Archive for the 'youtube' tag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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quit aardvark

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quit aardvark

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

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

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

Instead of the old way of doing things (Web1.0) where a site is created, and a staff of writers or other content producers populate the site with stuff (typically static content), and then people come to read the stuff, now (Web2.0) someone creates a site that has the tools and technical infrastructure for the people visiting the site to actually create content on their own, share the content, and comment on other people’s content.

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

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

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

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

While a lot of people have a hard time saying exactly what Web2.0 is (even if they are able to create an entire conference about it), they all pretty much universally recognize that it’s the social aspect that makes up the foundation.

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

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

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