hope to achieve outstanding organic search results, it’s not just the words that humans are going to see that are important. Search engine robots also read and index every available bit of information on your site. Even though there is considerable debate about the relative importance of a lot of these various “non-human” bits of information, it is understood that they do have a positive impact if you use them right. So here are some tips that can help your SEO above and beyond obvious textual information:

Name the images on your site with SEO in mind:
If you have an image of an oil filter for a Ducati GT1000, don’t just keep the name off your camera (like DSC-2054.jpg) or call it something like oilfilter.jpg, give it a nice descriptive name like 444.4.003.2A_Ducati_GT1000_oil_filter.jpg. If someone does a web search for the part number, the brand, the bike model, etc. they all are supported by a search result that will highlight those keywords in the search engine results page (SERP).

Use all of the “extra” HTML attributes that are available:
Modern HTML code is designed for what’s called “accessibility.” There is extra data that can be inserted into a page to help things like screen readers (programs that actually read everything on a site out loud using speech synthesis) for the blind. You can use these extra bits of data to incrementally help your search results (again, it’s debatable how much it helps, but it’s easy to do and it does seem to make a difference in real world use). Use the ALT (this is short for alternate, typically used to describe what the image is) attribute for image tags. In the above example of the oil filter, the image’s tag should have the ALT attribute set to something like Ducati Oil Filter For Ducati GT1000 - Part Number: 444.4.003.2A.

There is another attribute that most tags also posses, and that’s the TITLE attribute. An example would be using this in a link’s anchor tag to provide extra information about the link. So in your site’s navigation, or within editorial copy, you could have a link to Ducati Riding Apparel with a TITLE attribute set to Ducati Motorcycle Riding Apparel. This will not only provide a tool tip pop up when you mouse over it, but it may help with SEO as well. Of the two (ALT and TITLE), TITLE attributes impact on SERP placement is the most dubious, but it can’t hurt, and every little bit helps.

URL’s:
URL’s are another area of hot debate in the SEO world. Most e-commerce packages will create URL’s for your categories and products that look something like this: http://vroomvroommoto.com/product_detail.aspx?8675309 where 8675309 is the internal ID number of the product. This is totally sub-optimal for SEO purposes. What you want is a URL that looks like this: http://vroomvroommoto.com/ducati_motorcycle_oil_filter.aspx. If your e-commerce package does not support what’s known as re-writing URL’s there are several methods and tools that you can use to do it at the server level or by installing and using various add-ons.

Page Titles:
Page titles absolutely make a huge difference in page ranking. The first and most important thing is that the most important things needs to go first! The most important keywords need to be in the first 5 to 7 words in the title. Most companies will put their company name first, then the other stuff. That’s backwards, unless your company name also has the keywords you’re hoping to promote. Lets say that your company is Vroom Vroom Italian Moto Works and you sell Ducati and Moto Guzzi. It would be pointless to have your page titles read Vroom Vroom Italian Moto Works: Ducati and Moto Guzzi Motorcycles. Instead it should read Ducati & Moto Guzzi Motorcycles, Parts, Accessories, and Riding Apparel from Vroom Vroom Italian Moto Works. Now you’re covering all the bases and getting all the important keywords at the front of the title.

Page titles on your product detail pages absolutely should display a comprehensive product description before anything else if you want the search engines to rank the stuff people are searching for at the product level on the search engines. In the oil filter example, the product detail page should read something like Ducati GT1000 Oil Filter: Part 444.4.003.2A - Ducati & Moto Guzzi Motorcycles, Parts, Accessories, and Riding Apparel, not Ducati & Moto Guzzi Motorcycles, Parts, Accessories, and Riding Apparel from Vroom Vroom Italian Moto Works : Ducati GT1000 Oil Filter: Part 444.4.003.2A. On the product page, the most important keywords are the ones that have to do with that product.

Some of this may have seemed kind of propeller-headish, and hopefully the web developer you are using is up on this SEO stuff, but it’s still a good idea that you have at least some exposure to it so you can manage and verify.

Keep in mind that none of these techniques are a silver bullet, and these suggestions are by no means even close to exhaustive, but when combined with good site design and merchandising copy they can help you get higher up in the SERP’s.

Next month I’ll finish the SEO series on a list of the big no-no’s to avoid at all costs if you want anyone to ever find your site via a search engine!

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

Last month I wrote about the online advertising practice of paid search. As I alluded to in that column, and that you may have found out if you have looked into it on your own, it can be a really expensive endeavor, and accurately measuring the success or the ROI of all that advertising spending can be a headache.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to get people to your site without having to spend all that money? The good news is that there is a way. It’s known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

You should have noticed that frequently during past columns (such as the design, development, and merchandising columns) I’ve already made mention of SEO. The reason for doing that is because to do SEO right, you need to design your site from the ground up with optimization in mind. The next series of columns will now go into the nuts and bolts of actually bringing all that SEO stuff together.

Just like some of my other columns that deal with stuff that has a strong technical underpinning, it’s going to take more than one issue to get through it all because it’s important to understand the why’s of SEO as well as the what’s because it’s the why’s that will most likely drive the how’s.

Just to get my bona fides out of the way; feel free to Google “BMW Motorcycle Parts” or “BMW Motorcycle Accessories” or even model specific stuff like “BMW R1150RT Parts.” That’s the site I run (A&S BMW Motorcycles) at the top. It’s been in the #1 position for 3 years running for just about every permutation of BMW Motorcycling related keywords you can throw at it, and if we’re not at the #1 position, we’re in the top 5. We’ve even been above the BMW corporate site for the search of “BMW Motorcycles” (BMW makes special effort now to see that doesn’t happen anymore!).

All of this is all so vitally important because when most people are looking for something online, they typically start at one of the major search engines like Google (the 800 pound gorilla), Yahoo, Ask, and so on. Each search engine has it’s own methods of “discovering” websites (typically known as spidering where an automated web surfing program called a robot just goes from page to page, indexes what it finds on that page and follows all the links that it finds to the next set of pages, over and over, and over again) and of sending back a series of pages ranking the return results (known as the Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs) when you enter a search term.

When companies talk about how well their business does with regards to SEO, they use a term called organic results. That term is used to separate how visible they are based on the pure search results vs. any type of paid search campaign that they may be running at the time, not if they use pesticides or keep their chickens in tiny cages. Everyone wants to have good organic results for the primary search terms that describe their business. Or more correctly, they want to rank at the top of the SERPs for the keywords that their customers are searching for. That can be a huge distinction when it comes down to the difference between just driving traffic to your site, and driving shoppers to your site.

One thing that you need to keep in mind as you launch your site is that even if you do a perfect job with your SEO efforts, it is going to take a while for your stuff to show up at all, let alone near the top. New sites are hard to find. It’s going to take a while for the search engines to find you (all major search engines have a registration process where you can request yo have your site indexed), and even after you are indexed, you may end up spending several months in a type of limbo while you are deemed a worthy site and not just some fly-by-night scam site (this limbo in Google’s case is called the Sandbox. This sandbox, unlike the one’s from your ill-spent youth, is not fun to be in).

Propeller-head alert!
From an informational standpoint the Holy Grail for the web would be something called the Semantic Web. This mythical beast would function in such a way that when an author creates a site, they could tag the site, a page on the site, or even a term on the page, in such a way that it removes all ambiguity related to what the content is about, and the search engines would not have to essentially guess how to index the site. It would add a layer of intelligence to all of the pure data out there and theoretically allow much better search engine results.

Unfortunately there’s a huge number of complete scammers out there that are more interested in pushing adult toys, Mexican Viagra, and naked pictures of Paris Hilton that would stop at nothing to cram as much semantic information that has nothing to do with the crap they are selling but would yield high search results just to get people to their site.

It’s primarily because of scammers that semantic information (you’ll hear terms like META data, keywords, descriptions, etc.) is virtually ignored today by all major search engines and they instead have to rely on keyword pattern matching, relevance ranking, as well as other more complicated algorithms that analyze intrasite as well as intersite link structures to determine at best worth, and at worst (and most typically) popularity. Yes that stuff sounds complex ( What do you think all those multiple PhD’s do all day at Google?), but if you want to get your site on top and make bags of money you’re going to need to understand it.

Now that I’ve laid out the landscape a little bit so that you have some context, in the end, it all boils down to content! Content is king. And like your mother used to say, it’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it that makes it really important. The next column I’ll teach you how to speak in a language and syntax that the robots can understand. Domo arigato Mr. Roboto!

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

You’ve got your wonderfully designed website up and running. It’s merchandised with all sorts of stuff that you’re sure people will want to buy. You’ve got great merchandising copy, a ton of awesome images, and your operations are all set up to handle hundreds of orders a day without a hitch.

There’s only one problem. No one is coming to your store! You’ve yet to build up a customer list so your e-mail marketing is not going to do a whole lot at this point. You’ve got your URL slapped on your business cards, billboards, direct mail pieces, etc. but still your potential customers seem to be ignoring the axiom, “if you build it, they will come!”

What’s worse is that because your site is so new, Google and the other search engines have not really found out about you. Perhaps there are not enough pages indexed on your site to give relevant returns for search terms you are looking for, or maybe you’re still in Google’s “sandbox” where they put new sites until they essentially prove (through some mystical mix of longevity, inbound links, black magic, etc.) that they are not just some spam site. For whatever super-secret reason that Google, Yahoo, or the rest have, your site is nowhere to be seen in the organic search results for the keywords you or your customers care about.

If you follow the link to Wikipedia above on the Sandbox effect, make sure you check out the talk section to understand the dispute about what may or may not be going on. Regardless of what you read there, in my view it’s pretty much accepted that you are indeed placed in some kind of purgatory when you have a new site.

What can you do? Well, if you’ve got the cash, you can resort to what’s known as paid search or search engine advertising/marketing.

Paid search is the reason that Google is worth bazillions of dollars today. What’s interesting is that Google didn’t invent the concept (The credit for that goes to one of the early DotCom’s then known as GoTo.com. GoTo.com eventually changed its name to Overture, and then was purchased by Yahoo when Yahoo discovered that it had its pants around it’s ankles and Google was stealing all its lunch money because it didn’t have either a paid search strategy or the technology to do anything about it even if they did have one. To read more check out this story in Wired. Because Google is the 800 pound Gorilla here, most of my examples will involve them and their AdWords program, but keep in mind that most search engines offer paid search of one kind or another.

The concept is fairly simple. Businesses wanting to advertise on Google bid on keywords (let’s say “motorcycle parts”), when a search engine user does a web search for those terms, in addition to the long list of “organic” search results (pages that are listed because Google has determined that they are the best result for the search term), there are also results on the page that represent the advertiser’s links. You’ll see them along the right edge in a column under the heading of Sponsored Links or for certain highly relevant ads, along the top (again with the identifier of “Sponsored Links”).

The cost to you as an advertiser as well as the placement of your ad are determined by a number of factors (as is typical of Google, not all of those factors are known or communicated to you, the advertiser). The first and most obvious is the amount of money you are willing to spend per ad. Actually you are bidding on how much you are willing to spend for each click by a search user (cost-per-click or CPC). Typically, the more you spend, the more likely your ad will appear, and if you spend enough, your ad will appear closer to the top.

One of the clever bits about Google’s AdWords shows why Google is the king of this game. Instead of just allowing ad display and placement to be driven by the keyword’s bid price, Google also keeps track of how many people actually click on your ad. Obviously Google wants to make sure that they are displaying relevant ads that will lead to a search user clicking on them so Google gets paid, and their advertising customers see people coming to their site from these ads. If Google didn’t do it this way, Viagra spammers and the like would just buy up a ton of the hottest keywords so their totally irrelevant ads would show up all over the place, driving out potentially relevant ads in the process.

Because Google has a stake in the game this way, they want your ads to be good ads that people click on. Google provides a ton of tools and guides to help you craft the most effective AdWords campaigns possible. They will guide you through choosing the best keywords as well as the best ad copy. However, even with all of Google’s guidance, it’s still important that before you dive into paid search advertising that you do some serious thinking about 1) your budget, and 2) what keywords you want to focus on.

Those two elements are very closely linked. Once you start using AdWords, if you’re not careful to set realistic daily maximums or choose targeted keywords, you will be in for a potentially VERY nasty surprise when your first AdWords payment comes out of your shop’s credit card. Make sure that you understand how to set up your campaigns to be effective but within your budget, otherwise it will seem like you’ve got a tweeked out teenager with a no limit credit card running wild through the mall!

Unless you’ve got more money in your advertising budget than you know what to do with, I’d recommend focusing on very specific keywords and phrases and avoid something like the example at the start of the column (”Motorcycle parts”). Open ended or general keywords are going to be pretty expensive, as well as show up on a lot of non-relevant searches.

Here’s another example. Let’s say all you sell are motorcycle helmets. Let’s say that you didn’t read this column or pay any attention to the guidance that Google tries to provide and bought keywords like “helmet”, “Motorcycle“, “motorcycle riding”, and so on. Essentially you think that you want to cast a really wide net and get anyone even remotely interested in motorcycling to your site with the logic being that they all need helmets. So you end up paying $5.00 per click for a term like “motorcycle“, or $8.00 per click for “helmet”. You’ll soon discover that your daily ad budget is gone in like 1 hour and you’ve got zero sales based on those clicks! Why? Because while your ad was showing up all over the place, it was showing up for things like a kid doing a book report on The Mouse And The Motorcycle, or people searching for information about the band Helmet or mountain bike helmets.

Now, if you are smart about it, you’d typically decide that with your limited ad budget you’d better focus a little more and start bidding on really tight search terms. Examples would be “discount motorcycle helmets” or “Scorpion Helmets.” There’s very little point in placing your ad in front of people that are not really interested in what your selling. Getting your ad out there “just in case” will become very expensive and typically very ineffective.

Considering the billions of dollars that Google is worth, all because of paid search, it’s no surprise there is a considerable industry involved in it. There are firms that do nothing but create and execute paid search campaigns, and software that does nothing but try to optimize your paid search campaign. This column can really do nothing more than give a brief overview. There are all kinds of other issues that could be columns unto themselves, such as click-fraud (for example, your competitor hires a team of monkeys to click all of your ads, thus depleting your ad inventory. Google is “supposed” to protect against this, but Google “click fraud” and you’ll see it’s a real issue).

Hopefully this gives you enough to get started exploring paid search as an advertising possibility. One thing I can guarantee is that once you start doing it, you’ll realize why so many people spend so much time and energy trying to get good organic results. Paid search can be really expensive! The next series of columns is going to cover getting your site on top of those organic lists so you can cut back, or even eliminate your paid search altogether.

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