Archive for the 'web2.0' tag

Selling Online #25 : Social Networking : Part 4

March 10th, 2008 — DealerNews, E-Commerce

First off, I want to thank everyone that showed up to my Dealernews Live! sessions at Indy. Both sessions were packed and there were a lot of good questions and some lively discussion. In fact, one of the discussions prompted to me to slightly alter how I’m going to present this next piece in my Social Networking. I’m going to talk a little about blogging and how having a company can be a good thing. I want to reiterate the context to emphasize why all of this social networking stuff matters.

The question was (essentially), “with all of the other sites out there, why would anyone want to buy from us?” Well, there’s hundreds of potential reasons from obvious things like price, selection, and so on, but a big piece really is who you are. What kind of personality does your site (and by extension your dealership) project?

Social networking and related marketing activities are your chance to create a face and a personality for your dealership (design is another huge piece that I’m going to go into after the social networking series that really needs to be addressed after looking at some of your sites). It’s how you begin the relationship with potential buyers of your products.

Let’s move onto the subject of blogs and blogging. To review, the word blog is an odd contraction of web + log. They are typically like a kind of journal or diary that is published on the web. There are in fact several popular bloggers on various topics that make well into 6 figures or more just from writing a site (the money comes from advertising like Google’s AdSense).

While most likely you’re not going to make money off your per se, you can use it bring people to your site if you make the content useful, compelling or funny and they feel the need to come back often (an aside on this: most blogs have the ability to publish what’s called a site feed using something called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This allows readers to stay up on new postings without having to actually go to the site. Personally, I don’t get that. I can see sending out a message with the title and a “click here to read more” kind of link, but publishing the full post in an RSS feed seems to defeat the whole point of using a for it’s marketing value to draw people to your site).

The first thing you need to do is set up your . You can do this using any number of free blogging tools and software. By far the most popular (and in my opinion the best) is WordPress. You can let host the for you, or you can download and install it on your own server. I recommend the latter option as you will have more control. Another strong contender comes from the 8,000 pound gorilla, Google. A few years ago Google bought out a company called Blogspot and created Blogger. Blogger is only available as a hosted option. The last tool I’ll mention is TypePad. Typepad is also a hosted solution. Personally, I would almost always recommend against software-as-service solutions (for blogging, , etc.) because if the company that runs your goes under, so does your . Sometimes overnight without warning. Say bye-bye to all your hard work if that happens!

All of these blogging tools allow you to apply a theme/template to your . There are thousands of them out there, however, I strongly suggest that you create (or have someone create it for you) a custom theme so that it matches your corporate branding and integrates with your primary site. Again, we’re trying to portray a sense of personality. If your personality is the same as a few thousand other sites, then by all means use a canned template. I recommend you follow the snowflake route. Be special!

As far as integration with your main site goes, I also suggest that you create a sub-domain for your , as opposed to a separate and distinct domain name. So if your site is www.vroomvroommoto.com, then set up your so it’s address is .vroomvroommoto.com. Then you will get some SEO benefit from the primary domain name. There’s still some debate about if Google ranks a sub-domain as a totally different site, but for my money there’s no reason not to do it this way in case there is a benefit. It’s also easier to market and remember the simple convention of adding . to your base domain name.

So what are you and your employees going to about? Well, start with what you know! Post reviews of bikes and gear. Write about rides and events. Write about industry news, race results, etc. Just remember that your purpose is to not just repost news from somewhere else. You need to have your own take on the stuff. Make it interesting. Or Funny. Or controversial.

Keep in mind that there are some potential risks associated with opening up blogging to your employees. You can lose some of the central control of your brand messaging and there may be occasions when the language is a little more colorful that you may be comfortable with. Keep your knee-jerk response in check however. Especially if your market trends toward the younger, GenNext crowd and the writer is in that generation. You may have to put some faith in the writer knowing their audience and knowing where the line is. You may also want to consider having a dedicated person write your as part of their job. That will help ensure a constant stream of fresh content and provide a uniformity of voice.

It’s important that you go into this with a clear idea of what you want to get out of it. What are your goals for having a ? How exactly are you going to leverage the to increase traffic and sales? Are you really prepared to take this all on and keep it running smoothly? If you can’t really
provide good answers to these questions, then perhaps you’re better off letting the thing go for now. However, if you decide to really take it on it can be very useful.

For much more in-depth coverage of the power of a corporate in general, I recommend you check out this book: Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.

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Selling Online #24 : Social Networking : Part 3

March 1st, 2008 — DealerNews, E-Commerce

Will you be my friend?

In my last column on how to use social networking as a marketing tool for your e-commerce efforts I laid out the landscape of social sites and hopefully gave you a few ideas about how you could use the various types to help in your marketing efforts. This month, I’m going to focus on the pure social networking sites and how they could be used to help create interest (thus traffic, thus hopefully sales) on your site.

These pure social networking sites don’t focus on any particular type of content. That is, they are not just photo, video, or blogging sites, although they will typically have the ability to create or share all of those media types (I’ll address some of the more specialized photo, video, and blogging sites next month). The two big-hitters in this space (at least in US or North American markets) are MySpace and FaceBook.

’s demographic skews very young and it’s primary (although not exclusive) draw is music. gives you a rudimentary ability to customize your “profile” page with graphics, videos, a sort of , a list of your friends, and a few other things. Because of the fairly limited, non-user friendly nature of the customization ability on , and because most people on are not web designers, are not artists, and apparently lack anything even close to taste, most of is ungodly ugly (there are new 3rd party tools like www.lovemyflash.com percolating through the web that are helping this). The main point of is to convince as many total strangers as you can to be your “Friend.” The more friends you have, the more “cred.” I’m bringing up because it’s the thousand pound gorilla, and I’m pretty sure it’s the one most of you have heard of. And while I’m sure it’s possible to use as a tool in the context of social network marketing, unless you really spend a lot of time (or money as it’s possible to be a sort of elite member of , for a fee, and have a really nice looking profile and get some other advantages) I find to basically be worthless in attracting good leads, or driving quality traffic (most search engines totally discount links to your site from a site like because of all the SEO spam that goes on). That’s not to say that it can’t be done of course as plenty of people have, and I’m sure someone reading this is going to prove me wrong.

However, my recommendation is that you set up a profile, populate it with some relevant content, get a few hundred friends, and use it every once and a while, but it would not be where I’d spend most of my time. Although even with all of those caveats, if your dealership really focuses on youth culture aspects of the industry (stunting, freestyle MX, etc.) can be a great fit, especially for things like videos and getting the word out for any stunt shows or other exhibitions that you may be putting on.

If is sort of the sinkhole on the web, what’s better? Well, it looks like it’s shaking out that may be the new King Of The Web. began as primarily a social network for college students. In fact, in the beginning you had to attend one of the official schools (initially Harvard) that had a site. Since September of 2006 however, anyone can join. still seems to skew more toward college age users, although recent reports seem to indicate that one of the larger areas of growth are actually women in their 30’s. One area worth taking advantage of on are the Groups. While perhaps not as plentiful or as populated as other groups sites like GoogleGroups or Yahoo!Groups/Yahoo!360, they are within the ecosystem so you get a little more bang for your buck.

Conventional wisdom seems to indicate that seems to be pursuing a strategy of becoming something of an operating system for the Internet. And while conventional wisdom may think that, most real people don’t really know exactly what that means in terms of putting it to practice. It has something to do with the ability to create and deploy widgets/applications that use the technical underpinnings of the Platform (known amongst the pocket protected as an API or application programming interface). What this really all comes down to is that not only does have a lot of attention pointed at it, it’s also developing a strong underpinning in terms of technology that will allow it to evolve and grow. So much so that Microsoft (perhaps sensing a challenge to their desktop operating system that an Internet operating system could pose) invested $240MM recently. So has a pretty decent quality of user, has a lot of good social networking functions and feature out of the box, it has technology that can be leveraged to create custom applications or features, and it appears that it’s going to be around for a while. If I was going to make an all-in bet on one site to really focus on, it would be .

So what’s the next up-and coming site? Well, I don’t know for sure (if I did, I’m sure I would be making an insane amount of money working for a venture capitalist rather than running a website for a dealer), but there seems to be a lot of buzz around a site called BeBo. Another site that just launched to the public is called Pownce that is all about sharing stuff like video, photos, invites to events, and so on. One thing you can be sure of, because most of the buzz and the money out there is stampeding in its typical herd fashion to social networking sites there’s going to be a lot of new sites coming out in the future. And because of the nature of the way the web works, each new social networking site is going to rip off, or at least riff on, what’s good or what works on the sites that are out there, and ditch the stuff that doesn’t work. That’s one of the things that makes the so cool, and so frustrating. The rate of change is insane and next to impossible to keep on top of, but it typically seems to change for the better.

Another site that is really taking off (but I have a hard time figuring out how to leverage it from an perspective) is LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com). LinkedIn is sort of one of those six degrees of separation ideas with a business and employment networking focus. It’s a stunning way to get in touch with people you used to know, and get to know new people that you need to know by way of people that you know in common. It’s very cool on a personal level. I’m just not sure how valuable it is as a social networking site with regards to marketing.

A good place to go to see a pretty large picture of what’s out there in the social networking space is this Wikipedia page on social networking.

To really leverage these and pretty much all social networking sites you need to participate. A lot. I’ve read enough case studies, and heard enough presentations at and conferences to know that social networking absolutely can pay dividends when it’s used right, and most of what makes it right, is constant, dedicated participation. I can easily make the case that just the social networking aspect of marketing (social sites, forums, blogs, etc.) require at least one dedicated person. You need to have someone that does nothing but come up with good ideas, and has the time to devote to executing them. It’s very time consuming, but it can pay off.

My profile pages (I seriously need some more friends…):

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Selling Online #24 : Social Networking : Part 2

February 1st, 2008 — DealerNews, E-Commerce

Last month I introduced the idea of social networking on the and gave a brief overview of what social networking is all about and how it can play a role in the promotion of your operation. This month I’m going to give a 40,000 foot overview of the different types of social sites out there.

General, high-level social sites: The best examples currently are MySpace and FaceBook - These act as a sort of catch all “home” for people on the web. People can create “profiles” there and host content with basic blogging and content management tools, as well as upload other types of multimedia content (pictures, graphics, video). The key to these sites from a marketing standpoint is to create a compelling persona for your dealership, and then participate and contribute constantly to keep the activity level up.

While these high-level sites like and are currently getting most of the attention when it comes to social networking, there’s many other types and sub-types of social sites out there that you can participate in.

Forums - Forums are the oldest form of social networking that I can think of. They are essentially the modern incarnation of the old fashioned BBS (bulletin board system) from the pre- dark ages. Successful forums primarily exist around a singular aspect of life that has a large enough population that cares about it so you get enough participation, but that is narrowly focused to actually be about something. A perfect example of an amazing forum would be one that you are most likely aware of, advrider.com. (An interesting aside that demonstrates the value of the mixing of various social networking sites or technologies is how tightly integrated the social photo site SmugMug is integrated into Advrider.com).

Forums are a great place to participate at the dealer level because most of the stuff posted on them is typically ill-informed, third-hand information that may or may not be intentionally misleading just to mess with people. That’s just the nature of the a lot of times. However, if you post clearly as a trusted and knowledgeable source of information, you will be loved. A side advantage is that typically you can have a link to your site in your signature on each of your posts so it acts as a bit of search engine fodder. Just remember to only post valuable information, and try to avoid arguments or flame-wars as those are pretty much no-win situations that will make you look bad.

Groups - Groups are essentially the modern incarnation of UseNet Newsgroups (not that Newsgroups have totally disappeared). They are typically hosted on a larger site like Yahoo!Groups or GoogleGroups. They are sort of like the gated community version of a forum. Because of their somewhat closed nature they are almost not in the social network ecosystem, however, they are worth mentioning especially if there are groups that you can participate in

Blogs - Blogs (short for web log) are basically online diarys or newsletters. There are stand-alone sites where you can set up a for your shop as well such as Google’s Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress, or you can install and run your own on your own server, or you can take advantage of the -like features of the high-level social sites like The Wall on . If your resources are limited, I’d suggest creating a profile on a high-level social site like and use The Wall instead of spreading yourself too thin across multiple sites.

Video sharing - Two good examples are YouTube and MetaCafe. These types of sites exist as both a destination where you can watch, upload, and comment as well as a platform that you can use to distribute your video. While a stand-alone site like may be pretty cool, it’s the ability to embed your video on another site that makes them truly the killer application. There’s a lot of potential marketing benefit if you can manage to create what’s known as a viral video. That’s a video that’s so cool, funny, or otherwise catchy that hundreds of people watch it and send it to their friends. More on that in a later .

Photo sharing - The biggest player in this space is Flickr and a site that’s a distant second but that I personally like a lot more is SmugMug. These sites work pretty much the same way that the video sharing sites except obviously focus on images. One thing worth pointing out is how has so many ways to leverage the photos you put up there on other sites and in other applications. An example is how you can create a photo album on and then embed a little slideshow plugin on your site that shows those images just like you can do with videos from video sites like .

Social Bookmarking sites - Sites like StumbleUpon and del.icio.us (del.icio.us yes, that’s a real URL) are sites where people can publicly create, share, and tag (provide a series of keywords that describe the bookmark to make them easier to find) sites. The goal is to have a site that is valuable enough, or at least attention-worth enough to get a lot of people to create and share the bookmark to your site.

Socially-driven content aggregation - The current big-daddy is Digg. They are sort of like the social bookmarking sites on steroids. These sites are basically news or what’s cool type sites that are not driven by an editorial team, but are instead driven by users submitting a “story” with a link to a site, and then all the other users of the site will vote on the submission. Submissions that for one reason or another are deemed “interesting” will get more votes and move up in the rankings. The goal is to get on the front page of these sites. If you are fortunate enough to get on the front page of these sites, be prepared to watch your web server break into flames from what is known as the “digg-effect” where the sudden barrage (upwards of a 3000% increase in a lot of cases) of traffic brings your poor dealership’s website to its knees. That’s what’s known as a good problem.
There are literally hundreds of other categories, mash-ups, and sites out there in the social networking space. What I’ve done is to just scratch the surface and try to expose you to the possibilities and the major players. Wikipedia has a pretty complete list of social networking sites if you want to dive in a little more.

Next month I’m going to go into more detail on the the pure social networking sites like and and give some thoughts on why your should care about them (or not), how you may be able to use them, and what else might be coming around the bend in the ’s tubes in the near future.

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quit aardvark

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quit aardvark

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Selling Online #23 : Happy New Year! 2008 Is The Year of Social Networking

January 1st, 2008 — DealerNews, E-Commerce

Welcome to the first for 2008. I hope those of you out there with on your sites enjoyed a successful holiday selling season. I’m going to kick off this year by not talking so much about directly (e.g. the nuts and bolts of building your site), but rather talking about how to use the environment exists within (the ) to get the most out of your efforts.The first topic I’ll dive into is one of the hottest areas of the , Social Networking. Out of everything I’ve written about over the past two years, this topic, and the series of columns that will cover it, are the ones I’m the most excited about presenting to you. Why? Because in terms of the potential bang-for-your buck when it comes to getting people to buy stuff from you, successfully and effectively jumping on the social band-wagon should be one of, if not the most important things you do this year. The keys being successfully and effectively, because if you don’t really understand the lay of the land you can’t really envision your strategy and you’ll end up spinning your wheels, wasting a lot of time and money, and not getting any return on your efforts.

While you’d need to be living under a really large rock to not have heard the names , , or you may need an explanation of what social networking actually is (especially if you don’t have, or socialize with, kids of any age). You may hear it referred to by a number of other names, and you will most likely never hear two people (even people that ostensibly know what they are talking about) give the exact same definition. This is due to two factors: 1) It’s still pretty new thus it’s still shaking out, and 2) it can mean different things to different people or within different contexts. But one central tenant of the idea is that it is driven by user generated content (written word, graphics and pictures, video, etc.).

Instead of the old way of doing things (Web1.0) where a site is created, and a staff of writers or other content producers populate the site with stuff (typically static content), and then people come to read the stuff, now () someone creates a site that has the tools and technical infrastructure for the people visiting the site to actually create content on their own, share the content, and comment on other people’s content.

So what’s the point? Why am I blathering on about goofing off on sites like and in a under the title of ? Well, from an merchant’s point of view the main reasons that you should care about being involved in social networking pretty much comes down to the following three things:

  • Drive people to your site (so they hopefully buy something)
  • The lowest level of pragmatism with regards to being in the social ecosystem is that it works great for your SEO efforts. Most of those social sites you either create or participate in out there all act as potential inbound links to your website which in turn helps your Google and other search engine rankings.
  • Give people a reason to stay on your site (so they hopefully eventually buy something even if that’s not why they actually came there)
  • Social elements like product reviews, product discussion forums, or video product merchandising all make your site more engaging and can act as sales tools
  • Extend commerce beyond your site (so they hopefully buy something from you while they are on some other website)
  • There’s only a certain percentage of potential (the key is the word potential because active customers should be able to find you if you are doing well on the SEO and advertising fronts) customers that are ever going to find your site regardless of how good you’re doing in the search engines. However, there’s typically bound to be a large number of people that would be interested in buying what you have to sell if you are hanging out online where they are hanging out. There are and related groupings on pretty much all of the major social networking sites. If you are not there too, you’re missing out on potential sales.

As I said above, to really make your efforts worthwhile you need to understand the social networking ecosystem. That starts with making sure we’re on the same track with regards to the terms and concepts I’ll be using in this and follow up columns. First, what is a social site? Social sites typically share the same three important attributes:

  1. A way for a user to create a home or profile page that represents their identity within the framework of that site [ex: profile page, or LinkedIn profile page]. There’s no reason that your dealership can’t have it’s own profile or identity. I’ll go into this more in a later on how to actually pull all of this off.
  2. A way for the user to either create content [ex: a text editor to write a ], or upload and share content that was created somewhere else [ex: photos (.com or smugmug.com), video (.com or .com)]
  3. Most importantly and universally the ability to comment on, interact with, alter, or share what’s on the site. A way to be social! While #1 and #2 may be present in greater or lesser degrees, it’s the ability for people to throw their two cents in and share the content that make these sites live.

While a lot of people have a hard time saying exactly what is (even if they are able to create an entire conference about it), they all pretty much universally recognize that it’s the social aspect that makes up the foundation.

Next month I’m going to go over what the major types of social sites are, who the major (and minor because if history has taught us anything, today’s up-and-coming player is tomorrow’s powerhouse), and give you some ideas of how you can use them in your social networking efforts.

Here’s a little head’s up for all of you going to Indy this year. As last year it seemed that most of the value people got out of my presentation was in the Q&A portions, I want to make this year’s even more interactive. You know, social! So start shooting me any topics you want to discuss or any questions that you’d like to have addressed in the sessions so I can gather up the good ones and have something remotely intelligent to say prepared.

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