Archive for the 'community-marketing' tag

By now I think most of you reading this column have heeded the advice from my past columns and gotten onto the social media bandwagon in one form or another. You’ve got a Facebook fan page, a twitter account, maybe a MySpace page and if you’ve been really ambitious a blog or a forum. You’ve created a profile on Google Maps and Yelp where customers can post reviews. You’ve gotten out there in an attempt to make your business more visible. Unfortunately, that visibility can quickly turn you into a target.

Like so many things in life, there’s always the law of unintended consequences to deal with. The social media landscape is no less prone to subjecting you to this law. This month I’m going to address what happens when you get negative, harsh, or even intentionally hostile interactions on your social media channels.

In days gone by (a whopping 5 years ago or so) if a customer had a serious beef with your business, they were pretty much limited to things like the “We’re on your side” segment on the local news, a letter to the editor of your local paper or maybe a negative report to the BBB. These days it’s mind-bogglingly simple for a ticked-off person with an ax to grind to single-handily destroy, or at least seriously damage, your business’s online reputation. And a supreme irony here is that a lot of these soapboxes from which they shout were built by you!

There’s basically three variants of folks you’re going to have to deal with:

Category #1) The legitimately (at least to them) ill-treated customer that feels like they have not been able to get the resolution they want and has decided that they will “show you” and make the issue public.
Category #2) A person that is blatantly hijacking your public spaces or the web in general at the behest of a competitor.
Category #3) A common garden variety of internet troll.

I’ll give you some generally accepted methods to deal with each of these.

The first variety can be the most damaging if you deal with it badly. These are folks that have spent money with your business and feel that somehow they didn’t get the response they feel they deserved. Often these people have already talked to someone at your shop about their grievance (in person, phone, or email). That means if it gets to the point they are venting on your Facebook page or ripping you apart on Yelp your customer feedback process in the real world broke down. They left not just unsatisfied, but so pissed off that they have sworn a vendetta against you and by God they will personally see to it that not another living soul ever does business with you again (again, once upon a time there wasn’t that much one irate customer could do to you… Now all they need is a little time and know-how and this once idle threat can be alarmingly real).

There’s basically three outcomes from this kind of altercation. The first involves you taking a big step back to determine if this customer’s got a legitimate point. Not from your standpoint, but from the standpoint of a typical customer that is going to read what’s going on online. You may not like it, but customers have certain attitudes about what is and isn’t fair. Face it, you feel that way plenty of times. There’s always two sides to a story. Sure you can deny the guy’s extended warranty claim because of some small print, or sure the customer is supposed to deal with the manufacturer of that widget for repairs, but customers don’t always see it the way you want them to.

If you decide that it’s best to appease this irate individual then I recommend doing it offline and as part of the “agreement” convince them to post how the outcome was favorable and everything is just fine now.

Of course a great deal of damage can already be done because it’s probable that their Yelp review, “Crazy Harry’s MotoMall is run by a corrupt ferret!” has already been crawled by GoogleBot and indexed so that when someone Googles your business name they see the post header or page title, but never see the retraction or follow up. And no, Google (or even Yelp for that matter) will not remove that entry. Welcome to the brave new world of a permanent online record!

The second outcome is that you feel the customer is being unreasonable, you are almost 100% certain that most reasonable people would agree, so you post your side of the story calmly and clearly and wait for the general public consensus to come to your aid (i.e. your Facebook fans, Twitter followers, etc. rally behind you and essentially shout the complainer down).

The final outcome is just to ignore they guy. Let him vent, maybe let some of your forum members, Facebook fans, etc. defend you but you essentially remain above the fray. This option is probably not the best for small business. The big guys like Dell and Apple can operate this way because they are huge and the vocal minority, no matter how loud, will not make a large enough impact. You are a small business that relies on a smaller number of customers that may be swayed by the complainer’s arguments. Therefore I suggest that you engage these folks and don’t just ignore them.

Next up is something that’s gaining more wide-spread attention. Your competition, either directly or though various proxies, make a concerted effort to blow you up online. Believe it or not, there are actually companies that you can hire who’s sole purpose is to essentially nuke your online reputation. They don’t typically advertise this fact, but they are out there, often as a part of a marketing firm or SEO/SEM company.

It’s often hard to tell if what’s going on is the work of a “real” customer or a hit-job by a paid online assassin. The best indicator is if the negative online vibe is cranking up all at once, or if it’s just a onesy-twosy type thing. If you start seeing your business name all over the web in negative posts, or if you go from 3 positive reviews on Yelp to 300 Negative ones in the course of a few weeks, it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on.

Unfortunately if you get hit with this kind of thing, there’s really not much you can do to fight back beyond trying to overcome it with legitimate positive karma. If you have run a good business for years and you have thousands of legit and happy customers, fans on Facebook, or forum users, quite often your friends will come to your aid in denouncing the attackers. That’s the best you can hope for. A grass-roots uprising of supporters defending your honor in the court of public opinion. Of course if your business has developed a somewhat well deserved reputation as a place to get screwed and you’ve focused on how to squeeze every penny out of a deal at the risk of long-term customer loyalty, well… Karma’s a bitch.

There are companies starting up that focus on “online reputation management” that can help you out to an extent, but they are not typically cheap, nor are they fool-proof. If an attacker has created a ton of negative pages on websites like joe-bobs-moto-shack-sucks.com and avoid-joe-bobs-at-all-costs.com and they do some basic SEO so that when a person searches for your business in Google and your real site is #5 behind these assassination pages or a ton of negative reports on www.ripoffreport.com, your only recourse is to create some more sites and SEO them so that the “bad” pages fall off the first page in the SERPS (search engine results pages). Yes, it can get ugly.

The killer here is that as far as I can tell there’s nothing legally wrong with this if the pages, posts, reviews, etc. have factually accurate information. In the US at least the truth is a defense against libel and slander. So imagine that you get bad reviews from real customers on Yelp that rip you apart. An “attacker” can take the facts of those negative reviews and essentially repeat these “facts” on a few hundred websites, blogs, forums, etc.

Most of you out there do not have the luxury of really solid, defensible positions in the search engines therefore you are very vulnerable to this kind of attack. If you have not been in the top 5 or so for years for your own name, it would be really, really, really easy in a long afternoon for someone with the will and the know-how and a little bit of cash for domain registration to blow you away.

The last kind of issue you’re going to have to deal with are the internet “trolls.” Trolls are basically losers holed up in their parent’s basement basking in the relative anonymity that the internet provides and throwing grenades into online forums, Facebook, etc. just to make you look bad and to feel a power rush. Typically if they post under their own name like on Facebook, they are not a troll. If they post with a cool handle like m0T0dUde or something else anonymously they are a troll.

The primary axiom when it comes to these idiots is: “Don’t feed the trolls.” If you are positive that the poster in question is just a troll and does not fall into one of the above categories that require action or a response, just ignore them. Hopefully your loyal customers will beat these idiots back into their basement where they can go back to playing World of Warcraft or giggling like school girls at the latest LOLCATZ. But make sure that you do a good job of identifying the person as a troll. If you get it wrong and ignore them they can easily go into category #1 and if they are really pissed off at you, they can take it to category #2

The moral of this story is that today, more than ever, it’s vitally important that even marginally (in your eyes) pissed-off customers are handled before they get a chance to do real damage to your online reputation. The best defense is a good offense. Make sure you are running your business in a way that only the most unreasonable folks have cause to go screaming, pitchfork and torch in hand, through the virtual village to burn down your castle. Make sure that you have established a wide and deep social media presence and that you own site is SEO’d to the hilt so that it can’t get buried by negative decoy sites. Because now more than ever, the world is watching, and they ALL have access to the microphone.

Tags:Column, community-marketing, dealerships, Powersports Industry, social marketing, social media, social-networking, web2.0

In all my years of writing about “all things web” (granted weighted heavily toward e-commerce) for the motorcycle and powersports industry, nothing has seemed to reach the same level of resonance as my idea that developing a dedicated, full-time community management position was a brilliant thing to do.

When I was running marketing for the dealership that I work with, I had put on a few really successful open-house events. The “light bulb” moment came when I said: “we need to do stuff like this every month!”

That required someone dedicated to coming up with the ideas, handling all the logistics, etc. But I then saw this role as much more than just an “event” person. We need to do more community stuff. Community stuff takes a lot of time. I need a full-time person to do it. Bingo! It was that simple.

I also wanted them to start being the “face” of the company on all our our online social networking activities. That led to me climbing up the abstraction ladder to call the position community relationship manager.

In short, this position is THE public and personal face of the company.

I just came across a post on ReadWriteWeb that deals with the same idea. Their article is obviously written from a more theoretical framework, while my take on it is much more the result of pragmatic, hands-on needs.

Marshall asks the questions “Do Startup Companies Need A Community Manager?” My answer is of course a resounding “YES”. However, like pretty much everything else it all comes down to the ability to execute on the idea.

It’s not PR!

PR is dead. The two-faced, B.S. spewing PR flacks that have made their money by coming up with ever more creative methods to lie to a company’s customer are going to die a loud and long overdue death.

PR was a one-sided shouting match. The new age of community is more about listening than talking. One thing that most PR people seem to have is a genetic aversion letting anyone else talk or listening to them when they do.

No one with ANY hint of PR on their resume should come anywhere near a community relationship position!

But what about all those functions that PR serves? Like minimizing damage when the company does something stupid or bad? Or “spinning” one result to be seen as something totally different?

Oh, I don’t know… How about not doing things like putting poison in kid’s toys, or letting poison food get produced in the first place or simply telling the truth?

Naive? Probably.

The direction that the world is going to force you to go? Absolutely!

Might as well start recognizing that you’ve got a transparent kimono on. Open it up… Or don’t… Don’t matter because people are going to know what’s going on anyway. You might want to see how the truth works for a change.

It’s not Marketing!

Marketing still has a valuable place when it comes to developing the identity and the initial message. But marketing is going to need to become much more participatory and reactive to the reality being dictated by the real world.

It must be legitimate!

Don’t lie. If you have a position that the market doesn’t seem to like, then explain in truthful detail why you did what you did, do what you do, or are going to continue to do what you did. Even people that hate you will at least respect you. How is that a downside? And who knows, maybe being honest may actually turn some people onto you. After years and years of BS, maybe legitimacy and honesty are worth giving a try?

It may be a game changer!

This has the potential to be one of those paradigm changing ideas that fundamentally changes the way companies communicate with their customers.

Customers don’t want to listen to PR B.S. and they sure as hell don’t believe anything that comes out of a marketing or advertising department.

There are of course risks. The old model of how PR/Marketing crafted and controlled a focused message or identity is over. In reality the only messages or identities that really mattered were the ones that the customers created for themselves and communicated to each other.

In the past it was obviously easier for a large company to force conformity to the desired message, but as the number of communication channels is now nearly infinite, there’s no way any company is going to be able to effectively control their message or ID.

Companies must sooner or later respond to the fact that the key to their company’s long term survival is the active and honest communication and participation with the market. And in non-economic terms, what’s a market if not a community?

This is going to totally shake up so many business practices! From product development, to accounting, to of course sales and marketing.

It’s going to bring about the need for greater transparency. Worn-out corporate double-speak is dead. The old guard PR industry is going to die (no doubt kicking and screaming about “losing control”).

It’s time for companies of all sizes to realize that they have already lost, or very shortly will loose, control over their true image.

So it’s time now to start crafting plans and organizations that can communicate and participate openly and truthfully with the market. That starts with the Community Relationship position.

If you really want to take this on and understand it, you need to closely read Groundswell. It will articulate in detail pretty much everything I’m talking about. But with better writing and more footnotes.

Tags:community-marketing, community-relationship-management, marketing, pr, relationship

Last month I introduced the idea of using existing on-line social networking sites (MySpace, MeetUp, Facebook, etc.) to create a loose collection of on-line social experiences that you can use to drive real-world, physical traffic into your dealership (as opposed to using them strictly as on-line or e-commerce selling tools).

This month I’m going to expand that idea and introduce the idea of White Label social networking platforms. White Label platforms are similar to the idea of an e-commerce platform that I’ve covered pretty extensively in the past. They contain most of the features and functions that you’d need to carry out the tasks that the big social networking players have and you just need to customize the look and feel of the site, maybe add on or develop some custom plug-ins for expanded functionality and so on. Because of the extreme complexity in developing a social networking platform, this is typically a much better route than completely developing your own site from scratch.

By far the White Label platform that gets the most press is Ning (http://www.ning.com). One of the biggest reasons that Ning gets so much attention (and money) is that it was was co-founded by Marc Andreessen (he’s the guy that started a company called Netscape and is prety much singly responsible for introducing the idea of the World Wide Web to the unwashed masses of non-computer geeks so when he gets involved in something a lot of people take notice).

If you want to dig a little deeper a really good resource for a comprehensive list of white label social platforms is located on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog located here: http://tinyurl.com/2mwa6g. A lot of them are free, some are open source, and some you’ll need to pay for use.

For more reading check out this good article (it’s a year old and there’s new players and a lot of change in this space but it’s still a pretty comprehensive take on the idea of private/white label networking platforms) is located at TechCrunch here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/24/9-ways-to-build-your-own-social-network/. Of course there’s also a Google search for white label social networking platforms as well.

There are several pros and cons to creating a social networking site for your dealership vs. using one or more of the existing social sites out there.

Pros: Almost complete control and flexibility to make the site do what you need it to, unique branding possibilities, harder for the competition to copy you, your customers don’t require a separate login for each site (i.e. one for Facebook for social networking, one for YouTube to share videos, one for flickr to share photos, etc.),

Cons: Can be costly (in terms of time or developer pay if using a free platform or straight up expensive if paying for a platform), and probably the biggest drawback is that it’s harder to leverage the larger communities of established networks like Facebook, MeetUp, etc.

I want to spend a little time talking about the last con above. There are several initiatives like OpenSocial and Google’s Friend Connect that are trying to open up the Social Graph and make it more portable. So that the user (and more importantly the connections that make up the user’s network) will no longer be locked into say Facebook or mySpace. Each site or application will still do its own thing and serve its own purpose by using the user’s social network. It may seem like a pedantic distinction but its ramifications are huge on the social networking space. No longer will the value of a site like Facebook be established by the mere fact that it holds the leash to a user’s social network, but by what it does with that network.

So once you choose your platform you need to start thinking about how you want to use it to create a community around dealership. I’d suggest that the more features, functions, and tools that you can cram into it so that your customers can sort of do their own thing under your dealership’s auspices the better. A great example would be organizing rides. You’d want tools to allow the ride organizers to be able to invite other members of the dealership’s network and manage RSVP’s (think MeetUp or eVite functionality). You also want some kind of functionality that would allow you to display the ride route (maybe a mash-up integration with Google Maps) and even allow participants to download the route data in various data formats they can put into their GPS. You’re also going to want to have message board or forum where people can discuss the ride both before the event and after the event. A way for people to upload ride photos and videos are also must haves.

Now again, as I talked about last month, you could have links to all the various existing sites like YouTube, flickr, MeetUp, etc. on your site and force people to go on a snipe hunt to each one for every piece of the puzzle, or you could use your own socially networked site and create a uniform, harmonized, customized experience for your customers where they can do everythig they need or want to do under your virtual “roof.”

Tags:Column, community-marketing, dealerships, ecommerce, facebook, internet, motorcycle, myspace, powersports, Powersports Industry, selling-online, social marketing, social media, social-networking, web2.0, youtube

This month I’m going diverge from using social networking to strictly sell online. I’m going to write about using online social networking tools to get people through your physical doors and hopefully help you sell more stuff over the counter (of course doing all of this will also dramatically help your online sales as well because content is content and people and search engines both love content!).

This on-line/off-line thinking is sort of the as-yet undiscovered frontier. To date most of the social networking fuss has been about online activities. Chatting, bookmarking, reading, ranking, and commenting on news and entertainment sites, etc. This new wave of Internet enabled social networking I’m writing about this month is all about using online tools to get people offline and into the real world. In our case that’s onto the back of a motorcycle, scooter or PWC and more importantly into your dealership.

Our goal is to take disparate social networking entities and create a plan that unifies and leverages their capabilities to establish, strengthen, and utilize relationships with your local customers and then connect them all to your site and with each other.

A great example of a dealership that’s done something similar by leveraging the old-world, non-internet methods is Rick Fairless’ Strokers Dallas (and all of the other pieces of his empire). Rick apparently realized that it’s really, really, really not about the bikes, or even the dealership. It’s about the relationships between the dealership and the customer. The bikes are basically just the vehicle that initiates the relationship. It’s all the other stuff that strengthens that bond (the bar, the tattoo parlor, the events, the TV show, etc.)

Now Rick was able to leverage the force of his personality to drive this through the use of the mainstream media and by word of mouth. However, it’s interesting to note that as far as I can tell even he’s not doing a lot of the Internet based stuff I’m talking about (I did find a profile on Facebook, but there’s no integration, or even a link as far as I could tell, on his shop’s site). Maybe he just doesn’t need to?

Now you might be thinking that Rick’s operation is light years ahead of you. He’s on TV, he’s famous, etc. etc. There’s no way you could emulate that. And you may be correct if you are talking about a national or global level. But what about on a local or regional level?

The old media that made Rick’s operation (and of course Rick himself) famous is playing less and less of a role today. The Internet is bringing about an open stage that anyone can use to secure their own form of fame (albeit on a smaller geographic scale, but you never know where it might take you).

So how do we go about doing this? First keep this caveat firmly in your mind: this is all very new. From the sites/tools themselves all the way down to the very concepts that I’m talking about. Like, bleeding edge, don’t touch the wet paint, new. So you’re going to need to really switch on your right brain and think creatively about what’s possible, what you want to do, and how you want to do it. But trust me on this one. In no more than three years this month’s column will seem amazingly prescient. Maybe?

At the highest level you need to create accounts for your dealership on various established social networking sites and then create an integration between them all on your dealership’s website.

More social networking sites are realizing that they need to open up a bit and are providing API’s (application programming interfaces: ways for multiple, disparate computer programs to talk to each other) for developers to use. You’re even starting to see things like pre-built widgets from the established sites that allow you to embed part of their functionality on your site or on other social networking sites.

Here’s an example of how this might look in practice (the sites mentioned are just for illustration, there’s plenty of other ones out there):

1) Establish a primary social networking hub site. This will be the primary place where you create the social relationship linkages between your dealership and your customers. Sites like Facebook, MySpace are good choices. Most of the other elements of the social networking ecosystem have plug-ins that allow loose integration with these big players.

[Note: the realization is beginning to dawn that a potential, upcoming killer application is going to be the social networking hub or aggregation site. Currently the biggest hindrance to this is the walled garden approach that the big players like Facebook are imposing with their social graphs (the map/graph of all the connections between the user and his or her friends/connections, etc.). Initiatives like OpenSocial and Google's Friend Connect may help in opening this whole thing up.]

2) Because our big goal is to get people offline and out riding (and ultimately into your shop) you need a way to set up and publicise what’s going on. To allow your customers to participate in (or even organize on their own) rides and events (open houses, bike nights, etc.) create an account on the amazing site MeetUp.

3) Take videos, or better yet have customers take the videos, of rides and events and share them on YouTube.

4) Do the same with flickr for still pictures of rides, events, customer’s bikes, whatever.

5) Now embed all the various widgets and plugins that the social networking sites offer into your dealership’s own site(s). You will also want to make sure that there are links to your dealership’s site on each of the social networking properties, and that all of the various social sites are all linking to each other. Yes, conceptually it’s all a bit messy, but a clean execution will hide most the mess.

A step that is going to be vital for you to succeed here is going to be customer education and facilitation. If a customer (or a prospect! There’s no reason why everyone that walks in your door, whether they buy a bike or not should not be offered the opportunity to be a part of your community to see what your dealership is about) is not already on these sites (or even aware of them) you may need to do some hand holding and help them set up accounts, add your shop as a “friend” where applicable and so on. It would be a good idea to have one primary point of contact in your shop to handle this community building activity (read more on this community relationship management aspect)

This sort of piece-meal method of using social networking has the advantage being cheap and fairly easy. The disadvantage, as I mentioned earlier, is that it’s pretty messy. Next month I’m going to talk about how you can clean it all up by bringing all of this functionality under your own roof using something called white-label social networking platforms.

Tags:Column, community-marketing, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, facebook, flickr, internet, metacafe, motorcycle, myspace, powersports, Powersports Industry, social marketing, social-networking, web2.0, youtube

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 [Edit:2/18/10 No longer there].

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) administration, 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.

Tags:community-marketing, events, MPN, radical-idea