Archive for the 'social-networking' tag

…And he just checked in to your shop on Facebook Places. Or on Gowalla… Or FourSquare… Or Loopt… Or Yelp… Or any number of “location based social networking” clones that are popping up all over the interwebs.

What are these sites/services? How do they work? Who uses them? Why should you care? This month I’m going to make an attempt to give you a primer on the subject that makes at least a rough pass on those questions.

Basically, the core of the idea is that now that people have gotten used to the idea of social networking by using sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and a lot of those people are using “smart phones” that have fast(ish) connection to the internet and have some method of determining where you are physically located (GPS, cell-tower triangulation, etc.) it was natural that someone would come along and make the big connection: Combine the social networking experience with location-aware features while providing opportunity for the business location to participate. Except for the creepy stalker / exhibitionist aspect of the whole thing, it’s pretty brilliant…

Here’s how most of these types of services work. You sign up for an account with a site like FourSquare (www.foursquare.com). When you go someplace (a restaurant, a concert, a club) you use the application on your iPhone (or whatever device you have that is supported) to “check in.” You’re basically broadcasting to your social network (or at least the part of your social network that is using the same service you are) a message that says “Hey I’m HERE!” (and when I think about it cynically, you’re also saying to any potential robbers, “My apartment is empty, go for it!”). From there, depending on the service/site, a lot of other things can happen. If you have “friends” that are on the same location-aware social network, and they have also checked in, you can basically hook up, you can earn loyalty points (which I’ll go into later) from the business, etc.

So far, the big dog in this space has been FourSquare. They were the first big player that developed a large user base, got a lot of press, and captured the hearts of the VC’s. However, now that the concept is starting to prove itself, the really big dogs in the main-stream social networking space like Facebook (with Facebook Places) are starting to roll “check-in” functionality into their service offerings. It seems to me that now that Facebook is playing in this pool, where most people already have their social graph, sites like FourSquare are going to have a lot less room to move around. That is assuming that Facebook doesn’t eventually blow itself up due to privacy concerns.

Most of these location-based social sites like FourSquare have methods to provide incentives to people that check into a location a lot. The idea works like this: Business A has an account with the location-based social service and “claims” their business. Business A provides incentives (special services, discounts, free stuff, etc.) to people that meet certain levels of participation. For example, with FourSquare a user can earn points the more they check into the same location. Earning more points leads to various “badges” that tell the world “I’m a regular.” With FourSquare folks aspire to be a location’s “mayor.” Typically a business owner will provide more perks the higher up the ladder a user goes.

By themselves these location-based social services can be thought of like a game. But where they should be interesting to you is as a means to advertise your business, participate in the various ecosystems that will develop around these growing social networks, reward loyal customers, and so on.

Sites like FourSquare, Gowalla (gowalla.com), etc. are hot right now as companies look for more effective ways to use social networking tools and sites to market their businesses and make money. At the most recent Search Engine Strategies conference I just attended in San Francisco, it was very clear that businesses are becoming more and more disenchanted with the typical paid search advertising (if you purchase Google Ad Words, you know that our industry has managed to jack up relevant keyword prices to levels that are just goofy…). Display ads and other content network ads are proving to be very costly and difficult to measure except for companies that can afford complicated advertising attribution tools and services. Advertising on social sites like Facebook is reportedly not very effective for a lot of companies. Companies see the advertising and marketing opportunities that these new social networking sites offer because they mostly hinge around actually having live customers physically in their store. These sites/services may finally be the holy grail union between local, web, and social people have been waiting for. Or they may be just another flash in the pan web sensation that caters to narcissistic exhibitionists… Who knows? Some folks thought TV was a fad.

You should already be able to envision ways that you can leverage the functionality these sites provide for your dealership. Especially if your shop has, or could be made to have, a reason for people to hang out. You could also partner with establishments in your area that are hot hang-outs for riders. Here’s something to get the ball rolling around in your head: If you live close to a track, partner with the operators by offering free oil changes or something like that to the trackday-rat “mayor” of that facility. It’s a safe bet that a lot of tracks, especially ones that sit empty quite often, don’t have owners or operators that are even bothering to “claim” their business in sites like FourSquare, Yelp, etc.. Offer to step in and do it for them! I’m sure once you start using these things, more brilliant ideas will come to you.

In closing, I recommend that you keep a close eye on this area of the social web. It’s attracting a lot of attention, companies playing in this space are raising a lot of money from VC’s, and it’s already starting to develop some technical extensions and meta-level technologies that hope to provide additional value to the participants. An example of this is TopGuest (www.topguest.com) that links “check in’s” with a user’s loyalty programs (frequent flyer program for example) allowing them to earn points.

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, marketing, powersports, Powersports Industry, selling-online, social marketing, social media, social-networking, web2.0

We need to talk. All of us. Everyone in this industry needs to be talking to each other a lot more than we currently do. Sure there’s the occasional show where we all get together like DealerExpo and there’s the inevitable gripe-session that is sure to break out whenever a few dealer principals get together at an OEM show or 20 group meeting. What I’m talking about here is more of an ongoing, broad-based, industry wide series of conversations about the important issues that affect us every day.

Once again, the internet can step in to help. If there’s one thing that the internet is great at it’s providing a common, albeit virtual, meeting space where like minds can get together and discuss whatever hot issues are top of mind.

I’m sure a lot of you are part of a 20 group and recognize that quite often these gatherings are great places to share and discover new ideas that have potential to improve your business or even help grow our industry as a whole. Some of you may even have an email list where you keep those discussions going. I’d like to propose that as an industry we expand that idea and start taking advantage of some of the discussion forums that already exist.

I’m going to focus on two specific places where I recommend we all start gathering and having some lively discussions.

The first is LinkedIn. If you’re not on LinkedIn already, you really need to be. Linkedin is pretty much the best professional social networking site out there right now. In addition to it’s potential to build a network, LinkedIn has a feature called Groups. Groups are like mini-forums built right into the LinkedIn framework. A big part of these groups are the discussions and that’s what I’m really focusing on here.

There are already some great groups on LinkedIn aimed at our industry. In fact, it was the discussion from a few months ago about vendors competing with their own customers (prompted by Arlo’s blog posts at DealerNews) that really motivated me to write last month’s column. But what’s really lacking is a lot more members and a lot more active discussions of issues that really affect everyone: MAP policies, national and state legislation, general business issues, and just general brainstorming.

Here are a few of my suggestions about groups to join. These were picked because they focus on our industry and as of this writing they have the more members than some of the other groups. I don’t have any stake beyond wanting to push toward a critical mass of users to make the groups more useful.

The first is Motorcycle Industry Professionals. This group is a pretty high-level group that covers more than just dealers. It already has over 1,000 members and it has hosted a few pretty good discussions.

Next up is the Motorcycle OEM Network. This is a good group to be in if the goal is to engage in some constructive conversations between the OEM’s and their dealers.

Wrapping up LinkedIn we have the most obvious, the Motorcycle Dealers Group. Unfortunately this group only has about 100 members currently and for the sake of this month’s column, it’s the one I want to see really bloom.

Finally, we have Dealernews’ own Shop Talk. You really should be a member of this social network because you’ll also be kept informed of blog posts from the Dealernews staff as well as other important information from Dealernews.

So now that you’ve signed up, start participating! Ask questions… What impact are e-bikes going to have on our industry? What kinds of features should the ultimate DMS system have? What kinds of parking lot events are folks running that break the mold of the tired-out “open house”? If you see a question or discussion that you can provide valuable insight, jump in!

So now we’re left with the big questions of “why?” Why do I want to poke, prod, and encourage all of you to participate in these discussion forums? The answer is because I want to make sure that our industry sticks around as long as possible. I want the fundamental structure of small and medium sized dealerships to be able to compete with the growing threat of mega-online shopping sites, direct to consumer sales from PG&A manufactures and vehicle OEM’s. I’m positive that if we can start raising and answering more and more questions and addressing more and more issues that are pressing on our businesses as a collective business unit, the stronger we can be.

In the absence of a strong, nationwide, dealership-focused trade organization that has a vibrant and active membership, maybe we can build it ourselves using the amazing potential of existing social networking sites like LinkedIn and Dealernews’ ShopTalk. Fingers crossed!

Tags:Column, dealerships, marketing, recommendations, social marketing, social media, social-networking, web2.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to 2010! I want to kick off this year with a column about selling online, but selling someplace else other than your own website. This is something that you can engage in even if you’re not directly engaged in full-blown e-commerce on your dealership’s primary website.

What I’m talking about is taking advantage of things like e-commerce applications on social networking sites like Facebook and other “widgets” that you can embed in blogs or forums.

The first example I’ll point out is a company called Payvment [http://www.payvment.com/] that has a nifty little storefront application for Facebook.

In order for this to work you’ll need to have a Facebook fan page set up for your dealership. You simply install the application on your page, set up the look at feel of the storefront using the tools that Payvement gives you, enter in some information about your shop, and then start loading products. (Obviously there’s more detailed steps involved and Payvment’s site provides all the details).

I’d recommend experimenting at first and a load a small selection (around 10) of products that are impulse buy, gift, general interest type of products. You’ll want to keep in mind that Facebook is not really a shopping destination, and typically you’ll want to focus on the interaction and social networking aspect of Facebook and keep the sales pitches to a minimum. But since it is a fan page, I see it as a great way to sell things like t-shirts, hats, and other items branded with your shop’s logo, or the brands that you carry.

Considering that Payvement is totally free to use right now, there’s really no reason to not give it a try and see if there’s a sensible way for you to fit it into the overall online activities.

One dealership that has begun experimenting with Payvment is Ducati Seattle [http://tinyurl.com/ykppl42]. What’s interesting about the fact that they have this e-commerce application running on Facebook is that they don’t even have any e-commerce on their primary dealership website!

Ducati Seattle’s Cindy Wallace is in charge of the Facebook storefront as well as their eBay store where they focus on selling crash damage take-offs, excess & obsolete, etc. Cindy told me that based on a combination of factors (strong local community support & involvement in the shop, etc.) Ducati Seattle has made the decision to not have a full-blown e-commerce operation. “People prefer to come into the shop to buy things where they can actually see them and to see other people there as well.”

But that doesn’t mean that they are not active online in other ways. Based on leadership by Ducati Seattle’s owner David Roosevelt they have made a decision to be very involved in social media like Facebook. Considering that they have over 1,200 fans on their Facebook page it makes sense that they are giving the Payvement application a test ride.

Another Facebook application for selling products from within your Facebook page is Nimbit MyStore for Facebook [http://tinyurl.com/yzvdzxh]. Nimbit seems to be going more for the rock band trying to sell merchandise angle (so they offer features like the ability to sell tickets or downloadable music), but I don’t see why you couldn’t use it to sell merchandise for your shop. Nimbit has several offerings that range from free to about twenty bucks a month.

Moving away from Facebook, I want to point out that there’s a growing number of widgets that allow you to place shopping experiences on more content-centered (as opposed to shopping-centered) websites and pages. A widget is a small bit of code that you embed in a webpage that provides a little area or box where something shows up that gives people information (weather, race results, etc.) or in our case a product display with the ability to buy it right there.

These widgets allow what I call contextual commerce. Where you can offer products that go along with the content the visitor is reading about. Writing a post in your blog about how to bleed the brakes? Why not have a widget in the side bar selling brake fluid, brake bleeders, pads, etc?

There’s quite a few people playing in this widget area out there. Here’s a few leads to get you started: BlinkCart [http://www.blinkcart.com/], Shopit [http://www.shopit.com/], CartFly [http://www.cartfly.com/], and Amazon [https://widgets.amazon.com/] even has widgets that let you sell products they offer (or that you have loaded as an Amazon merchant) on your site.

Check out Widgetbox (a clearinghouse of all things widget) as well and check out the ecommerce tag http://www.widgetbox.com/tag/ecommerce. Finally, of course, you can always Google “e-commerce widgets” to track down more of the latest and greatest as developers keep the wheels of progress humming along.

Having a storefront on Facebook or an e-commmerce widget on your blog is most likely not going to be a silver bullet in terms of generating a huge amount of extra revenue. A lot of this has to do with the fact that most people out there are not in the shopping mood when they are on a social site like Facebook. However, having a good selection of impulse purchase products and gifty items makes a lot of sense. It gives you a chance to have a few more hooks in the water in terms of selling things and it keeps you abreast of what’s going on in the world of e-commerce technology and off-site merchandising.

If you give this a try, please let me know how it works for you!

Tags:Column, contextual commerce, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, marketing, Merchandising, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, selling-online, social marketing, social media, social-networking

While I know that most of you see me as the ultimate guru of all things web (right?), the truth is, there’s a wealth of places out there other than me where you can (and really should) find out a lot more about things like e-commerce, internet advertising, and integrating social media into your overall internet marketing strategy and so on.

The truth is, this area of technology (especially social media) is forming and re-forming so fast that if you blink you’re likely to miss a development or a breakthrough that becomes the next “big thing.” You don’t want to be the one that misses out on the next hot trend do you?

If you answered “No!” then read on. If you answered “Yes!” then I’m not sure we have anything else to talk about frankly.

So, without further ado, this month I’m going to save you some time in filtering out the wheat from the chaff (ooohhh… an 18th century reference in a 21st century column!) and point out some of the resources that I find pretty valuable in keeping up with what’s hot, happening, and now.

E-Commerce

First and foremost is a resources that I’ve mentioned in the past when it comes to e-commerce, and that’s Internet Retailer (www.internetretailer.com). Internet Retailer has a print magazine that you can get for free, as well as several really well done e-mail newsletters that you can subscribe to. Internet Retailer is also responsible for the Top 500 Guide, which every year ranks the top largest e-commerce players in terms of revenue and provides a wealth of information such as traffic figures, sales performance data (conversion rates, average order value, etc.) that you can use to benchmark your own performance.

Next up in the e-commerce space is Shop.org (guess what the address of their website is). Shop.org is the e-commerce focus for the larger National Retail Federation (www.nrf.com). Shop.org puts out a great series of e-mail newsletters that do an excellent job of keeping the reader up on what’s going on in the e-commerce space. I find the coverage they provide to have a slightly different twist than Internet Retailer and between the two you can get a great picture of what’s working, what’s coming down the road, what you need to be doing to get ahead and once you’re there, to stay there.

Internet Marketing

As all internet marketing pretty much begins by looking through the lens of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, etc. the best place to get your daily fix of search engine related wisdom is probably Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com). They have a series of e-mail updates, as well as a worthwhile RSS feed and Twitter profile (@sewatch) that you should be reading. They cover pretty much all the aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) that you will ever need to know (or at least could ever remember or implement).

The next excellent resource for internet (and even general) marketing is Marketing Sherpa (www.marketingsherpa.com). Marketing Sherpa has developed the reputation as the source for marketing best practices. These are real-world best practices, not high-level theory like you’d get from some place like the American Marketing Association. While they do offer some free reports and resources (their write-ups are free for the first week), to get the most out of what Marketing Sherpa has to offer you will need to pay for the annual subscription. You can sign up for a free trial subscription to check it out. I recommend that you do.

Social Media, etc.

Finally we have the increasingly important and dynamically changing world of social media and all of the hybrid offshoots of sites like Facebook and Twitter.

First up is a site called Mashable (www.mashable.com) who bills itself as The Social Media Guide. They do an excellent job of covering how to use the exisiting social sites both from the perspective of a user, as well as from the perspective of a business looking to use social media for marketing and promotional purposes. In addition they keep on top of the bubbling, churning, and chaotic world of emerging social media players as well as clever and useful ways to leverage the social media ecosystem of feeds, API, applications, and widgets.

Finally I’m offering up a great site, TechCrunch (www.techcrunch.com), that will keep you abreast of both the social media scene as well as the business world of the internet from a technical perspective. TechCrunch is actually billed as a blog, but it’s a blog (and extended media empire known as the Crunch Network) that headed by probably the best “new business” gadfly around, Michael Arrington. Michael and his team are plugged into who’s doing what, what it’s good for, who’s getting funded and who’s the newest member of the internet industry deadpool. It’s a great resource that you don’t want to miss.

So there you have it. A great list of summer reading when you need to know what’s going on in the world of the web. I’ve only scratched the surface by offering up the ones that I read on a regular basis. If you have some great resources you want to share, let me know!

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

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

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

I just read a blurb about a company called Cartfly in the E-Commerce Times. After checking it out it seems that a concept that failed the first time around may have another chance at life.
It’s fascinating that the old adage that everything old is new again, even if in the internet age that progression happens more quickly, is as alive as ever!

It seems to me that what Cartfly is doing is in many ways very similar to the concept that was attempted by a company that I worked at as a sales engineer/evangelist during the dot-com boom/bust period. That company was called CrossCommerce [RIP] and their idea was to take e-commerce out of the walls of a typical “store” and instead embed buying opportunities within content-rich sites.

The concept was called “contextual commerce.” There were all kinds of studies that showed that the conversion rates were much higher for products that were displayed inline with interesting content. For example, if you ran a site about snowboarding and had a story about a recent trip, you could display small product display “shelves” in the story that would allow people to buy the products you were talking about right then and there.

It was a compelling idea, especially at the time, because for the most part there was nowhere near the opportunity to monetize a content rich site other than banner ads. It was before Google’s AdSense had established the strangle-hold on the ad world. This was back in the day of roll-your-own banner advertising, or relying on folks like DoubleClick.

One of the hugely significant things about CrossCommerce that was different was that a large portion of CrossCommerce’s operations was taken up with developing the business relationships with the OEM’s and distributors of literally millions of products. From the old stand-bys like CD and Videos to golf and sporting equipment.

It was literally a one stop shop for content producers. Once you had an account with CrossCommerce (which was free as CrossCommerce made money off a vig/transaction charge) you would go to your CrossCommerce site, choose the products you wanted to sell from the massive catalog, create the little shelf, copy the javascript code that was generated and put that code in your content where you wanted to the products to appear.

In my opinion, it was bloody brilliant (which is why I worked there and stayed around too long even after the writing was on the wall, the rats were leaving the ship, etc. etc.)! It was one of the few ideas to come out during the dot-bomb time that was actually a really, really sound idea. And it worked! CrossCommerce was even developing methods that would scan the page that held the shelf and based on that content analysis automatically generate appropriate products. AdSense, but with products instead of ads. And again it actually worked!

Now why in the world would such a brilliant idea, that was backed up with an actual working execution, built on an insanely robust and expensive technology platform, with strong implementation with product suppliers (which even handled the drop-shipping and logistics!), and financed to the tune of like $60MM+ fail?

Well, for one thing this all happened around 2000. The dot-com bubble was bursting so there was a general downward momentum. What was amazing to witness first-hand as I was on the front lines in sales was the number of these content sites that had zero plans on how to make money and as far as I could tell didn’t care if they ever made money! It was pure insanity and obviously most of them died unquiet deaths.

Next, this was before blogs and other sources of easily-generated content. It was still the days of build your own websites or large, expensive content management solutions. So there were nowhere near the number of sites looking to make money with a completly turn-key, self administered e-commerce solution. And it also did not have the amazing phenominom of the social-networking tidal wave going for it either.

Then the complete and total mis-management of just about every possible opportunity that came up didn’t help either. Ego and hubris don’t work well during crisis times. I won’t go into that in any more detail because it was the same story pretty much as every other dot-bomb during that period of time that was run by people with more money that sense. That and people that were promoted from being receptionists in a prior job to a VP of such-and-such. that never helps either.

So anyway, I hope that Cartfly can make a go of it. I believed then, and I still do, that the idea of embedding buying opportunities within content makes an amazing amount of sense. And now that you have the opportunity to leverage the relationships created via all the social-networking platforms, I can see why Cartfly is feeling like they’re onto something big!

Tags:cartfly, contextual commerce, social-networking