Archive for the 'flickr' tag

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

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