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!
Who needs emails anyway, rise of Egommunication
It was with much amusement that I read the post by SaulK on "the outlet" on 6 things you did not know of rafiq.
Two interesting things stand out for me, 1) This post is less malicious then tickling a puddycat and is clearly a clever ploy to attract some attention, which is by no means a bad thing (or are their some thinly veiled frustrations hidden Saul? 
) , 2) It presents a very interesting experiment as to whether the one provoked will respond quickly.
And yes .. he did. In fact he muti'd it himself within a couple hours.
This had me thinking .. let's say you wanted to get hold of some lofty techy type celeb, fairly ensconced in the web, can this be a more effective means of communication than email? Email is so nasty nowadays, what with spam and the amount of it, that it has become a fairly ineffective medium through witch to get hold of the cognoscenti (eliciting that *damned spammer* response is easier than one might think) whereas a post on a blog or twitter referencing one name seems to not carry that same problem (perhaps the cognitive filters are differently applied, reading a blog post at ones one accord is different from having an email shoved upon oneself afterall).
As I'm writing this though I release that I have read these exact same thoughts somewhere else before, and I have found it. In July Doc Searls responded on a similar call via a blog by Rohit Bhargava.
Rohit has also seen and acknowledged this trend and his even coined it, "Egommunication".
Ego Searches, also called Vanity Searches. Shallow or Human Nature? We like to know what people are saying, good or bad (we hope more good). We don't like to feel people are talking behind our backs, but we don't like getting sold to. Is this an opportunity for gold diggers and spammers employing clever tricks to have us view their wares? Perhaps.
To tack onto this idea I would like to add another observation, take a look at the number of comments at the end of Saul's piece, normally he garners somewhere between null and two comments on a piece, this one had 9 comments at the time of writing this. What does this tell us? Link baiting works, lol. No but more importantly, people track themselves and those that they feel close, or involved with. Basically Rafiq's groupies and enemies where also checking in. Thus sending out a certain proposition to a certain person might get you in contact with others with a similar interest around there, perhaps even a competitor in the space you never may have known about.
What's your take on this? As a developer I have to ask, is there a place for a tool here? I reckon so, I wouldn't mind a tool where I can slot in my name and have it feed me an RSS feed of new items found out there on the web, Facebook, Flicker, Twitter, Blogs, Web Searches wherever. Call it a vanity aggregator, perhaps one already exists? The idea of the Vanity Folder is not a new one.
Web Engineer, lover of technology, tearer down of walls.
