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 it was SPAM in pretty much every definition of the word I don’t feel too bad about posting all of the details here. I’m removing their actual name and contact info because I don’t want to help them out in ANY way.

Here’s the e-mail I get. Pay close attention to the subject:

Subject: XXXXXXX website — New Online Parts & Accessories Catalog & Store + Niewsletter sign up

XXX XXX to valuedclientsWe are always adding features to our services but as always we are NOT increasing our price ($199/mo - No contracts).

Contact us XXX-XXX-XXXX and we can demonstratively illustrate within 1 minute why your sales will increase utilizing XXXXX as your primary site vs. your current solution.

Take the challenge and learn more about XXXXX, you will be amazed of how much more you can achieve online. BK

Pricing: $199/mo (no contract)

Demo site (enjoy a 1-click to inventory process - “The only standard accepted by visitors”)
Sell part & Accessories online - NEW feature added WOW!!

Newsletter System NEW

References (see all our dealers sites)

Thank you for the opportunity to help increase your online sales.

XXXX XXXX
President
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXX web services for automotive dealers
We are the most profitable web solution for automotive dealers in the industry. Our websites sell more cars and cost less money ($199/mo) than any of the competition. The reason is simple, we deliver an enjoyable and informative experience for visitors. placing visitors’ first

XXXXX standard features
XXXXX offers many features but putting your visitors’ demands first is our primary goal. XXXXX delivers 1-click navigation to inventory throughout every search process.

• One Click Navigation “The only standard accepted by visitors”
• Financial and vehicle data
• Marketing made easy
• Admin controls
• Unlimited e-mails
• Web statistics
• Auction manager ( Ebay & Craigslist )
• Sell Parts & Accessories Online NEW
  Newsletter System NEW
  Service and Support
  Higher Search Engine Rankings
  Manufacturer promotions maintained.

*Note: I’m not including any links to them because I don’t want to do them the favor of passing on any link-juice for SEO.

My response pretty much sums up how I feel about these types of “services”…

Wow…

Just wow…

1) You are selling websites that look that bad and are constructed that poorly for $199/mo? In 2009? If this was like 1998 that might be acceptable.
If your demo site is any indication that’s about $198/mo too much. I could spin around in a Jr. High School pretty much anywhere in the US and find a kid that could produce a better looking website than your demo site. And if your demo site is the site that is intended to present the best of the best to your potential clients, then I really can’t imagine how bad the “real” sites look.

2) You claim “Higher Search Engine Rankings” yet all of your primary navigation is in non-SEO Flash. Have you guys ever even read a book, site, or blog on how to design a properly designed SEO-friendly site?!

Your own site www.XXXXX.com does not even rank in the top 100 for “dealer website” in Google, Yahoo, or MS/Live! (according to SEOBook’s RankChecker Firefox plugin)

3) You appear to be setting yourselves up as a marketing asset for your dealership clients, yet you don’t seen to be able to even master the concept of spell checking your (unsolicited I may add) e-mails.  Unless of course your are marketing a new concept called the “Niewsletter.”

4) As a company that seems to be trying to grab some dealership marketing money and do their e-mail marketing for them, it would seem that you would at least be able to follow the minimum provisions of the CAN-SPAM act. This unsolicited email that you sent out for your own company is clearly in violation of CAN-SPAM. Are you willing to pay CAN-SPAM fee violations for your “valued clients” when you send out e-mails for them?

I only hope you are clueless enough to have left your valuedclients@XXXXX.com address open for responses so everyone can read this reply. If not, they can read it when I re-post it to my blog.

It’s time that companies like you are taken out of the market and stop ripping off dealerships that don’t know any better.

Oh, and since you failed to have an unsubscribe link in this spam, please take this e-mail as my request to be removed from your spam list. I WILL register CAN-SPAM complaints for any more of this tripe that ends up filling my e-mail box.

If you’d like someone to explain to you the in’s and out’s of how to properly do marketing on the internet, let me know.

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!

It does seem to have happened pretty quickly considering it was only back at the end of July that the MIC said it was evaluating if it should issue a request for proposal for a new sanctioning body. In only two months the MIC was able to complete their evaluation AND issue the request for proposals, AND get the proposals back, AND evaluate those proposals, AND then organize, set up, and announce this new organization. Maybe if they can do all that so quickly they can actually pull this off. Amazing example of organizational dynamics it would seem.

I just wish it was someone’s job to tell the OEM’s to think about the larger picture as it relates to expanding the motorcycle market in the USA and not just whine about losing their own little patches. Get out of the box a little and try to think a little more creatively and strategically.

DMG/AMA Pro Racing (apparently) has the goal of making motorcycle racing more exciting and interesting to a wider audience. Think NASCAR for motorcycles.

That might be part of the problem I guess. The motorcycle community (at least the people I talk to) all seem to think that NASCAR=BAD. It’s insane. They all are like, “DMG is going to turn motorcycle racing in the US into NASCAR.” They apparently think this is a BAD thing?!

The MIC and ostensibly this new USSB organization seems content to have one of the largest countries in the world with one of the worst street bike racing series as measured by things like mass-market, non-motorcycle specific sponsor involvement, media viewership, race attendance, etc.

Seriously… has anyone from the MIC been to an AMA race lately? The stands are empty. It’s TV coverage is totally limited to SpeedTV (not that there’s anything wrong with SpeedTV.. I watch it constantly. But for the industry as a whole to grow it needs to be on the majors like Speed’s parent FOX). It’s the same old tired crop of motorcycle/powersports centric sponsors that are there race after race.

There’s no appeal to the old AMA superbike formula outside of hard-core motorcycle enthusiasts and of course the OEM’s (especially Suzuki who essentially dominates the Superbike class).

It seems that the motorcycle and powersports industry prefer to keep their blinders on and fight over pieces of a tiny little pie instead of making a REALLY, REALLY big pie instead!

The argument goes that the new DMG formula is going to have limited/formula spec bikes that have little in common with their street-going siblings other than some decals. The poor manufacturers are going to be left without the “test bed” to develop new bikes if they can’t put their best foot forward. Right.

Hmmm… It seems to me that there is a racing series that involves vehicles with four tires that follows a very similar strategy and they seem to do pretty well.

Has the MIC or the motorcycle industry as a whole never heard of NASCAR? Have they not looked at the amazing success that has been possible with the NASCAR formula?

Win on Sunday sell on Monday still works pretty darn well for the OEM’s that play in NASCAR’s game and those cars have absolutely, positivly nothing in common with the street going variations. Especially now that NASCAR has the Car Of Tomorrow (COT).

This is just stupid, short-sited thinking on the parts of the OEM’s and the MIC as far as I’m concerned.

What does the MIC know about creating a racing series from scratch. Promoting it. Getting killer media deals put together? Do they know more than the folks at DMG? I’m going to guess… No.

How are they going to model it? What are they going to base it on? What should they base it on. The AMA model that was so uniformly hated by pretty much every single racing fan I’ve ever talked to? Or NASCAR, that EVERYONE knows about even if they never have watched or wish to watch cars go ’round and ’round.

I’m willing to be that these guys are getting a bunch of traffic that they have no idea where it came from.

Here’s why this is such a big deal to me. I want more, more, more people to watch motorcycle racing on TV and in person. I want to see motorcycle racing on FOX. I want soccer moms driving around in their giant killer cages to have a #69 Repsol Honda sticker on their bumper right next to their #88 Jr. NASCAR sticker.

Why? Because now those same soccer moms that were once content to run down motorcycles left and right in their mini-vans now like motorcycles! They know what they look like! They might even end up SEEING them when they try to turn left.

In fact, the same day I get this announcement I get the print version of PowerSports Business that has an article about how the Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF) wants the Feds to start looking into motorcycle crash data more because fatalities were up in the US in 2007 by 6%!

Now explain to me again how maintaining a failed, fringe racing series like the USSB is bound to become (vs. a larger, more well funded, and popular series that the DMG was trying to put together) the catalyst to expand motorcycle’s visibility in the USA?

You can read this article that has some comments from Roger Edmondson (head of DMG) that indicate that he’s probably not a real happy camper right about now.

Mark my words that this may be a death knell for street motorcycle racing in the USA in the same way that the IRL/CART split killed off open-wheel racing here. Of course, maybe I’m totally wrong and the MIC will be able to create the kind of series that the motorcycle industry in the US needs.

[edit: i just came across this news that even though KTM is on the board of the MIC, it will NOT be racing in the MIC/USSB and will stick to the AMA Pro Racing/DMG gig]

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

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

I’m so easy to make happy!