Here’s the announcement I just posted on our Facebook page:

Hello everyone!

Family PowerSports is happy to announce that we are launching a brand new shopping website (shop.familypowersports.com) that will allow folks all over the world to experience what it’s like to shop with Family PowerSports.

We know that there are already quite a few places to shop on the web for motorcycle, motocross, ATV, PWC and other powersports parts, accessories, apparel, and gear. However, we think that FPS has a unique benefit to offer over those other huge, impersonal online warehouse stores. Our customers in Texas know that we’re a great place to get product information, shop, and just hang out, and we think that by offering that same level of customer service and experience to everyone on the web we can make riding more fun for everyone.

We’ve got online microfiche for you do-it-yourselfers as well as the really cool ability to tell our website what vehicle you have and it will automatically find parts and accessories that work on your ride. Very cool!

Before we announce this new site (shop.familypowersports.com) to the world we’re asking our Facebook family to help us beta test our shopping site. As an incentive we’re offering you a 20% discount that you apply when you check (code:fbbeta) out as well as free shipping (you can also arrange for in-store pick up if you live close to a FPS location).

Again, the discount code that you’ll use when you check out is fbbeta and it’s good for 20% off your entire order from our shop.familypowersports.com website.

So if you need anything for your ride, please stop on by our new site (shop.familypowersports.com) and place an order. If you see anything that you don’t like, that seems broken or could be improved, please let me know by shooting me an email at webmaster at familypowersports.com.

We’ll be running this test for about two weeks and the beta code will be good that entire time. Feel free to share the code with any of your family and friends if you think that there’s something that they can use now that riding season is getting close.

Thanks in advance for your help and we look forward to building a great resource for all of our current and future Family PowerSports fans!

First, in spite of what the news item from Power Sports business wrote, I did not leave A&S BMW & Ducati to join 50 Below. The press release that 50 Below sent out was an announcement about what I’ve already written about here on my blog.

However, I have left A&S for much bigger and better things at Family Powersports in Texas!

Family Powersports is an amazing multi-line, multi-location dealership group in West Texas. FPS is a three time winner of the prestigious  Dealernews Top 100 dealership and was recently featured on the cover of Dealernews. I met them for the first time after my Indy presentation in 2008 and shortly after that went down to do some consulting with them on how to leverage the internet to help their business.

The timing was just not right for me to jump over there full time. I was still plugging away at A&S and was looking forward to A&S taking on Ducati and getting the chance to dominate the Ducati market the same way I was able to do with BMW.

Recently things changed at A&S and at the same time the opportunity window opened up again at FPS and this time it just made sense to make the jump.

I’m exceedingly proud of what I was able to achieve during my tenure at A&S (#1 BMW Motorcycle search result in Google, #1 BMW parts/accessory retailer, Ducati business and search results are already starting to climb, etc.) , but the limited scope and resources that A&S was able to offer were just not able to compete with the opportunity to work with such an amazing outfit like Family Powersports. The opportunity to work with a large multi-line, multi-location operation that is so well run, professional, and most of all enthusiastic was just impossible to pass up.

Family Powersports has a large OEM line-up (Axis Boats, Bayliner, Can-am, Club Car UTV’s, Crownline, Glastron, Honda, Honda Power Equipment, Kawasaki, KTM, Lehman Trikes, Malibu, Polaris, Premier, Sea-Doo PWC, Spyder, Stratos, Suzuki, Victory, Yamaha, Yamaha Boats & Yamaha PWC) across six locations (McKinney Texas, Weatherford TX, San Angelo Texas [powersports], San Angelo Texas [watersports/marina], Lubbock Texas, and Odessa Texas). It’s huge!

Family Powersports is the model for what a modern dealership/retailer should be. The one thing they were missing was a best in class internet presence, both from a dealership perspective as well as e-commerce. That’s where I’m going to come in. We’re taking this thing to the top baby!

So as you can imagine, I’m going to be slammed 24/7 with this new gig for the foreseeable future. Because of that, I’m not going to be taking on any more consulting business outside of the folks I’m already working with.

That’s the main part of this announcement I guess… I’m going to be really busy for a while, so leave me alone!

I’ll still be doing my Dealernews column and other stuff like that so it’s not like I’m going to fall off the face of the earth.

Wish me luck!

Todd

Posted using ShareThis

I don’t want there to be any confusion or misunderstanding about why I’m doing this. I want you Dear Reader to be 100% clear about what the deal is. And because of that, I hope you will respect my position and my conclusion. If at any point in the future anything changes I will be equally clear.

No, This little missive is not brief. It’s not a bunch of key concepts organized in bullet points. You’re going to probably want to carve out a chunk of time to read it, but damnit, it’s my site and it’s one of the few places I can do whatever the hell I want! It’s a blog and I like to rant! And I’m writing a lot of it on an airplane flying back home from Duluth so I’ve got time to burn.

Also, I don’t have an editor anywhere around here so I’m sure there’s a lot of really bad writing in here as well. Also (see?! two sentences in a row that start with also!), because this is my point of view and not officially a statement from 50 Below, I’m going to be pretty direct so there’s not a lot of ambiguity.

On with the show…

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve placed an advertisement on my blog here for 50 Below. In addition, you need to know that I have entered into a co-marketing partnership with 50 Below to help promote, and more importantly, develop, their range of solutions for the motorcycle and powersports industries.

If you’re a long-time reader of my random thoughts and rants in Dealernews or here on this site (Congratulations! You’re among a very small, and elite group of people!), you should be saying to yourself, “Self: but I thought Todd has said repeatedly in his columns and in his Indy presentations that all of those turn-key, 3rd party website providers were to be avoided if at all possible.” (Actually, to be honest, I’ve said they were all crap) And yes, when those things were written or spoken it was, in my rather well-informed opinion, true.

I fully stand behind the fact that when I expressed those views that if a dealership was committed to really taking on things like e-commerce or using their web presence as a cornerstone of their marketing strategy that the only honest advise I could give was to take it on and build something unique, bespoke, custom… Expensive.

That was before I began a project for A&S Powersports, the dealership that I am, at the time of this writing, responsible for the development and operation of their websites.

I’m pleased to say that now, for like 98% of you, when you ask me what you need to do to get online and really take it on, instead of of a 16 page proposal that had a ton of bullet points and would require you to spend a lot of money, my advise boils down to the following three points:

1. Sign up with 50 Below (load it up… get EZ-Shop, Shop by fitment, and when they launch some of the cool-as-hell stuff that I’ve seen this week, whatever it costs, you’ll need that too…)
2. Have someone that is at least full-time to really take it on that has the competence and ability to make the most of it. You don’t have a service department without a Service Manager do you? How about a sales department with no Sales Manager? Parts department with no Parts Manager? Nope. Nope. And…… Nope. So why would you have a line of your business that has more potential for revenue than all three combined (and right now, without exaggeration, that potential exists) without at least one person dedicated to it full time?
   Would you buy a new box of tools from the Snap-On guy, roll a bike in front of it and then get pissed because when you came back at the end of the month the bike still doesn’t run?
3. Hire me as an obscenely high-priced consultant to really show you how to make enough money so that you can sleep on a bed of $100 bills with three or four MotoGP Umbrella Girls.

(Step #3 is optional, but highly recommended)

Anyway on with the main story…

Over the years, A&S had one primary website, www.ascycles.com. This site was doing double duty as a successful dealership-based e-commerce operation, and our “dealership” website. So whenever we needed to communicate something like an event, or a vehicle financing special, it had to go onto a site that was generating significant e-commerce revenue from PG&A sales to BMW riders all over the country. This meant “giving up” things like screen real estate, navigation areas etc. for locally oriented purposes at the expense of direct revenue generation via e-commerce (promotion space, merchandising, etc.).

At the beginning of this year A&S took on Ducati and created a new line of business, A&S Ducati. This was going to require some shuffling around and thinking about what I was going to do in terms of site organization.

I made the decision that:

• the site www.ascycles.com should remain focused on BMW Motorcycle e-commerce
• there should be a new dedicated Ducati e-commerce site (www.ducati-motorcycle-parts.com (I can’t believe that in 2009 that this prime, SEO worthy domain was available!)
• I should create two new sites for local dealership activities (vehicle information, lead generation, local community activities, etc.).

I had some key goals or constraints for these two new dealer sites:

1) They had to be easily maintainable directly by A&S sales and marketing staff. I had zero desire, interest, or time to do things like put up new graphics or change content on these sites. So there needed to be some kind of easy-to-use content management system.

I could custom develop a site around a content management system (CMS) platform like Wordpress or maybe suck it up and go with one of those 3rd party, turn-key sites that focus on the powersports industry. At this point in the process, you need to read that last part with a sneer of disdain bordering on disgust. Remember, I still didn’t like any of them.

2) I wanted a system that automagically had things like vehicle specs and OEM promotions just show up on the site. Well, that obviously ruled out building a custom site on a CMS and pretty much forced me to at least consider one of the three players in this space.

So I wrote up an extensive evaluation questionnaire similar to the one Arlo did for Dealernews. No, you can’t see my questionnaire because I did it as part of my day job for A&S, but Arlo’s is a pretty good representation of what I was asking.

I was going to grill the hell out of these guys and if they couldn’t handle it then maybe I’d have to go the custom route.

So I wrote up the questions, emailed them to each of the vendors, had them fill them out and then scheduled the follow up interviews.

Now I want to be very clear here. I was asking questions to a detail and a level that I’m 100% sure that none of you ask. How do I know that? Because all three told me that. They all said that I was asking stuff that they had never had any dealer ask them.

Because of my years, and years, and years in the software sales industry before I came to the powersports market, I know how to get through the smokescreens, the fake demos, the hand-waving, etc. I was a sales engineer during the dot-com days. I know how to rig a demo. Therefore I know how to spot a rigged game.

And remember, I was looking to spend real money for the dealership where I worked on not one, but two sites. I don’t take my job lightly. I’m obsessive to the point of being a pain in the ass. But I’m pretty good at what I do so I consider it a fair trade.

Also keep in mind that I was sort of throwing my weight in as somewhat of an expert in the motorcycle and powersports industry when I was asking these questions. As in, “You know who I am right? You know, if I end up picking you that means that I’m going against my past stand against a turn-key site and that might be potentially valuable for your company… Right?”

I’m kind of like the male version of Paris Hilton when it comes to the internet in this industry except I don’t carry around an ugly rat-dog and I make a lot, lot, lot less money.

And I’m not as hot.
Or as skinny.

OK… Maybe I’m more like Oprah.

But male.
And white.
And thinner…
And much, much, much poorer.

Anyway… I was being very clear that:

1. I don’t want to use any of you
2. If you impress me, I’m going to be very vocal about it
3. I’m 90% sure that you’re not going to impress me
4. It’s worth your effort to try to impress me

So onto the results:

Company A:

To sum up Company A in powersports terms, they are the equivalent of an inexpensive Chinese motorcycle. It’s cheap, and yea, it technically qualifies as as a motorcycle, but I would never buy one or ride on one or let a friend buy one. And it’s sure as heck not going to win you any races.

• They pretty much refused to offer much of anything in the way of a written response to my RFQ questionnaire so it fell to a phone call.
• On the initial phone call I went though the answers with a salesperson that I’m pretty sure had just turned on a computer for the very first time a day or two before we talked. They were totally clueless about everything. They finally admitted they were new (why would they have a brand new sales person talk to someone like me?! What were they thinking?!) and they were going to get their boss involved. That was probably a mistake.
• “The Boss” was one of the most unpleasant people I have ever had to deal in a sales/customer interaction in recent memory. And they were pretty clueless as well. On several occasions their initial response to a question was something along the lines of “Why do you need to know that?” Because maybe I’d like to know as much as I can about the platform I’m going to invest a big chunk of money in and depend on as a significant part of my business’s future success. How’s that for a reason? Good grief… Sales training anyone?
• So in addition to the general unpleasant feeling about the call, the solution was so horrible that I pretty much stopped writing down answers on my notes and tried to get off the phone as quickly as possible.
• Well, they do have pretty good micro-fiche solutions. I think they should go back to focusing on that, hand off all their customers to 50 Below and just move on. But that’s just me.

Company A’s verdict… Immediate and total FAIL!

Company B:

In powersports terms, Company B is a 1996 Virago. It might have been an adequate bike for the time, but it’s 2009 for Pete’s sake! A new coat of paint and new tires are not enough to let it compete in the modern marketplace!

• Dated platform. They have not made, nor do they seem to be interested in making any significant or necessary advancements or improvements to their products in several years.
• Pretty much without exception, every one of the sites I’ve ever seen that is based on their platform is ugly. Not just ugly based on 2009 standards, but most of these sites would have been ugly back in 1998 when people still thought that the <blink> tag was cool. I know, because when I judged the top websites for the 2009 Indy show, I had to suffer through reviewing like 90 of them. The good news is I could identify them before the header graphic had even loaded so I didn’t have to suffer long before I moved on to the next one.
  While I can’t fault you dealers for not being graphic designers, or knowing anything about how to design a website that enhances your brand image, you’d think that the largest supplier of websites to the powersports industry would have a frickin clue and hire someone that had more artistic and design background than painting portraits of Elvis on black velvet at the country fair.
• Horrible, horrible shopping experience. Face it… Customers do… not… shop… by… distributor… catalog…! A customer for a motorcycle jacket does not care or know who Tucker Rocky is! Sure, they know Parts Unlimited because their banners are all over the race track, but I’d say less than 1% of your customers has a clue what Parts Unlimited actually does. And they sure as hell don’t want to search through those catalogs for something like a jacket, sprocket, tire, or helmet.
• You’re locked into a long term contract. You are required to sign a one year contract with an non-optional auto-renew clause. No way! I’m not getting locked into anything as important as my website’s platform. Things change in our industry and on the web too quickly to run the risk of missing a significant opportunity to do the right thing for my business because I’m tied to an agreement that is not in my best interest. Seriously, what do they think they are…? A cell phone company?
• Very poor customer service. When I used them on a limited basis for a dealership I was trying to help out (to the point that I wrote several strongly worded e-mails about the issue to their parent company’s upper management) I basically got an “oh… so sorry…” response. I (and by extension Company B’s customer) never did get answers to my questions.
• Very expensive. When all the bells and whistles are turned on to get it to come close to what 50 Below offers when all their bells and whistles are turned on they were almost $10,000 more expensive than 50 Below over a year for both sites. And that’s with, in my opinion, an inferior product and much worse service.
  You’d think that if anyone could get a discount it would be me so they’d have a pretty good reference account… Nope… It’s not until now, in a down market with an obviously inferior product are they offering any discounts to try to shore up customers that are finally realizing that they’ve been overpaying for years. If you happen to have been a customer of Company B, and they offer you a discount going forward, make sure that you ask if you can get that discount back-dated for all those years they were over charging you.
• Here’s a real shocker… The person that I talked to on the phone, a guy that I’ve met at a few Indy shows and you would think would obviously know that there’s a fair chance that I’ll talk to people about our conversation, didn’t hesitate to take advantage of opportunities to totally rip apart the parent company that had just spent an obscene amount of money to acquire them. So here’s an executive at the company ripping apart his parent company to a potential, and somewhat influential, customer. What does that say about the internal dynamics of the entire operation and its internal corporate health?
• Backing up the above indications of bad blood between the acquired and the acquirer was that when I was at Indy and talked to several guys from another division of the acquiring company about their thoughts of the soon to be corporate sibling, they ripped them apart. Not just a little either. These are not rumors about hostility within the overall organization. This is my first-hand account with both sides of this company being openly hostile to the other guys.
• So obviously there’s something really messed up at that company and it’s just one more giant indication that I’d never want to recommend them to anyone, let alone choose them myself.
• I even offered the following to them: “If you are interested in detailed reasons why Company B was not chosen, and think that my input/reasons would help your development in the future, let me know.” Nothing… OK, fine. Maybe in spite of my position in the industry, my years of experience, my demonstrated success in e-commerce in the motorcycle industry they figured I was full of crap and had nothing to learn from. Might have been worth a discussion or two though, no?

Now again keep in mind that both of these vendors knew who I was. That by signing me and the dealership where I worked it would be at least a tacit, and at best an overt, endorsement of their company and their products.

And in both of these cases they acted as if they could care less. I was stunned. I expected a little more effort.

So, I’d say that if they were willing to treat me like that (and let’s not forget, I’m really, really important around here! ), before I’d even signed up with them, you gotta wonder what would happen if I was a customer and ran into “issues.”

So once again. Total… Fail…

50 Below:

With 50 Below, you’re getting a race ready factory bike. You even get factory support in the form of their Marketing Account Executives that will work with you, as part of the standard package to help you get your site working the way it’s supposed to work. They want to help you win. Let them!

So then I move on to 50 Below… Keep in mind that I went into this whole process positive that 50 Below was going to be the absolute worst. So much so that I had considered not even including them.

Why?

1) The solution they first offered a few years ago was so God-awful horrible. That whole page turning, flash-based, parts catalog based shopping experience was just miserable. The templates were eye-searingly bad. Etc. etc.

2) They had had some pretty significant financial and/or legal issues in their recent past that I thought indicated that they were at worst shady and at best irresponsible. Everyone I talked to about 50 Below, even today, universally says something along the lines of:

• “Are they still in business?”
• “Didn’t they all get hauled off to Gitmo?”
• “Don’t they try to keep your domain name if you leave their service?”
• (It should be pointed out that a lot of this FUD was being propagated and encouraged to propagate by good ol’ Company B above… Oh… Look… One more reason to not pick Company B… They like to play dirty.). For the record, none of the above was true or at least true to the extent that it was portrayed. If you want to know what really happened, talk to 50 Below. They will explain it to you.

Or better yet, check this out…

I didn’t know this at first, and I bet most of you might not know this, but 50 Below is also involved in other industries other than powersports. For instance, they are the only approved provider for franchised UPS stores. They are also the sole, authorized website providers for various financial and insurance firm’s independent advisers like UBS and Smith Barney.

I’m willing to bet that all those companies probably did a fair amount of due diligence when they decided to pick 50 Below. WAYYYY more than I did and I’m willing to bet WAYYYY more than you’re going to do. You think they would have picked 50 Below if the rumors were even close to being true? Yea. I don’t think so either.

And does being involved in those other industries mean that 50 Below is not “focused” or “dedicated” to the powersports markets? Hell no… It means that they are diversified across multiple industries so that when crap like what’s hitting our industry now happens, it doesn’t cripple them. Now if all you’re involved in is the powersports industries and things start getting bad, what do you lean on? Oh… Right…Nothing.

So onto the results of my investigation…

About 5 minutes into the presentation on their product offering I was really, really impressed with

1. the improvements they had made in the last few years and
2. how astonishingly far beyond the other two competitors they were.

Their website designs are composed of modern best-practices. All that crappy table based layout stuff that they had used in the past, and that the other two companies still used was gone with clean and efficient CSS based design. Nice!

Their shopping experience, what they are calling EZ-Shop, finally addressed the horrible practice of catalog based shopping. Customers can shop by category, brand, and even fitment to the model of vehicle that they own. This is seriously an order of magnitude better than the other two solutions. If you care about e-commerce at all as a part of your overall business strategy, this feature alone is reason to pick 50 Below. The fact that they are kicking ass on so many other features as well just makes this such a no brainer solution.

Is 50 Below perfect? Nope. Is it better than the rest? Absolutely.

Are there things I’d like to see changed or improved? Yes. And you know what? They are really interested in making those changes. In fact they already have plans, prototypes, or almost released features to address a lot of the things I’d like to see. They seem to actually be very committed to making their product better and better and providing more value and better service. What more can you ask for from a partner?

If 50 Below would have had an offering like they have now when I began the work on the sites I manage, I would have used it. Or to put it another way, if I was going to go to work for a new dealership today with the goal of creating another world-class internet presence I would use 50 Below as the platform upon which I would begin my work. No brainer.

Where do you want your techs to buy their tools? Snap On? MAC? Or some dude selling crap from China out of a van at the flea market? Same deal.

Does this mean that just because you use 50 Below you’ll automagically end up with a website that shows up #1 in all Google results and generates millions of dollars in e-commerce revenue? Not a chance. Just because you buy a Ducati 1098R can you jump on it and win an WSBK title? Nope. But if you have an amazing rider and a talented team working on it, you’ll have better than a fighting chance.

I get from 50 Below a real sense of forward momentum, valuable progress, continuous improvement. Moving forward at an amazing speed. In the time I’ve spent working with 50 Below I’ve seen a team of dedicated individuals that are hell-bent on creating the ultimate platform for the motorcycle and powersports industries.

In conclusion (finally…), I just spent the better part of a week in Duluth meeting with the folks from 50 Below. Seeing what they’ve got going on, seeing what’s coming, etc. I wanted to make sure that if I was going to get behind promoting something that I could do it in good faith.

After doing that I’m even more convinced that I made the right decision for A&S to use them for my projects and that I can recommend them as the default, no-brainer, “what are you waiting for?”, go-to solution for the motorcycle and powersports industry when it comes to turn-key internet presences.

Why do I want you to all move to 50 Below? Because I want to be able to actually help this industry start using the web so you’ll be successful. I’m sick of seeing dealers wallow around with no website, or crap websites, and not be able to tell you in simple terms how to do the stuff you need to be doing.

Now I can. Call 50 Below. Tell them you just read this and you’re ready to start taking responsibility for getting your dealership into the 21st century.

Here’s some more details about how and why I’m working with 50 Below:

• I contacted them to see if there was anything I could do to help them get more dealers to use their platform. Why? Because I could not understand why anyone except in the most unusual of circumstances would not choose 50 Below. I have a very limited tolerance for irrational behaviour. If after reading this, and after really digging into the three options out there you don’t choose 50 Below, well, I’d love to hear why. Seriously… If you don’t pick 50 Below, tell me why. If it’s a valid point, I will ask them to address the issue. If it’s a legitimate issue, I’ll update this post with that info.
• They are paying me a small consulting retainer to do things like write tutorials for their newsletters and other educational materials in the future. This fee also includes an advertising component for the banner on my site. Trust me, it’s not a lot of money and if I didn’t feel that I was doing the right thing to recommend them to you, the amount of money they are paying me would never be enough to get me to do it.
• I absolutely, positively, do not make any more or less money if you sign up or don’t sign up with them.
• And to be very, very clear, just because I write for Dealernews there is not even the slightest connection between my personal opinions and conclusions and anyone at Dealernews. I will not involve myself in any activity at Dealernews that involves the review or discussion of the competing platforms while I’m working with 50 Below.

When I was running marketing for the dealership that I work with, I had put on a few really successful open-house events. The “light bulb” moment came when I said: “we need to do stuff like this every month!”

That required someone dedicated to coming up with the ideas, handling all the logistics, etc. But I then saw this role as much more than just an “event” person. We need to do more community stuff. Community stuff takes a lot of time. I need a full-time person to do it. Bingo! It was that simple.

I also wanted them to start being the “face” of the company on all our our online social networking activities. That led to me climbing up the abstraction ladder to call the position community relationship manager.

In short, this position is THE public and personal face of the company.

I just came across a post on ReadWriteWeb that deals with the same idea. Their article is obviously written from a more theoretical framework, while my take on it is much more the result of pragmatic, hands-on needs.

Marshall asks the questions “Do Startup Companies Need A Community Manager?” My answer is of course a resounding “YES”. However, like pretty much everything else it all comes down to the ability to execute on the idea.

It’s not PR!

PR is dead. The two-faced, B.S. spewing PR flacks that have made their money by coming up with ever more creative methods to lie to a company’s customer are going to die a loud and long overdue death.

PR was a one-sided shouting match. The new age of community is more about listening than talking. One thing that most PR people seem to have is a genetic aversion letting anyone else talk or listening to them when they do.

No one with ANY hint of PR on their resume should come anywhere near a community relationship position!

But what about all those functions that PR serves? Like minimizing damage when the company does something stupid or bad? Or “spinning” one result to be seen as something totally different?

Oh, I don’t know… How about not doing things like putting poison in kid’s toys, or letting poison food get produced in the first place or simply telling the truth?

Naive? Probably.

The direction that the world is going to force you to go? Absolutely!

Might as well start recognizing that you’ve got a transparent kimono on. Open it up… Or don’t… Don’t matter because people are going to know what’s going on anyway. You might want to see how the truth works for a change.

It’s not Marketing!

Marketing still has a valuable place when it comes to developing the identity and the initial message. But marketing is going to need to become much more participatory and reactive to the reality being dictated by the real world.

It must be legitimate!

Don’t lie. If you have a position that the market doesn’t seem to like, then explain in truthful detail why you did what you did, do what you do, or are going to continue to do what you did. Even people that hate you will at least respect you. How is that a downside? And who knows, maybe being honest may actually turn some people onto you. After years and years of BS, maybe legitimacy and honesty are worth giving a try?

It may be a game changer!

This has the potential to be one of those paradigm changing ideas that fundamentally changes the way companies communicate with their customers.

Customers don’t want to listen to PR B.S. and they sure as hell don’t believe anything that comes out of a marketing or advertising department.

There are of course risks. The old model of how PR/Marketing crafted and controlled a focused message or identity is over. In reality the only messages or identities that really mattered were the ones that the customers created for themselves and communicated to each other.

In the past it was obviously easier for a large company to force conformity to the desired message, but as the number of communication channels is now nearly infinite, there’s no way any company is going to be able to effectively control their message or ID.

Companies must sooner or later respond to the fact that the key to their company’s long term survival is the active and honest communication and participation with the market. And in non-economic terms, what’s a market if not a community?

This is going to totally shake up so many business practices! From product development, to accounting, to of course sales and marketing.

It’s going to bring about the need for greater transparency. Worn-out corporate double-speak is dead. The old guard PR industry is going to die (no doubt kicking and screaming about “losing control”).

It’s time for companies of all sizes to realize that they have already lost, or very shortly will loose, control over their true image.

So it’s time now to start crafting plans and organizations that can communicate and participate openly and truthfully with the market. That starts with the Community Relationship position.

If you really want to take this on and understand it, you need to closely read Groundswell. It will articulate in detail pretty much everything I’m talking about. But with better writing and more footnotes.

As usual, if you have any questions or issues let me know in the comments section below.

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.

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.

It’s not really all that surprising to me to be honest. I’ve gotten so many sales calls from Mercado over the years trying to sell me their insanly overpriced offering that it just seemed unsustainable. Not only that, but their advertising was everywhere! Like Dot-Com boom-everywhere in the e-commerce space. They were prime sponsors or significant sponsors of so many shows that I’d attend. They had to be paying an insane amount of money for all that advertising and sales effort.

It always seemed to me that they must be overcharging for their software to keep the marketing and sales machine chugging along and now that suspicion has been proven correct.

I’m willing to bet there will be a lot more providers like this falling in this little e-commerce dot-com 2.0 bubble burst. The business and revenue models of so many of the companies that I see at shows like Shop.Org and Internet Retailer are straight out of 2000 before the bubble burst. They all seem to be built around going after the big guys (the 20% in the grand e-commerce market) in the Internet Retailer Top 500 and charging top dollar to do it, when the same solutions could be offered to the remaining 80% if they would have a decent pricing and servicing structure.

Although this time it’s worse because most of these companies are run by suits from the East Coast that are totally clueless beyond anything but the deal.

At least during the dot-com era the jokers driving their Titanics into the same iceberg over and over were a lot of time nerds, geeks, or other variety of egghead that actually knows something that were inadvertently elevated to the position of businessman. This time it seems that it’s being driven by empty suits with a smile and a handshake from the beginning.

I’m still amazed that anyone is investing any money in these companies, let alone $65 million!

Fools and their money.

There’s a lot of big hitters out there who’s CIO’s have got to be getting a pretty interesting presentation ready for their bosses!