Archive for the 'ecommerce' tag

Phew! One of the largest projects I’ve ever done has just crossed a major milestone: Family PowerSports new e-commerce site is now “live” and in beta testing. Fingers crossed!

Here’s the announcement I just posted on our Facebook page:

Hello everyone!

Family PowerSports is happy to announce that we are launching a brand new shopping website (shop.familypowersports.com) that will allow folks all over the world to experience what it’s like to shop with Family PowerSports.

We know that there are already quite a few places to shop on the web for motorcycle, motocross, ATV, PWC and other powersports parts, accessories, apparel, and gear. However, we think that FPS has a unique benefit to offer over those other huge, impersonal online warehouse stores. Our customers in Texas know that we’re a great place to get product information, shop, and just hang out, and we think that by offering that same level of customer service and experience to everyone on the web we can make riding more fun for everyone.

We’ve got online microfiche for you do-it-yourselfers as well as the really cool ability to tell our website what vehicle you have and it will automatically find parts and accessories that work on your ride. Very cool!

Before we announce this new site (shop.familypowersports.com) to the world we’re asking our Facebook family to help us beta test our shopping site. As an incentive we’re offering you a 20% discount that you apply when you check (code:fbbeta) out as well as free shipping (you can also arrange for in-store pick up if you live close to a FPS location).

Again, the discount code that you’ll use when you check out is fbbeta and it’s good for 20% off your entire order from our shop.familypowersports.com website.

So if you need anything for your ride, please stop on by our new site (shop.familypowersports.com) and place an order. If you see anything that you don’t like, that seems broken or could be improved, please let me know by shooting me an email at webmaster at familypowersports.com.

We’ll be running this test for about two weeks and the beta code will be good that entire time. Feel free to share the code with any of your family and friends if you think that there’s something that they can use now that riding season is getting close.

Thanks in advance for your help and we look forward to building a great resource for all of our current and future Family PowerSports fans!

Tags:E-Commerce, ecommerce, motorcycle, powersports, selling-online

I’m writing this post to insure that there’s complete transparency regarding my involvement with 50 Below. I’m pretty sure that some of you, either with some encouragement from one of 50 Below’s competitors, or on your own, are going to wonder what the nature of this relationship is.

I don’t want there to be any confusion or misunderstanding about why I’m doing this. I want you Dear Reader to be 100% clear about what the deal is. And because of that, I hope you will respect my position and my conclusion. If at any point in the future anything changes I will be equally clear.

No, This little missive is not brief. It’s not a bunch of key concepts organized in bullet points. You’re going to probably want to carve out a chunk of time to read it, but damnit, it’s my site and it’s one of the few places I can do whatever the hell I want! It’s a blog and I like to rant! And I’m writing a lot of it on an airplane flying back home from Duluth so I’ve got time to burn.

Also, I don’t have an editor anywhere around here so I’m sure there’s a lot of really bad writing in here as well. Also (see?! two sentences in a row that start with also!), because this is my point of view and not officially a statement from 50 Below, I’m going to be pretty direct so there’s not a lot of ambiguity.

On with the show…

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve placed an advertisement on my blog here for 50 Below. In addition, you need to know that I have entered into a co-marketing partnership with 50 Below to help promote, and more importantly, develop, their range of solutions for the motorcycle and powersports industries.

If you’re a long-time reader of my random thoughts and rants in Dealernews or here on this site (Congratulations! You’re among a very small, and elite group of people!), you should be saying to yourself, “Self: but I thought Todd has said repeatedly in his columns and in his Indy presentations that all of those turn-key, 3rd party website providers were to be avoided if at all possible.” (Actually, to be honest, I’ve said they were all crap) And yes, when those things were written or spoken it was, in my rather well-informed opinion, true.

I fully stand behind the fact that when I expressed those views that if a dealership was committed to really taking on things like e-commerce or using their web presence as a cornerstone of their marketing strategy that the only honest advise I could give was to take it on and build something unique, bespoke, custom… Expensive.

That was before I began a project for A&S Powersports, the dealership that I am, at the time of this writing, responsible for the development and operation of their websites.

I’m pleased to say that now, for like 98% of you, when you ask me what you need to do to get online and really take it on, instead of of a 16 page proposal that had a ton of bullet points and would require you to spend a lot of money, my advise boils down to the following three points:

1. Sign up with 50 Below (load it up… get EZ-Shop, Shop by fitment, and when they launch some of the cool-as-hell stuff that I’ve seen this week, whatever it costs, you’ll need that too…)
2. Have someone that is at least full-time to really take it on that has the competence and ability to make the most of it. You don’t have a service department without a Service Manager do you? How about a sales department with no Sales Manager? Parts department with no Parts Manager? Nope. Nope. And…… Nope. So why would you have a line of your business that has more potential for revenue than all three combined (and right now, without exaggeration, that potential exists) without at least one person dedicated to it full time?
   Would you buy a new box of tools from the Snap-On guy, roll a bike in front of it and then get pissed because when you came back at the end of the month the bike still doesn’t run?
3. Hire me as an obscenely high-priced consultant to really show you how to make enough money so that you can sleep on a bed of $100 bills with three or four MotoGP Umbrella Girls.

(Step #3 is optional, but highly recommended)

Anyway on with the main story…

Over the years, A&S had one primary website, www.ascycles.com. This site was doing double duty as a successful dealership-based e-commerce operation, and our “dealership” website. So whenever we needed to communicate something like an event, or a vehicle financing special, it had to go onto a site that was generating significant e-commerce revenue from PG&A sales to BMW riders all over the country. This meant “giving up” things like screen real estate, navigation areas etc. for locally oriented purposes at the expense of direct revenue generation via e-commerce (promotion space, merchandising, etc.).

At the beginning of this year A&S took on Ducati and created a new line of business, A&S Ducati. This was going to require some shuffling around and thinking about what I was going to do in terms of site organization.

I made the decision that:

• the site www.ascycles.com should remain focused on BMW Motorcycle e-commerce
• there should be a new dedicated Ducati e-commerce site (www.ducati-motorcycle-parts.com (I can’t believe that in 2009 that this prime, SEO worthy domain was available!)
• I should create two new sites for local dealership activities (vehicle information, lead generation, local community activities, etc.).

I had some key goals or constraints for these two new dealer sites:

1) They had to be easily maintainable directly by A&S sales and marketing staff. I had zero desire, interest, or time to do things like put up new graphics or change content on these sites. So there needed to be some kind of easy-to-use content management system.

I could custom develop a site around a content management system (CMS) platform like Wordpress or maybe suck it up and go with one of those 3rd party, turn-key sites that focus on the powersports industry. At this point in the process, you need to read that last part with a sneer of disdain bordering on disgust. Remember, I still didn’t like any of them.

2) I wanted a system that automagically had things like vehicle specs and OEM promotions just show up on the site. Well, that obviously ruled out building a custom site on a CMS and pretty much forced me to at least consider one of the three players in this space.

So I wrote up an extensive evaluation questionnaire similar to the one Arlo did for Dealernews. No, you can’t see my questionnaire because I did it as part of my day job for A&S, but Arlo’s is a pretty good representation of what I was asking.

I was going to grill the hell out of these guys and if they couldn’t handle it then maybe I’d have to go the custom route.

So I wrote up the questions, emailed them to each of the vendors, had them fill them out and then scheduled the follow up interviews.

Now I want to be very clear here. I was asking questions to a detail and a level that I’m 100% sure that none of you ask. How do I know that? Because all three told me that. They all said that I was asking stuff that they had never had any dealer ask them.

Because of my years, and years, and years in the software sales industry before I came to the powersports market, I know how to get through the smokescreens, the fake demos, the hand-waving, etc. I was a sales engineer during the dot-com days. I know how to rig a demo. Therefore I know how to spot a rigged game.

And remember, I was looking to spend real money for the dealership where I worked on not one, but two sites. I don’t take my job lightly. I’m obsessive to the point of being a pain in the ass. But I’m pretty good at what I do so I consider it a fair trade.

Also keep in mind that I was sort of throwing my weight in as somewhat of an expert in the motorcycle and powersports industry when I was asking these questions. As in, “You know who I am right? You know, if I end up picking you that means that I’m going against my past stand against a turn-key site and that might be potentially valuable for your company… Right?”

I’m kind of like the male version of Paris Hilton when it comes to the internet in this industry except I don’t carry around an ugly rat-dog and I make a lot, lot, lot less money.

And I’m not as hot.
Or as skinny.

OK… Maybe I’m more like Oprah.

But male.
And white.
And thinner…
And much, much, much poorer.

Anyway… I was being very clear that:

1. I don’t want to use any of you
2. If you impress me, I’m going to be very vocal about it
3. I’m 90% sure that you’re not going to impress me
4. It’s worth your effort to try to impress me

So onto the results:

Company A:

To sum up Company A in powersports terms, they are the equivalent of an inexpensive Chinese motorcycle. It’s cheap, and yea, it technically qualifies as as a motorcycle, but I would never buy one or ride on one or let a friend buy one. And it’s sure as heck not going to win you any races.

• They pretty much refused to offer much of anything in the way of a written response to my RFQ questionnaire so it fell to a phone call.
• On the initial phone call I went though the answers with a salesperson that I’m pretty sure had just turned on a computer for the very first time a day or two before we talked. They were totally clueless about everything. They finally admitted they were new (why would they have a brand new sales person talk to someone like me?! What were they thinking?!) and they were going to get their boss involved. That was probably a mistake.
• “The Boss” was one of the most unpleasant people I have ever had to deal in a sales/customer interaction in recent memory. And they were pretty clueless as well. On several occasions their initial response to a question was something along the lines of “Why do you need to know that?” Because maybe I’d like to know as much as I can about the platform I’m going to invest a big chunk of money in and depend on as a significant part of my business’s future success. How’s that for a reason? Good grief… Sales training anyone?
• So in addition to the general unpleasant feeling about the call, the solution was so horrible that I pretty much stopped writing down answers on my notes and tried to get off the phone as quickly as possible.
• Well, they do have pretty good micro-fiche solutions. I think they should go back to focusing on that, hand off all their customers to 50 Below and just move on. But that’s just me.

Company A’s verdict… Immediate and total FAIL!

Company B:

In powersports terms, Company B is a 1996 Virago. It might have been an adequate bike for the time, but it’s 2009 for Pete’s sake! A new coat of paint and new tires are not enough to let it compete in the modern marketplace!

• Dated platform. They have not made, nor do they seem to be interested in making any significant or necessary advancements or improvements to their products in several years.
• Pretty much without exception, every one of the sites I’ve ever seen that is based on their platform is ugly. Not just ugly based on 2009 standards, but most of these sites would have been ugly back in 1998 when people still thought that the <blink> tag was cool. I know, because when I judged the top websites for the 2009 Indy show, I had to suffer through reviewing like 90 of them. The good news is I could identify them before the header graphic had even loaded so I didn’t have to suffer long before I moved on to the next one.
  While I can’t fault you dealers for not being graphic designers, or knowing anything about how to design a website that enhances your brand image, you’d think that the largest supplier of websites to the powersports industry would have a frickin clue and hire someone that had more artistic and design background than painting portraits of Elvis on black velvet at the country fair.
• Horrible, horrible shopping experience. Face it… Customers do… not… shop… by… distributor… catalog…! A customer for a motorcycle jacket does not care or know who Tucker Rocky is! Sure, they know Parts Unlimited because their banners are all over the race track, but I’d say less than 1% of your customers has a clue what Parts Unlimited actually does. And they sure as hell don’t want to search through those catalogs for something like a jacket, sprocket, tire, or helmet.
• You’re locked into a long term contract. You are required to sign a one year contract with an non-optional auto-renew clause. No way! I’m not getting locked into anything as important as my website’s platform. Things change in our industry and on the web too quickly to run the risk of missing a significant opportunity to do the right thing for my business because I’m tied to an agreement that is not in my best interest. Seriously, what do they think they are…? A cell phone company?
• Very poor customer service. When I used them on a limited basis for a dealership I was trying to help out (to the point that I wrote several strongly worded e-mails about the issue to their parent company’s upper management) I basically got an “oh… so sorry…” response. I (and by extension Company B’s customer) never did get answers to my questions.
• Very expensive. When all the bells and whistles are turned on to get it to come close to what 50 Below offers when all their bells and whistles are turned on they were almost $10,000 more expensive than 50 Below over a year for both sites. And that’s with, in my opinion, an inferior product and much worse service.
  You’d think that if anyone could get a discount it would be me so they’d have a pretty good reference account… Nope… It’s not until now, in a down market with an obviously inferior product are they offering any discounts to try to shore up customers that are finally realizing that they’ve been overpaying for years. If you happen to have been a customer of Company B, and they offer you a discount going forward, make sure that you ask if you can get that discount back-dated for all those years they were over charging you.
• Here’s a real shocker… The person that I talked to on the phone, a guy that I’ve met at a few Indy shows and you would think would obviously know that there’s a fair chance that I’ll talk to people about our conversation, didn’t hesitate to take advantage of opportunities to totally rip apart the parent company that had just spent an obscene amount of money to acquire them. So here’s an executive at the company ripping apart his parent company to a potential, and somewhat influential, customer. What does that say about the internal dynamics of the entire operation and its internal corporate health?
• Backing up the above indications of bad blood between the acquired and the acquirer was that when I was at Indy and talked to several guys from another division of the acquiring company about their thoughts of the soon to be corporate sibling, they ripped them apart. Not just a little either. These are not rumors about hostility within the overall organization. This is my first-hand account with both sides of this company being openly hostile to the other guys.
• So obviously there’s something really messed up at that company and it’s just one more giant indication that I’d never want to recommend them to anyone, let alone choose them myself.
• I even offered the following to them: “If you are interested in detailed reasons why Company B was not chosen, and think that my input/reasons would help your development in the future, let me know.” Nothing… OK, fine. Maybe in spite of my position in the industry, my years of experience, my demonstrated success in e-commerce in the motorcycle industry they figured I was full of crap and had nothing to learn from. Might have been worth a discussion or two though, no?

Now again keep in mind that both of these vendors knew who I was. That by signing me and the dealership where I worked it would be at least a tacit, and at best an overt, endorsement of their company and their products.

And in both of these cases they acted as if they could care less. I was stunned. I expected a little more effort.

So, I’d say that if they were willing to treat me like that (and let’s not forget, I’m really, really important around here! ), before I’d even signed up with them, you gotta wonder what would happen if I was a customer and ran into “issues.”

So once again. Total… Fail…

50 Below:

With 50 Below, you’re getting a race ready factory bike. You even get factory support in the form of their Marketing Account Executives that will work with you, as part of the standard package to help you get your site working the way it’s supposed to work. They want to help you win. Let them!

So then I move on to 50 Below… Keep in mind that I went into this whole process positive that 50 Below was going to be the absolute worst. So much so that I had considered not even including them.

Why?

1) The solution they first offered a few years ago was so God-awful horrible. That whole page turning, flash-based, parts catalog based shopping experience was just miserable. The templates were eye-searingly bad. Etc. etc.

2) They had had some pretty significant financial and/or legal issues in their recent past that I thought indicated that they were at worst shady and at best irresponsible. Everyone I talked to about 50 Below, even today, universally says something along the lines of:

• “Are they still in business?”
• “Didn’t they all get hauled off to Gitmo?”
• “Don’t they try to keep your domain name if you leave their service?”
• (It should be pointed out that a lot of this FUD was being propagated and encouraged to propagate by good ol’ Company B above… Oh… Look… One more reason to not pick Company B… They like to play dirty.). For the record, none of the above was true or at least true to the extent that it was portrayed. If you want to know what really happened, talk to 50 Below. They will explain it to you.

Or better yet, check this out…

I didn’t know this at first, and I bet most of you might not know this, but 50 Below is also involved in other industries other than powersports. For instance, they are the only approved provider for franchised UPS stores. They are also the sole, authorized website providers for various financial and insurance firm’s independent advisers like UBS and Smith Barney.

I’m willing to bet that all those companies probably did a fair amount of due diligence when they decided to pick 50 Below. WAYYYY more than I did and I’m willing to bet WAYYYY more than you’re going to do. You think they would have picked 50 Below if the rumors were even close to being true? Yea. I don’t think so either.

And does being involved in those other industries mean that 50 Below is not “focused” or “dedicated” to the powersports markets? Hell no… It means that they are diversified across multiple industries so that when crap like what’s hitting our industry now happens, it doesn’t cripple them. Now if all you’re involved in is the powersports industries and things start getting bad, what do you lean on? Oh… Right…Nothing.

So onto the results of my investigation…

About 5 minutes into the presentation on their product offering I was really, really impressed with

1. the improvements they had made in the last few years and
2. how astonishingly far beyond the other two competitors they were.

Their website designs are composed of modern best-practices. All that crappy table based layout stuff that they had used in the past, and that the other two companies still used was gone with clean and efficient CSS based design. Nice!

Their shopping experience, what they are calling EZ-Shop, finally addressed the horrible practice of catalog based shopping. Customers can shop by category, brand, and even fitment to the model of vehicle that they own. This is seriously an order of magnitude better than the other two solutions. If you care about e-commerce at all as a part of your overall business strategy, this feature alone is reason to pick 50 Below. The fact that they are kicking ass on so many other features as well just makes this such a no brainer solution.

Is 50 Below perfect? Nope. Is it better than the rest? Absolutely.

Are there things I’d like to see changed or improved? Yes. And you know what? They are really interested in making those changes. In fact they already have plans, prototypes, or almost released features to address a lot of the things I’d like to see. They seem to actually be very committed to making their product better and better and providing more value and better service. What more can you ask for from a partner?

If 50 Below would have had an offering like they have now when I began the work on the sites I manage, I would have used it. Or to put it another way, if I was going to go to work for a new dealership today with the goal of creating another world-class internet presence I would use 50 Below as the platform upon which I would begin my work. No brainer.

Where do you want your techs to buy their tools? Snap On? MAC? Or some dude selling crap from China out of a van at the flea market? Same deal.

Does this mean that just because you use 50 Below you’ll automagically end up with a website that shows up #1 in all Google results and generates millions of dollars in e-commerce revenue? Not a chance. Just because you buy a Ducati 1098R can you jump on it and win an WSBK title? Nope. But if you have an amazing rider and a talented team working on it, you’ll have better than a fighting chance.

I get from 50 Below a real sense of forward momentum, valuable progress, continuous improvement. Moving forward at an amazing speed. In the time I’ve spent working with 50 Below I’ve seen a team of dedicated individuals that are hell-bent on creating the ultimate platform for the motorcycle and powersports industries.

In conclusion (finally…), I just spent the better part of a week in Duluth meeting with the folks from 50 Below. Seeing what they’ve got going on, seeing what’s coming, etc. I wanted to make sure that if I was going to get behind promoting something that I could do it in good faith.

After doing that I’m even more convinced that I made the right decision for A&S to use them for my projects and that I can recommend them as the default, no-brainer, “what are you waiting for?”, go-to solution for the motorcycle and powersports industry when it comes to turn-key internet presences.

Why do I want you to all move to 50 Below? Because I want to be able to actually help this industry start using the web so you’ll be successful. I’m sick of seeing dealers wallow around with no website, or crap websites, and not be able to tell you in simple terms how to do the stuff you need to be doing.

Now I can. Call 50 Below. Tell them you just read this and you’re ready to start taking responsibility for getting your dealership into the 21st century.

Here’s some more details about how and why I’m working with 50 Below:

• I contacted them to see if there was anything I could do to help them get more dealers to use their platform. Why? Because I could not understand why anyone except in the most unusual of circumstances would not choose 50 Below. I have a very limited tolerance for irrational behaviour. If after reading this, and after really digging into the three options out there you don’t choose 50 Below, well, I’d love to hear why. Seriously… If you don’t pick 50 Below, tell me why. If it’s a valid point, I will ask them to address the issue. If it’s a legitimate issue, I’ll update this post with that info.
• They are paying me a small consulting retainer to do things like write tutorials for their newsletters and other educational materials in the future. This fee also includes an advertising component for the banner on my site. Trust me, it’s not a lot of money and if I didn’t feel that I was doing the right thing to recommend them to you, the amount of money they are paying me would never be enough to get me to do it.
• I absolutely, positively, do not make any more or less money if you sign up or don’t sign up with them.
• And to be very, very clear, just because I write for Dealernews there is not even the slightest connection between my personal opinions and conclusions and anyone at Dealernews. I will not involve myself in any activity at Dealernews that involves the review or discussion of the competing platforms while I’m working with 50 Below.

Tags:dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, marketing, motorcycle, Motorcycle Advertising, powersports, reviews, selling-online

This month I’m going to continue our discussion of social networking/social media by talking a bit about one of the most important bits of user generated content (UGC) out there. Product reviews.

You’ve seen them on sites like Amazon.com and Buy.com and I’m sure you’ve probably used them yourself when researching a purchase.

As I’ve said over and over, when it comes to selling online content is king. Typically the more information you can provide to your shoppers the more likely they are to make the purchase (and there’s the benefit of getting higher organic search engine results because you have all of that content for Google and the other search engines to chew on). Now as anyone who’s doing it now knows, generating good content is hard work. It takes a lot of time and you typically need pretty high quality people to do the work. They need to know the product, they need to know how to write well, etc., etc. (and they typically want to get paid as well).

The beauty of user submitted product reviews is that it’s your customers that are doing the content creation. For free! And as studies have shown, shoppers typically place a much higher value on user-submitted reviews than the typical marketing-speak that accompanies most products online. There’s all kinds of statistics thrown around about how people are X% more likely to buy something with reviews, etc. No one knows what those percentages are, especially when viewed across various product types, price points, and so on. However, it is pretty much unassailable that reviews do have a significantly positive effect when it comes to increasing conversion rates. So in short it’s a smart thing to do.

So if it’s a good thing to do, how do you do it? Most modern e-commerce platforms either come with the ability built in or available as an add-on. If those options are not available there’s always the standby of getting a review/rating system custom developed.

However, if you don’t it built in, and you don’t have the resources to have something custom developed, there are companies out there that offer third-party review systems that can be integrated with most e-commerce platforms. The two most frequently mentioned companies that offer this capability are PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice.

One of the potential advantages of these two solutions is that in addition to your product reviews living on a potentially lonely island on your website, you can take advantage of the wider social network created by these companies and all of the other companies that they provide reviews for.

One of the most frequently asked questions about customer reviews (or UGC in general) is how do you control it? For instance, how do you handle negative reviews? Or reviews that were obviously written by someone under the influence of a controlled substance or the telepathic control of a creature from some alternate dimension not governed by logic or common sense? Or what about good ol’ fashioned curse words?

In order, the generally prescribed guidance is as follows:

Negative reviews: Leave them up. Don’t censor them because as soon as someone catches you taking off, or not approving a legit negative review, your credibility is shot and your reviews are now going to be seen as worthless. Notice that I emphasized legit. Product reviews should be seen as a utility to provide information from one customer to many other customers about the product at hand. Reviews are not a soapbox where you have to put up with some loud-mouth ripping you apart, or the company that made the jacket because he thought that his 300 pound frame would look good in a nice tight set of medium leathers (especially as they were half off).

The other “great” thing about negative reviews is that it helps you get bad product off your site sooner than later, or potentially have the ammo necessary to go to the OEM to get them to address significant weaknesses in their products so you can sell the product, but have it be the product people want.

Basically people expect to see some negative reviews. If the only reviews on your site are positive, no one is going to buy that. At best they will be highly suspect.

The next type of “problem” review are the incorrect or very ill-informed variety. If someone posts a review that is obviously off-base on things like technical features etc. where it’s obvious that they could not be bothered to read the manual or ask for help from you or the manufacturer’s customer service department, you’ll typically still want to let those reviews stand. If it’s a glaringly stupid point of view, other readers will typically pick up on the goofiness and brush it off (most modern review systems even have a method to allow this community feedback feature by allowing review readers to mark reviews along the lines of helfpful, not helpful, and so on.).

You can typically amend the wacky review in question with a note (make sure you mark it clearly as your comment) with correct information. Just make sure to not allow a product review to turn into a forum with a lot of back and forth on the issue.

The only real case where you might have to be more heavy-handed is if someone posts something like “this product will make your bike explode and also make you sterile.” Obviously if the accusation is unfounded it could lead to a call from the product manufacturer’s legal team with a nice cease-and-desist order for slander (however, if it is true in this case, you might want to stop selling it even before you get any more corroborating negative reviews).

The final type of review you have to worry about is when someone gets a little blue with the language. Now depending on your brand image, your customer’s expectations, etc. colorful, honest, reviews may be your claim to fame and you can just proudly just let it all hang out. Even if your are more conservative, typically it’s acceptable to let the bulk of the review stand and just replace the more colorful passages with something like asterisks.

And finally, because I know there’s some of you out there thinking this, I’ll bring it up: Never, ever, ever, under any circumstances write your own glowing reviews for products in the reviews section to entice people to buy something. Your opinion on the product goes in the merchandising copy. If the web ever finds out you’re shilling your own stuff in your reviews, it’s game over for your trustworthiness and reputation.

Check back next month as I talk about how to turn some of this virtual, social networking into some real boots in your showroom as part of your overall online selling strategy.

Tags:Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, forums, internet, motorcycle, powersports, reviews, selling-online, user-generated-content

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, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, facebook, flickr, internet, metacafe, motorcycle, myspace, powersports, social-networking, web2.0, youtube

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