Monthly Archives: October 2009
Looking for cars online and ruminations on wasted opportunities
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lancerrevolution/3710832872/
My mom is looking to buy a car, so I was asked to use my superpowers of search and to find her a few candidates online. My only instructions: it must not be too small, it must not be to slow, it must cost less than R100k, it must not be ugly, it must not be chinese, it must be reliable, it must not be too old, and it musn’t rust, ever. Right.
So off I went to my familiar port of call, namely autotrader.co.za and much to my surprise there was almost nothing of interest listed on there, useless. What now?! So I do a quick Google exercise and land up on Carfind.co.za.
Yuck! What an ugly site, this is like sooo old-school-not-web-two, don’t think your rounded promo boxes with shaded backgrounds will fool me buddies! But you know what? There where real cars on there, I mean lots!
So off I went and added brazillions of cars to my shortlist. I was super stoked. Now what? So I visit my shortlist and lo and behold, I find that I can contact ALL of these dealers with a single form. Brilliant! Fantastic! Killer Feature!
Now to be honest, it was not all moonshine and roses. Nope, there was a field to enter my mobile number. Oh dear. You see, I have this irrational fear when it comes to handing out my mobile number to car dealers, weird huh? Happily it seemed that it was an optional field. But wait what’s this? It’s refusing to post the form, so in went my “mobile number” as 000000000. Right, disaster averted.
So at this point I was pretty happy, and was even more surprised to find that not only did I get sent a useful list of contact details for all the dealers via emails, my showroom request was also stored under my profile on the site. Quite clever this site, hey?
Anyhoo, that being done I refreshed my Inbox for the swift responses I was expected .. and there where none. But 10 minutes later there where. Imagine that.
I must say that this is probably a triumph for what we do in this (web) industry, I mean its really basic, there is nothing cutting edge or amazing here, it just works. It saved me a ton of phonecalls and I have had real results.
Now why the title of this piece? You see it’s now 8 hours later and there are still some dealers that have not contacted me, why? I mean here is a solid sales lead, I did all the hard work for you, why can you not respond to me in a reasonable time frame? No, 24 hours is not reasonable, in fact I have already cancelled some viewings as other guys got there quicker. I get frustrated when we build these tools for people, they spend lots of money and then they drop the ball so heavily. Your tool which you pay for is only going to help you if you use it properly!
Now on another note, car sales guys listen up, learn to craft better emails, did you forget your job is to sell? Half the respondents forgot to tell me which company they are from and did not have a standard footer. Nearly ALL did not expand details on the vehicle, why? Do you realise there is only one crappy photo on carfind?
Kudos to David Carr from Barloworld Amstrong N1 City, he sent me a great email I was very impressed. He included a nice little sales pitch with the history of the vehicles (they are ex rentals in this case) and sent me 6 hi-res images from different angles, and had a complete mail footer with his name, title and contact details as well as the name of the dealership. That’s what I expected from the others.
Remember, use it or lose it!
Want to spend bucks on social media marketing? Read here first.
image via gapingvoid.com
More and more companies are latching on to social media marketing as a way to get their product across. Large companies are hiring the cream of social media consultants to establish a social strategy involving sophisticated monitoring systems, CRM integration and even hiring banks of staff to hit sites like facebook, twitter, myspace etc.
Sad thing is that smaller and smaller businesses are now getting caught up on the buzz, often losing serious amounts of cash to charlatans looking for a way to milk the wave, and worse, embarking on crazy “viral” competitions in which they giveaway wads of their hard earn income.
Before you start selling through social media channels, stop and think! In the beginning (uh 2 years ago?!) it was cute how hard companies where trying to get my attention but now its just getting old. Start listening to your customers for once if you want to really benefit your company. In short: talk less, listen more.
The number one danger out on the internet today for your business is the risk of losing a single customer as a result of negative feedback placed onto a social media channel like facebook and twitter. Disgruntled customers are really loud, happy ones keep quiet, ecstatic ones are even louder than angry ones. You need to engage your unhappy customers, and turn their frowns upside down, an ecstatic customer is your most valuable marketing asset, can you afford to have the antithesis running out there blackening your name? No! You want to be able to engage with them, and you can! This is the beauty of social media. All it takes is a reply to a tweet, a comment on a blog or a response on a forum.
So do you go out there and hire a “Social Media Expert” straight away to get you “situated”? No I honestly don’t think you have to, just do a Google search for “Social Media Strategy”and “Online Reputation Management” and read how others do it, make your self knowledgeable. Even if you pay that expert, remember he will eventually leave you to your own devices anyway. Also sign up for accounts on popular social networks and twitter and learn to use them, its really not hard! Remember that the expert also had to learn to use these things like the rest of us.
To get you started looks at tools like http://www.whostalkin.com/ and for a small fee there is a very good local product available at http://www.brandseye.com/
So after you have given it a go and want to ramp up to the next level, then you can consider bringing in an expert, its just that now you will be much more equipped to make your own informed decisions.
Good Luck!
SpiffBox.com, pays you to be social, but that’s not the point
I ran into a new social network today called SpiffBox.com, and the only reason it caught my attention is that they allegedly pay users to use their site, i.e “the more social you are, the more you earn” ethos.
“Interesting”, I thought to myself, mainly because I am not a fan of this marketing strategy for a social network (nothing like shallow, low value connections to devalue your network – just ask MySpace), but that’s a post for another day. No, after signing up with a 90210 area code (the site is only available to US people apparently – sorry SpiffBox), I realised that there was something else going on, something that they cleverly mask in the form of a social network.
Here it is: SpiffBox.com is not a social network, it’s a direct marketing platform! Let me lay out my reasons below:
- Credits can be earned, spent, purchased and redeemed.
- The word Spiff is well known to salespeople, referring to an immediate incentive a salesperson receives after a sale, i.e here is a box you can dig around in to earn yourself more spiffs?
- You can absolutely not interact with someone unless you are a friend.
- There is something in it for you to respond to friend requests, messages, chats etc.
- Friendships are shortlived (30 days), but you can pay points to have them extended. Clearly the system is not intended to foster lasting relationships and is encouraging a large turnover of connections. I don’t imaging you would bother to keep track of real-world friends here would you? Rather like the relationship you have with a marketer?
- You can really go into details in terms of your search demographic, this could also benefit those looking for a love interest, but also possibly marketers. Of interest is the long list of what the person would like to spend their points on (Food, Clothes, Bills, etc).
- Emails cannot be forwarded. Marketing might be confidential?
- Friends cannot see other friends. Again confidential.
- You can’t make anything from posting Status Updates? Why is that?
- You can create a list of “candidates” for future friendships, kind of like a sales prospect?
- You are able to take part in SpliffOffers which are promotions, surveys etc which reinforces the marketing angle.
This smells a lot like LinkedIn which masks a recruitment tool as a business network for obvious reasons (professionals are always looking for better jobs, their bosses just don’t know it), if you don’t believe me do a google search for the terms linkedin & recruitment.
The only part I cannot figure out is why you get credits when someone views your gallery and vice-versa, that part doesn’t quite make sense to me yet.
Clearly this is a social network which is setup to NOT foster long term relationships whether they meant to do it or not, and people doing it for the money are not there to catch-up with mates.
I just realised, those looking for love are not too far off from direct marketers hey? Hmmmm…