Archive for the 'motorcycle' tag

This month I’m going to be tweeting about Twitter. What it is, why you should care, and most importantly how you can use it in your business

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have most likely been bombarded with mentions of Twitter in the media

Even members of congress were “busted” tweeting during President Obama’s recent national address http://tinyurl.com/dc394j

Briefly, Twitter is a “microblogging” tool (and now a technical infrastructure) that lets people post short 140 character tweets to the web

Twitter is a weird FrankenTech that exists somewhere in the spaces between RSS, chat, e-mail (albeit public email), blogs, and forums

Once you post your “tweet” to the Twittersphere, users that are “following” you will be updated with the pearl of wisdom you just posted

I admit, at first I didn’t “get” Twitter. It seemed like a pointless social-media distraction. I’m rapidly and drastically changing my mind

The best way to really understand Twitter is to sign up for it and start playing with it. Go to twitter.com and create a twitter account

Make sure you take the time to create a customized and branded profile. Include a link to your e-commerce or dealership website

Be warned going in, Twitter goes down a lot. Just Google “Twitter is down”. It happens so much, it’s *almost* become an endearing quality

Check out Twitter’s help site help.twitter.com to really understand all that you can do with it. As always, if you’re stuck, RTFM!

Posting to, and managing followers is an excellent task for your Community Relationship Manager!

Publicize your dealership’s twitter ID and encourage people that visit your shop or your site to sign up for twitter and to follow you

Put your twitter ID on your printed receipts, on your business cards, add a “Follow Us” link to your website and in your e-mail marketing

You need to understand some of the tools and technique of the twitter “language.” First, a tweet is the name for a twitter post

Next, you will see the @ symbol in tweets. This is a way for directly referencing or replying to another twitter user. Mine is @radicalpower

Another symbol you will see is #. It’s an unofficial trick that has evolved among twitter users to tag or categorize post content #ecommerce

Another convention you will see is RT for Re-Tweet. When you read something really interesting that deserves wider distribution you RT it

Here’s how it looks together: RT @radicalpower- I’m writing a great article for #Dealernews on how to use #twitter for motorcycle dealers

Twitter has really become more of a technical infrastructure. To get the most out of it you’ll want to use some of the twitter clients

Two of the most widely used and recommended twitter clients are www.twhirl.org and www.tweetdeck.com. Try them out for yourself and use one

There are some cool applications that tap into twitter so people can analyze the real-time twit-stream to see what the world is thinking

Check out Twist twist.flaptor.com to track trends or keywords and Twitscoop www.twitscoop.com to see what terms are waxing or waning

There’s even an easy to use tool, twitpic twitpic.com that lets you post pictures through twitter.

Because you only have 140 characters, it’s hard to enter long urls when you want to direct people to a certain site or page

The solution to this is to use a URL-shortening service. Tinyurl.com is the most popular but there are hundreds more See: tinyurl.com/yp8cba

A user-generated directory has popped at wefollow.com. You simply tweet to @wefollow with 3 #category to get listed

So the big question you have to be asking is, OK this is all very interesting, but how can I use this to make more money in my shop?

On the e-commerce side, you can tweet to all your followers when you add new, cool products to your website. That will drive traffic & sales

You can also run RT-based contests. Tell people that if they re-tweet a product detail page, or blog post they have a chance to win a prize

Follow this link http://tinyurl.com/cg8euq for a Google search on “retweet contests” to see some ideas of what others are doing

You can publicize web discounts or in-store specials that are good with a code that you tweet. This gives people motivation to follow you.

Build a social media ecosystem with twitter that points people to your blog posts, and a blog link that points people to your twitter ID

When people follow you, or RT you, make sure you thank them via a Direct Message or publicly via an @reply. Don’t forget to follow them back

You will want to make sure that you do frequent searches on twitter for you company name to keep track of what people are saying about you

I hope you found this series of tweets on Twitter informative and I invite you to follow me on twitter @radicalpower

And yes, each of the points above were under 140 characters!

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, marketing, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, pr, Search Engine Optimization, selling-online, social marketing, social media, social-networking, Twitter

As I’m sure you’re well aware, the economic model that currently supports most of Western Civilization appears to be in the process of a major melt-down. These tough times are going to call for some creative thinking to pry the money you need to keep your doors open from the hands of the customer that is worried about keeping their job or paying their mortgage.

This month I’m going to talk about discounting and other promotions. In the past I have laid out my general philosophy that if you run a proper operation you should not need to think too much about discounting. I still hold by that sentiment. I’m not talking about some kind of grand fire-sale along the lines of those furniture stores that seem to be going out of business every other week.

What I am talking about are developing, and more importantly communicating, discount-type promotions that entice a shopper to buy from you if they were not going to buy from you in the first place, or to buy more from you if they were buying anyway.

An over-arching theme is that you never give anything away for free. If you are giving it away (cue the Red Hot Chili Peppers), then it’s only logical that the customer is not going to ascribe any value to it. You want to come up with some manner of telling your customers that you are buying something for them. After all, that’s what you’re doing, so why not position it that way?

Some people may consider it a matter of semantics but I think it’s an important distinction if you are trying to do some type of discounting yet retain a brand identity different from the multitudes of internet discounters.

For example: You are not offering “free shipping.” You are paying for the customer’s shipping. So instead of “Free shipping on orders over $150″ you need to communicate it like “Spend over $150 and we’ll pay your shipping.”

Yes they are functionally equivalent, but I think the latter has more value. Sure not everyone is going to look at it that way, but it helps. And it’s the thought process behind this that should be driving you as you craft discount or promotion methods.

A next point is to remember that your goal of discounting should be to get people that would not otherwise buy from you at full price to buy from you at a price that you are still willing to accept.

Let’s say that you run a promotion that requires customers to enter a discount code at check out to get 20% off their orders. I would say that in most circumstances that you would want to publicise that code to customers via advertising like e-mails or off-line print ads, but not publicise the code on your site. If someone hits your site off a Google search with the intent of buying something you’re selling, and they are willing to pay full price, why in the world would you be willing to accept less? Use the e-mails and print ads to drive incremental traffic to your store and the discount to increase conversion.

A lot of this is going to depend on the type of business you run and the type of normal customers & traffic you have buying from your site. You need to do some in-depth analysis of your analytics and sales data from the past. The goal should be to come up with discount methodologies that enable you to get full price from people that were willing to pay full price going in.

Next, you should try to come up with methods to coax a higher level of spending from people already buying. A good way to do this that also brings them back on a later date to buy more are instruments like gift certificates that are good for a certain dollar amount once they spend over a set limit. Say, “spend $300 today and we’ll email you a gift certificate code good for $30 off your next order.” You are hopefully pushing those customers sitting there with $250 in their cart to add another $50 to get the $30 gift certificate that they may use another day. And of course hopefully on that next visit they spend more than the $30.

Obviously you’ll again have to dip into your analytics and sales data to try to come up with the thresholds and values that make rational business sense for these types of promotions.

And finally here’s one of those brilliant ideas that keep you coming back to read my column every month. Because so many of you non-snow vehicle related retailers are sitting there looking out of empty showrooms at piles of the white stuff, here’s an idea to generate some cash now and defer the outflow until you’ve got more organic sales going on in the spring. Sell something like a “spring certificate” on your site that is good for a certain percentage above the face value when used between certain dates in the future (the certificate’s magic window).

Here’s an example: “Buy our Spring Certificate this week for $200 and when you come back and use it between April 1 and May 31 and we’ll increase the value to $250!” If they use it outside the magic window it’s still worth the face value of $200. This allows you to get cash from the customer now on your books with a potential liability for a lower margin during a set window when you should be generating enough sales to cover it. And I can promise you that not everyone will use it during the magic window. And of course there’s even a percentage of people that will never use it at all. You do realize that some estimates put the amount of money that will sit there unspent on those “gift cards” around $10Billion for 2008? It’s possible that the amount of people that don’t spend all of their $200 at all may make up for the loss in margin from the discount.

Fine print: I’m sure there’s some accounting and/or legal magic your controller and lawyer are going to have to perform to account for the future liability, cash flow, proper wording, etc., etc., etc. so make sure you get all that squared away before you launch something like this.

I’m going to leave you with one overarching theme that I recommend you use in all of your advertising and marketing messaging: motorcycles and powersports are the ultimate escape from the strife that people are being bombarded with every waking moment these days. Motorcycles and powersports have always been about freedom and getting away from it all. If you’re bombing through the woods on a dual sport you typically don’t have a lot of spare brain-cycles to be worried about your mortgage. If your cruising past the majestic Grand Tetons with your significant other behind you and soaking it all in, you typically are not thinking about the annual return on your 401k.

We are in the escape business. Economic realities may be dictating that people are not buying new bikes, but we can sure as heck make sure we help them get the parts, accessories, and gear they need to get out and enjoy the vehicles they already own. Intelligent discounting and promotions in your e-commerce operation can be a huge help. For them, and for you.

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, marketing, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, selling-online

Your website should be like your ultimate sales person. All knowing, all helpful, all the time.

As more and more dealerships and retailers are jumping into the motorcycle and powersports e-commerce space it’s going to become more and more important that you do some key things that differentiate your web store from everyone else.

One area that has a huge bang for the buck is having your own powerful, compelling, and well written product descriptions.

If you really want to set yourself apart from the competition, you need to do things differently especially when it comes to the product descriptions on your site. You shouldn’t be relying on the descriptions that come from the OEM or a distributor catalog. While they might be a good place to start, in general they are just not up to the level you need to truly be a best in class operation.

There are several advantages to doing this:

• Obviously better descriptions that are written to really inform the customer and turn that browser into a buyer will increase conversions and sales. Benefit: More money
• A side benefit is that better descriptions should lead to better search engine rankings. Even if they don’t get you to number one or number two (or even three or four) if everyone else is using the same canned descriptions, your unique description when picked up by the search engine and used as that little summary below your link (when well written as a sales tool) will lead more people to click your link even if you are nut at the very top (of course you still need to be at least in the top 10). Benefit: More traffic
• A last benefit I’ll spell out here is that you will slowly become known as the place on the web to go for in-depth information on motorcycle and powersports products. Sure you might be shouting at me (or at least my goofy picture above the column), “So I put all that time and energy into writing great descriptions, millions of people visit my site, then they go to some web discounter to get them for less!” Well yes, that may happen, but the increase in reputation, traffic, and so on will undoubtedly lead to more sales in the long run. Benefit: Better reputation and brand image

And of course unlike having to educate and train parts people over and over as they leave your shop and new one come in, once you put it on the website, it’s done!

Where does this in-depth product knowledge come from? Well, it should be coming from your parts department. If the people in your parts department don’t do much more than hold down the counter with their elbows waiting for a customer to come in or call, and when they do all they do is read the customer the description out of the product brochure or distributor’s catalog, they are not really providing a very unique service.

If you don’t have a parts staff that could, at any moment, give a customer a more compelling reason to buy some widget or doodad than that customer could get from reading a brochure, the manufacturer’s website (in most cases), or a distributor’s catalog, you need a new parts staff. Or at the very least you need to begin a comprehensive product training program so that your parts staff can provide the level of service that will blow customers away and that you can use on your website.

After all, some one’s dealership has to be known as the best place in the world to get the highest level of motorcycle and powersports information. Why shouldn’t it be yours? Are you afraid you’ll make so much money that you won’t know what to do with it all?

With your website acting as a never sleeping extension of that parts sales team, you should be doing everything you can to get the knowledge that’s in their heads onto your web customer’s computer screen when they visit your site.

Now obviously not everyone has the ability or education level to be able to write to the level that public display on a professional website requires and that’s where having your own professional merchandising copywriter comes in.

Hire a person that can write really, really well and have meetings between that person and your parts staff to go over all the products that you’re selling. Have your knowledgeable parts staff go over all the features, advantages, and benefits of the products and then let your merchandising copy-writer put them into words that sell. It is it’s own unique art form to write in a manner that sells products. Don’t assume that just because you have a warehouse full of monkeys banging away on keyboards that they have the ability to write truly amazing web copy that sells.

If you’re doing decent business, or want to be doing decent business, I’d recommend hiring someone internally. If you don’t want to go that way, there’s plenty of writers that are looking to make some money while they are waiting for their Great American Novel to get published. Look for someone with a background in catalog (remember mail-order) copy-writing that is also a motorcycle or powersports enthusiast and hire them on a contract basis.

Now if you are on a turn-key platform you may not have the ability to re-write the product descriptions for products that come out of their “catalogs.” Obviously this puts you at a potentially huge competitive disadvantage against the dealerships and other retailers that have taken my advice and not relied on these canned solutions.

It’s time to make a decision. If your website does not allow you to have the level of control that you need to be successful, then it seems like it might be a good idea to start developing a plan to get onto your own platform and take control of your future.

Next month I’ll expand on the product merchandising vein by talking about why it’s important to invest in your own product photography.

Tags:Column, copywriting, E-Commerce, ecommerce, Merchandising, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, SEO

Every once and a while I’ll get someone saying to me, “Todd, you’re nuts to be giving away some of these ideas for free!”

Well, this month is another great example. As this is my last column of the year, consider it my early Festivus present to you. I guarantee that if you follow my advice in this column your dealership will absolutely, positively  make significantly more money next year even if you don’t have anything to do with e-commerce.

I’m going to tell you about one of the hottest areas of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) right now: Local Results!

At the Search Engine Strategies show that I just attended in San Jose I heard several experts mention that as much as 40% of all web searches that have to do with commerce (i.e. person does a search for widget with the intent of buying widget) have an intent to transact locally if at all possible. Obviously for things like services, that number is more like 100%. Oil changes and brake jobs are not going to get killed off by e-commerce any time soon!

The secret is based on the fact that pretty much the only people that use things like a phone book to find a business are typically sitting in a cave and/or not all that interested in internal combustion engines anyhow (much to the chagrin of your pushy Yellow Pages sales rep of course).

What do people use instead? Why the interwebs of course! They open up their browser and type in things like “motorcycle oil change Las Vegas”, or “atv tires”, or just about any combination of powersports related keywords and a location. Even if they don’t type in an explicit location, most of the major search engines use a technology called IP address geolocation to figure out where they are to add it to what you’re looking for to offer up more relevant search results.

So when someone in your locale types “motorcycle oil change ZIPCODE” into Google (or Yahoo!, or Microsoft’s Bing) does your shop show up in the Local business results for motorcycle oil change near Your Town? Does your competition? How much more business would you be getting if you did?

How do you get in those results? Well, it’s a combination of having a website that is properly optimized for the kind of content you’re hoping to attract people for (for organic search engine results) as well as making sure that you have a business profile created on all of the major search engines out there (and any and all local resource sites that cover your neck of the woods).

If that sounds like a lot of work, you’re right, it can be. And there are tons of sites, firms and consultants that can help you out. Just Google terms like “local search engine marketing” to see how many. Sure, you can hire an internet advertising firm to help you out, but I’ll do you one better. Instead of paying some marketing firm to manage and place your ads and to do the required SEO activity, hire someone internally to not only manage all of these locally focused activities, but to also become your local community relationship manager.

I go into this idea of a Community Relationship Manager from an events standpoint in some detail on my site (http://tinyurl.com/perpetual-events), but it really becomes valuable when you have this same local expert manage all of your local-centric SEO/SEM activity as well. And unlike general SEO/SEM activity that really is a hard-to-master specialty when you are trying to rank for highly competitive keywords across the entire internet, local SEO/SEM is much easier to get your arms around internally (especially if you are not in a technologically savvy/astute area of the country and your competition has not caught on to the potential yet).

I can almost guarantee that the price you pay for the right person to manage your local presence will provide an ROI at least 3X what you would get if you spent the same money you are going to spend on salary on traditional advertising (YP, radio, TV, print, etc.). AND you have the additional benefit of being able to closely track how well the work/money spent on this person is converting to new sales. Try that with a TV ad or an increasingly expensive newspaper buy.

You of course need to hire the “right” someone to make this work out to its full potential. If you need help figuring out who the right someone should be, drop me an email and I’ll help you out with the job description as well as where to look.

There’s almost no limit to what your community relationship manager/local internet marketing person can be doing. Promote your business events using tools like Zvents (www.zvents.com) or MeetUp (www.meetup.com). Zvents is way cool because when you enter in a new event on their site in your profile, Zvents sends that event out to all the partners that are buying their event feeds that are pushed out. So just by posting your event on Zvents, local print and online (newspapers, yellowpages.com,etc.) and local search engines (i.e. MSN’s Live) will also have your company and event information thus dramatically magnifying the reach you have to get more customers into your shop (to see that reach, go here: corporate.zvents.com/company/media.html).

Finally, while there are currently very real benefits to getting your dealership’s local-centric online presence spruced up, in the future it’s going to become even more important. Pretty much all current and planned cell phones have some kind of GPS capability as well as internet access. Stand alone GPS units are going to begin adding real-time data that goes way beyond just traffic.

When a couple is out on their cross-country trip and need service immediately, they are going to whip out their Google Android-based phone (why do you think Google wants to play in the cell phone market? ADS!!!)  type in “motorcycle service” or something similar. If your shop doesn’t show up and your competition (that read my column and did something about it) does, well my friend, you just lost money.

Happy Festivus!

Here’s a brief list of the major search engines and other local information providers to help get your dealership’s local presence up to speed (a side benefit is that search engines like Google will actually look at your listings in other places and use that information to help you rank in Google’s results).

www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter?hl=en-US&gl=US
listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php
ssl.search.live.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx
dbupdate.infousa.com/dbupdate/startupdate
www.yellowpages.com/advertising/update_listing_form
advertising.superpages.com/spportal/
register.local.com/
www.truelocal.com/listabusiness.aspx
www.zoominfo.com/Registration/Register.aspx?type=6
www.infospace.com/info/kmaint/kdbadd.html
signup.yp.com/
www.yelp.com/signup

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, Motorcycle Advertising, powersports, Powersports Industry, Search Engine Optimization, selling-online, SEO

As we start to wind down this year I want to go back and cover an important topic that I touched on in a previous column some time ago as well as at my Indy sessions. Not enough is changing as fast as it needs to so I’m bringing it up again. I’m directing this column to parts, accessory, and apparel OEM’s in the hopes that it will eventually help us dealers and retailers when it comes to selling more of your products.

First and foremost if you want us (your retail partners) to sell for you, stop fighting against us! I can’t get over how hard it is to get the idea through to so many of you that we, the dealers and retailers, are on the same side. Our goal is typically to sell as many of your vehicles, vehicle related widgets, or vehicle riding apparel as possible to our willing and eager customers. We’re investing an insane amount of time and treasure to get the world to beat a path to our virtual doors. So why do you do so many counter-productive things that make us not want to (or not be able to) help you?!

First, what’s up with your MSRP models? I’m not talking about setting some insane MSRP that no one in their right mind is going to end up paying anywhere close. I’m saying that it would be lovely if you would give some consideration for your retailer’s need to make money when rationally setting your MSRP’s. Especially if you’re going through distribution. Every single link in the supply chain is going to expect their cut (whether they actually do anything of value to deserve it or not).

Get rid of every single link in your distribution chain that is not legitimately adding some type of significant value. In most cases that’s going to mean that you should stop using a distributor that doesn’t do anything more than basic warehouse and transport. Are they providing e-commerce and multi-channel merchandising support? Are they providing both forward as well as reverse logistics and handling customer service issues? Are they providing comprehensive aggregated demand forecasts that are farther out than your lead-times? Are they providing market and customer research data? Or better yet, are they selling their own lines that compete with yours? If you’re not shaking or nodding your head in the appropriate directions in response to those questions, you need to re-tool your distribution strategy.

So while based on your costs and your required profit margin an MSRP of $99.95 might look quite nice, by the time it gets to my website it’s just not going to be worth carrying that snazzy new doohicky if my gross margin is only 13%.

I mean sure, we can price it for more than MSRP to make a margin that justifies us carrying your product and providing the necessary level of customer service and support, but do you really think that’s a good idea? Especially if the customer can just go to your site and buy it for less? Which leads me to my next major issue…

Why are you selling direct? Seriously. Fish or cut bait. You’re either a direct sales model or you’re a channel sales model. Pick one! First you set an MSRP that’s unrealistically low, and then you go and sell on your own site at a price that only you can realistically afford to live on! I’ve got no rational reason to be selling your stuff on my site in those circumstances. It’s not worth the headache for a 3% net to compete with you! Why are you making me compete with you?! You’re supposed to be my supplier, my partner, my friend! Why are you stealing my customers?!

I’ve run into insane cases like where my site ranked much higher on a Google search for a popular, expensive, highly sought-after line of niche products than the OEM’s own site did! I could have sold the crap out of their products for them. So could the other 5 or 6 retailers that were also in the top 10. But instead the business geniuses at this company decided that they prefer to keep their MSRP at a level that could only realistically support selling off their own site. I tried to work with them. I laid out the business case. They even agreed that if they did things the way I was proposing they would probably sell more if they more fully supported their retail partners (especially the ones with vibrant e-commerce businesses). But they had their model and they weren’t going to change it. Whatever…

Now they get to spend all that extra money handling things like direct to consumer marketing and advertising, retail issues like customer service, shipping, returns, etc. etc. Instead of supporting and leveraging their retail sales channel (in this case e-commerce) they get to spend their money doing all the things that the retail partners they should have been working with are already doing! It’s insane!

I’m not saying that their aren’t brilliant business reasons why a direct to consumer model in this era of e-commerce, 3rd party logistics providers, and world-wide overnight shipping can work very very well. In fact I’ve got some fairly radical ideas that that very business model may be the predominant model for the future of our industry. I’m just saying that from what I’ve seen, most of you guys that are selling direct and selling through the channel have not really thought it all the way through.

I might not necessarily care if it was only yourself it was hurting, but I want to sell your stuff because my customers want it! Help me help you make more money for all of us!

Visit my site (www.radicalpowersports.com) where you’re going to see more written about these and other topics that have to do with radically overhauling how the motorcycle and powersports industry’s business models currently operate. How would you like your sacred cow burger cooked?

Tags:bad-business-practices, Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, rant, selling-online

Well I’m pretty stoked… I just did a quick check of Google’s results for the search motorcycle dealer e-commerce and lo and behold I’ve got two sites in the top 6 results of the SERP! The higher one is the site that I run day-to-day operations for, A&S BMW Motorcycles, and the second one is of course this site.

Now obviously Google is a fickle lover and a day, a week, or a month from now the same search could result in drastically different results. But for now I’m pretty happy that I’m at the top of the industry that I specialize in.

And now, for posterity’s sake, here’s a screen-grab of the SERP in question:

I’m so easy to make happy! 

Tags:E-Commerce, google, motorcycle, powersports, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SERP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, forums, internet, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, reviews, selling-online, social marketing, social media, social-networking, user-generated-content

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, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, forums, internet, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, selling-online, social-networking