Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc.

Author: Atlantic BT

  • How To Become a GREAT Email Marketer By Christmas [Pictures]

    Email Marketing Go Great Or Go Home

    We Internet marketers are about to walk into a Texas hail storm of email marketing. I grew up in Texas, and you can feel the air change before the dark clouds, hail and those twisting black shapes roar up out of the plains. The hair on the back of your neck literally stands up. The hair on my neck is standing up now because email marketing works, and so we Internet marketers are doing our best to kill it like a snake.

    We are trying to kill email marketing with LOVE, but it will be dead nonetheless. Responsible and Great email marketing requires:

    * List segmentation, relevant messages.

    * Personas, so you know what stories to tell to whom.

    * Great Campaigns, Creative and Offers.

    * Values – express who you really are at all times.

    Read more on what great email marketing needs:

    Email Marketing Is Live Ammunition

    Become A Great Email Marketer By Christmas

    1. Hire Bronto
    My first advice, if email is more than 5% of your top-line, is hire Bronto. I’ve used every tool from Constant Contact to Responsys, and Bronto is the best. I don’t have a dog in this hunt other than a desire to help save you time, money and pain. Bronto is here in Durham, so I know and like them. My recommendation is based on 12 years of Internet marketing experience, more than $30M in sales and the highest margin of that $30M coming from email marketing (by almost 2x).

    Bronto.com (http://bronto.com/ )

    2. Buy Managing Content Marketing, a book by David Rose
    My second recommendation, and again I have NO dog in this hunt, is to read David Rose’s Managing Content Marketing. If you are already a segmentation and persona wizard, then go right to Sally Hogshead’s site and refine your skills by taking her F-Test. If you aren’t a segmentation wizard yet (you will be), read Managing Content Marketing:

    Managing Content Marketing Book

    3. Look At Email Marketing That SUCKS  [PICTURES in PDF]
    – Jim Davidson, Bronto’s Researcher, “Email Menagerie” Report is a MUST read.

    Mid-Month Email Menagerie ( PDF http://bronto.com/sites/default/files/July-Mid-Month_jd.pdf )

    Jim Davidson, Bronto’s Research Director, creates a monthly summary of the 4,000 emails he monitors, a MUST READ. This month’s summary shows:

    • Behold The Fold (ignore the fold at your peril).
    • Promotions, Processes and Peeves (STORY not just SALE).
    • Composition – 5Ws :Who, What, When, Why, What.
    • Animation Station – abuse of the moving images.

    Internet marketing requires a lot these days. Video, cause, content and social marketing are all important, but if you want to increase the money you take to the bank THIS CHRISTMAS, there is only one sure way:

    BECOME A GREAT EMAIL MARKETER

    .

    Summary & Next Steps

    Email marketing is critical to your bottom line because:

    * Email profit margins are HIGH.
    * Great Is The Only Currency Now.
    * Be the best or go home.

    Support becoming a great email marketer with the full complement of social, cause, video and whatever Internet marketing, but if you want to drop a new million bucks or 2 or 3 to your bottom line, there is NOTHING more of a sure bet than improving your email marketing.

    PERIOD FULL STOP!

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  • Internet Marketing – Why Saving The World Is A Must

    Internet marketing attracts all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. I recently found an intelligent and helpful article (link below) from Lori Robertson, a working mother who uses Internet marketing to create more free time. One quick, early lesson learned with millions riding on my team’s Internet marketing decisions was what WE THINK only mattered in very specific ways. This was a hard lesson since I LOVE communicating everything I believe at all times (lol).

    Another important difference, part of the 5 degrees of difference, is Lori wants to “destroy” competition. My teams and I like to win too, but we view Internet marketing over time. I’ve lived through several hero to goat, goat to hero cycles in Internet marketing. I have no desire to destroy competition. I respect good competitors, learn from them and want to beat them at least partially because I want to see how the respond. Death, taxes and good Internet marketing competitors WILL respond are the only sure things in life.

    The give and take of Internet marketing is graceful, beautiful and requires dance partners. My teams and I got BETTER because our competitors got better. We built on each other. We would change something with universal implications for the space, and they GOT it right away and built on it, challenging us to spend little time congratulating ourselves and more time getting back down to business. There were times when we would put up an idea and it would be copied by lunch. Such is the immediate, real time nature of great Internet marketing.

    Learning about what helped people via metrics, data and direct feedback convinced us we needed to delegate some important work. We needed to change our Internet marketing and web design approach. This post highlights the difference between someone who uses Internet marketing to free up time to be with her family versus the people I work with who free up time to do more Internet marketing (lol).

    Article Link: Internet Marketing Advice To Help You Destroy Your Competition

    Marty’s Internet Marketing Note On Scoop.it

    I like the workman-like nature of many of these tips. Lori is an Internet marketer to make money, and I respect that. Internet marketing is my calling. I think of money as the scorecard indicating acceptance of those ideas my team and I are creating online.

    There is a difference between Lori’s post and my approach, but only in degrees. The Internet marketing ideas I would pull out and highlight from her piece include:

    1. Cause Marketing
    Very, very important to save the world in some appreciable, measurable and easy to share way. When I pitch this idea to people, many recoil. I had an HVAC website owner tell me his products were boring. “Air conditioning isn’t boring to a mother with a sick child on a hot North Carolina day,” I shared, and he agreed.

    Every product, brand or business saves the world in some way, large or small. Discover how your ideas, business, brands or products saves the world, and then align with a cause that is consistent, aligned and a good partner for those brand values.

    Choose carefully, as you want the association to be long, rewarding for both parties and helpful in completing your brand’s story (see post from earlier about telling your brand story: http://www.scoop.it/t/curation-revolution/p/2295257933/how-to-create-your-brand-s-style-guide-tell-your-brand-s-story .

    2. Friendly Error Pages

    Another great idea from Lori is dressing up your error page’s look and feel. When something goes bad, visitors see an error page. I’ve had times when the hardware supporting our site was so error prone that Google indexed our 500 (server in trouble) page (lol). This is NOT good, but I had an offer on that page, and there were months when it was the most used offer on our site. Imagine the money we would have lost WITHOUT the offer.

    You can’t change the behind the curtain coding of this or any error page. Google will mess you UP if you recode behind the curtain values, so don’t do that. This “be careful approach” when under the car is something Lori doesn’t cover – the potential blow up if you mess with the code- but I’ve been there and done that and so know to avoid the wrong move BEHIND the curtain.

    You can change the page’s presentation layer, what customers see, without ticking Google off. Make customers a special offer. Tell them you are sorry they are seeing this error page, it means something messed up, and here is an offer of 50% off their next order (or free shipping or whatever) for hanging with your site through the temporary issue.

    Error pages can lower your SEO and hurt credibility, so look to your webmaster report to resolve as soon as you can. Most errors are caused by links attempting to drive into pages that are gone.

    These 404 errors are damaging and should be resolved by removing the page from Google’s index, redirecting the link or correcting the link at its source. Other errors can be cause by image-heavy under-serving (these would be in the 500 range).

    The final issue on this page is to reassert security and trust. I like to write these pages with a sense of humor and ask for help. Provide a special email and ask customers to provide feedback if they see the page more than once. When in doubt, giving your audience a job enlists them into your tribe and helps create trust and security lost by presentation of an error page.

    3. Claims and Offers
    Lori talks about how to make a claim. I NEVER MAKE CLAIMS. I came to the conclusion that my job as an Internet marketer wasn’t to sell things anymore. I LOVE selling things, but that ship has sailed. To the extent we spoke about any claim, our credibility decreased and conversions went down. I came to understand my job was different. My team and I started to delegate the feature and benefit selling on our site to our users. That decision was worth several million dollars.

    We became coaches, curators and helpers to our Buzz Team, a special group of highly vested users. Any claim on our site came from that team, not mine. We COULD discuss our values, beliefs and the facts of what we did to prove those values and beliefs.

    If I took a plane trip to help you get a prom dress in time for a customer AND a customer noted it, then and only then would we confirm and complete the story. We didn’t stop making claims because the web is a huge wisdom of crowds cow palace. We LOWERED our authenticity and legitimacy when we pitched ourselves, so we didn’t.

    Thought people might find it interesting to see the 5 degrees difference between someone who makes money from her Internet marketing and someone who views the Internet as his church, his calling, his raison d’etre. Lori speaks of having more free time. Any free time I have is spent right here doing this, because I am hopelessly in love with the web’s power, ferocity and chameleon nature. M

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  • Mobile Revolution Arrives At Atlantic BT

    Mobile Revolution on Atlantic BT

    You may preach a lifetime before seeing the smallest sliver of revelation. Zen monks spend lifetimes in meditation and prayer. As much as I appreciate and respect such discipline, I’m too impatient to contemplate, much less live, such an eastern truth. Today the mobile revolution fell from the sky like Texas hail. Today a spiritual belief, a faith, was confirmed by science, by numbers. This post could be titled, “Portrait of the Internet Marketer As A Young Man”. I wasn’t that young when I became an Internet marketer in 1999, but grant some creative license as I share a story.

    Marty’s Internet Marketing Experience

    I fell into Internet marketing when Found Objects, the specialty gift company we started, needed a website in 1999. We didn’t have the $10K web developers were asking, so I read a book on HTML, attended a seminar on photo editing and dusted off writing chops rusting in my personal brand’s attic.

    Impatience fits Internet marketing. In 1999 no one knew nothing. There was NOTHING to lose. I moved from startup to an ecommerce site when eating became a much needed necessity. It wasn’t that FoundObjects.com wasn’t successful. The site came too late. Our company had a HUGE hit with our generation’s “Pet Rock”, called Magnetic Poetry Kit: words on magnets most put on their fridge. Magnetic Poetry Kit sold millions and destroyed our company. It goes that way sometimes. The good news is Magnetic Poetry Kit was a HUGE HIT. The bad news is MPK was a HUGE HIT.

    I have an intuitive sense about trends, I sense some trends about half a step before the crowd such as:

    • Purchased an Apple II in 1982.
    • Replaced it (much to my now disgrace) with an IBM PC in order to use Visicalc and then Lotus.
    • Created one of if not the first territory management systems in consumer products goods in 1985.
    • Being half a step ahead on PCs led to a new job as a Project Manager on M&M/Mars’ Sales, Management, Analysis and Telecommunications (SMART) system, the first territory management system in CPG.
    • Built first B2B and B2C ecommerce enabled website (FoundObjects.com), November,1999.
    • Being a half a step ahead on ecommerce led to Director of Ecommerce position on a million dollar website (that we turned into a $6M in annual sales ecommerce site).
    • Understanding print was dead despite protestations to the contrary motivated me to leave, after 7 years, my job as Director of Ecommerce to ride a bicycle across America (Martin’s Ride To Cure Cancer).
    • Returning from Martin’s Ride, everything Internet marketing felt different due to social networks and the massive amounts of User Generated Content (UGC) they generate.
    • Google responds with Panda and then Penguin algorithm updates.
    • Being half a step ahead on the NEW SEO and Ecommerce leads to becoming the Director of Marketing here at Atlantic BT.

    Mobile has been making my spidey senses tingle for a year, and The Mobile Marketing Revolution arrived at Atlantic BT in July. Here is a chart showing % of Atlanticbt.com’s traffic that is MOBILE for the last 18 months:

    Atlantic BT Mobile chart

    The Mobile Marketing Revolution

    Fear and a dinosaur was in the room. Attending the Bronto user conference, the managers of several large, sales greater than $10M a year, sites were complaining. “We didn’t know what hit us,” I heard a man in his forties explain to one of the speakers, “our mobile traffic went from nothing to something in the blink of an eye, and then from something to Holy Batman.” Yes, the man said, “Holy Batman,” and it is probably why I heard what he was saying.bronto logo for mobile revolution post

    Atlantic BT reached the Holy Batman stage with our Atlantic BT Gives Back $25,000 Mobile Grant contest. Our contest moved us from “something” to “Holy Batman” in mobile traffic bringing several important mobile marketing lessons including:

    • People use their phones to curate their lives and VOTE in contests.
    • YTD mobile traffic on AtlanticBT.com is now above 5%, the “something” threshold.
    • July’s mobile traffic was 13% of all traffic (the “Holy Batman” stage).
    • Mobile is different.

    Mobile Marketing Is Different

    Mobile first is a movement suggesting we should work from mobile out to everything else. Don’t force mobile into a process sure to be eliminated soon (static websites, say), the mobile first argument goes, think and build to the future, not the present, and the future is mobile. More than Responsive Design, mobile should promote a rethink of key Internet marketing concepts including:

    • Search and Search Marketing (mobile PPC is CHEAPER).
    • SEO.
    • Content development.
    • Email marketing.
    • Social Media Marketing.

    Don’t know about you, but just about everything I do for a living is on THAT list. In the middle of a revolution, you don’t know how things are going to come out. You know stuff is changing at an ever faster pace, but how everything and everyone will shake out is unknown. I’ve never worked for a company capable of generating millions in annual revenue that is comfortable being way ahead of the pack. They like to wait for an undeniable event and then adjust accordingly. The mobile revolution comes to Atlantic BT chart above is the mobile network effect chart your website will see for its mobile traffic too. When? Who knows, but that you WILL see a mobile traffic network effect that looks like Atlantic BT’s is a fact.

    What To Do About It

    Beyond finding and hiring great mobile development partners, every company needs to RETHINK a few things including:

    • Customer Service In Real Time On Social Networks Via Mobile Phones.
    • Content Development – One database needs to feed many channels and receiving devices.
    • Social Marketing – StumbleUpon moved past Twitter on the strength of their mobile application. Who is trying to make a mobile move on you, your company and brands?
    • Websites – static page limited sites are dead, platforms capable of curating, creating and generating UGC (User Generated Content) that are easily and powerfully mobile will rule the future of Internet marketing.
    • Campaigns, Offers and Promotions – Feels like we are reaching the end of the “never ending sale” merchandising cycle with “social shopping” powered by platforms and mobile its replacement. Figuring out what that means to your promotions calendar is beyond critical.
    • Ecommerce – how do we sell and communicate MOBILE FIRST and have that communication be MORE exciting as customers up their ante (look at our communications across devices).
    • UI – User Interface is different on phones and pads, how do we encourage and build to the conversion behavior we want (swiping, tapping, and an infinite pool look and feel created by pads).

    Hate to end a post with more questions than we started, but such is the nature of a revolution. You don’t know who, what or why is going to win in the middle, no matter how well your spidey senses tingle. The mobile marketing revolution is coming to your website, company and brands too. Get ready, and yes, that strange tingle you feel is your spidey senses in full alarm.

    Related Posts

    Mobile Revolution on Scoop.it

    Internet Marketing Goes Mobile – Join The Revolution

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  • Ecommerce Holiday Checklist – Santa Has A List, So Should You

    Cool Sant's Holiday Ecommerce Checklist
    Marty’s Ecommerce Holiday Checklist

    As we enter the Dog Days of Summer ecommerce teams are making a list and checking it twice. After more than 12 years in the trenches and over $30M in online revenue I enjoyed this quiet before the storm time of year. If you think of the holiday selling season as starting with Back-To-School and ending with Valentine’s then the starter’s gun is up and we are about to race again. Here is a quick list of holiday ecommerce tips you can check before the jolly man in the red suit gets off the beach and onto his sleigh.

    Free Shipping During Holidays

    If you don’t have free shipping promotions you are nuts, but you don’t have to do all orders all shipments all the time. Our ecommerce team liked to go out aggressive and early and then begin to tapper by using trigger points and other tactics to compete but not give away the farm. Tactics such as:

    • Start early with All Orders & All Shipments for a weekend.
    • Start on an “Early Bird” weekend right after Halloween.
    • Create and use shipping offer deadlines.
    • Create triggers in the middle of your AOV (Average Order Value you will exceed triggers by 40%).
    • Get your shipping table up early and test to make sure it is clear.

    Holiday Email Marketing

    The Internet is going to be awash in email marketing this season. Be smart about these email-marketing trends:

    • Relevant emails sell and don’t get unsubscribed from.
    • Tell a story over time.
    • Support with social and curate in customer feedback and ideas.
    • People curate emails with mobile, so look good on a phone.

    List health is important, but we never saw more than .05% churn even as we ramped our frequency in 4Q. That is good, but it could have been better.

    • You want your unsubscribe percentages to go DOWN as you increase frequency or you will take a chunk out of your list. Even .05% loss at 4x your normal email marketing frequency can hurt list health.
    • If you don’t know how to segment or create personas read David Rose’s Managing Content Marketing book and learn fast. Personas and segmentation is key to email relevancy and relevant emails are the key to money.

    Holiday Checkout Review

    Now is no time to undertake a major checkout revision since you want code that WORKS, but testing your checkout’s response time across a CDN network (where you get different checkout load reads from California, New York and Texas just to name 3) is a good idea. Focus on states where you do a lot of business. If you haven’t moved images to Akamai or a similar “edge network” think about doing so if your cart is slow in far-flung places, far-flung places that are important to your business.

    Your site MUST FLY or it will lose conversions. If your checkout is either slow, has too many steps or is hard to understand you will lose a lot of money. You are at the holiday dance now since major checkout revisions can take months, so review what can be easily changed such as:

    • Addition of trust marks.
    • Coupon Code Popups (so customers don’t LEAVE to find a code).
    • Smaller images (in weight not necessarily size).
    • Clear stepped checkout status bar ( for clear chekout flow).
    • Return popup called “easy returns” (better to answer objection/questions inside the checkout never move a customer OUT of the checkout to get answers).

    Winning Hearts, Minds and Loyalty With Gamification

    Uninterrupted deal flow is over. When all else is equal we buy from people we love. People we love never just ask for stuff, they give things too. Create fun ideas, ask your customers for feedback and be sure to do some of what they share with you and let them know THEY created that idea. Entertain, enchant and have fun and “customers” become advocates and life is good.

    Be sure to know WHEN to play and create games. After Halloween is riskier than before, but whether a game helps or hurts depends on the game and about 100 other things. If you’ve figured out how to gamify Christmas have at it.

    Your customers will appreciate a new voice, idea and tone other than BUY NOW being shouted from every rooftop. We are about to revise my white paper this week, but if you are in a big hurry here is the “trade a tweet” link:

    Gamification:Winning Hearts, Minds and Loyalty Online

    Create A Merchandising & Promotion Plan

    We used to War Room 12 to 16 weeks of holiday promotions and our merchandise mix. You can’t do it the way we did because times have changed. Social networks changed the game. Outline what you want to accomplish and react to what happens the rest of the time. Figure a 50% create ideas and 50% respond to ideas split and see how close your year follows. I would error on the side of MORE curation and LESS unidirectional deal flow since that is the trend.

    Unidirectional deal flow is when YOU think of a deal and put it out there for THEM to buy (read Social Media’s Magic Feedback Loops to know why distinctions between US and THEM are breaking down fast). We created polls asking what our customers wanted to be on sale and by how much. That poll was in an email, but would play great now on Facebook supported by StumbleUpon (see data on which social net drives the most traffic on Thank You Revolution) and Twitter.

    Hope these tips help. Time to batten down hatches and get ready for some FUN as we enter the first truly MOBILE Holidays.

    Writing more articles for Atlanticbt’s Holiday Ecommerce series:

    Christmas Is A Game, Here Is How To Play

    Does Santa HATE Your Ecommerce Site? Find Out Why

    Your Online Store Eaten By a Panda? Emergency Tips For Christmas 2012

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  • Social Media’s Magic Loops

    Social Media Marketing Magic Feedback Loops heart image

    Social Media’s Magic Feedback Loops

    Social Media’s most important gain may not be what you think. In Social Media Marketing – The Most Important ROI, I missed it too. That post from almost a year ago has been shared with more than 200,000 via Retweets, so it touched a nerve. The most important social media marketing gain is how WE are different because of THEM.

    I realized after posting Can Social Media Make Your Company Smarter that “smarter” is the LOGIC, but where are the emotions, the true drivers of our lives and loves? My first P&G boss taught a young bar soap salesman (me) that people BUY with emotion and JUSTIFY with logic. Then branding guru Faith Popcorn explained that people don’t BUY brands, they JOIN them.

    The final piece to the social media marketing three legged stool was reading David Edelman’s highly recommended Harvard Business Review article, Branding In The Digital Age: You’re Spending Money In All The Wrong Places. One of my favorite graphics linked from David’s Branding post provided the biggest connection. The graphic is part of David’s Aligning With The Customer Decision Journey HBR article:

    Branding In The Digital Age grpahic from HBR

    Edelman’s buying funnel starts with inspiration and ends with advocacy. Eye opener. When everything is equal, we “buy” from people we love and respect and who inspire us. We “buy” with a growing army of currencies such as attention, social capital (sharing links, Liking, following), advocacy and finally and possibly money and love. Money is at the end of an ever longer train and may not even be the most important payment in a digital age. Feels like we keep score differently now with money being a currency WE (business marketers) care about much more than THEM (our customers).

    Finally, one more reference to complete the idea – Is Branding An Artifact Of The Past? Brian Millar kicked off the current branding as a waste of valuable time and resources controversy in Fast Company. Branding as activity in and of itself does seem dangerously solipsistic in our conversational time that is powered by near real time social media.

    Social Media’s Magic Loops

    Struggling with a way to fit the pieces of social media marketing together? Join the club. The key may be understanding how interconnected everything is at all times. Everything you or your company does draws people to you, increasing chances for advocacy, or pushes them away, decreasing your chances for success.

    In our a flat, immediate, global time, distinctions break down. Differences between ideas such as:

    • Us and Them
    • Now and Later
    • Buying or Joining
    • Hearts and Minds

    all but go away.

    Social media’s magical, instant and robust feedback loops are WHY distinctions are fading fast. Lectures are replaced by conversations. Time is replaced with NOW, and our actions are shaped and changed by our conversations, our willingness to SHARE, LISTEN, LEARN and LOVE.

    Winning Hearts and Minds

    In the end, the philosophical social media debate about chickens and eggs is moot and doesn’t matter. Now is what we have, and now is where all marketing, branding, social media, and whatever other labels we attach, lives. Now is and has always been what we “own”, and social media’s magic loops will make some people, brands and companies rich beyond material measure. Win the hearts and minds of a zealous supporting horde to win the game.

    Social Media Marketing's Magic Feedback Loops graphic created by @Scenttrail

    More thoughts on HOW to win hearts and minds on Monday.

  • If Car Dealers Can Tune Up Real Time Shoppers, So Can Your Business

    Social Media Marketing Tipping Point

    How do you know when new marketing is about to become OLD marketing? When laggards like car dealerships start to get on board, it is a clear sign we are well past the social media marketing tipping point (lol). I’ve been fascinated with car dealers in a train wreck, have to watch kind of way. The power of an entire business segment to stick their collective head in the ground and attempt to wish away the future and the NOW has been impressive.

    Dealer Marketing Article

    This article in Dealer Marketing Magazine is a sign of HOPE for car dealers and a shot directly across any social media marketing hold outs. When car dealers understand the need for real time social media marketing, so should you (call me crazy). Internet Marketing Goes Mobile – Join The Revolution post is related as the fuel behind the pressure this article discusses. This article started on Design Revolution on Scoop.it, but has been expanded here to defeat the duplicate content police (lol).

    Note From Article
    How your dealership can handle modern consumers who expect instantaneous response. (Is Your Dealership Ready for the Real-Time Shopper?: Latest Marketing News …)

    Marty Real Time Note
    You know you’ve passed a significant social media marketing tipping point when laggards start climbing in the car. When I bought my last car, I had my Macbook Air live on their wifi, tweeting what was happening as the deal happened, checking Cars.com and other resources and checking everything the guy said in real time, AND I STILL GOT TAKEN.

    This article is 75% about what most reading this post already know – the real time and ditigal revolution is HERE – and only 25% about what to do about it. Here are my tips if, God forbid, I owned or ran a car dealership:

    EMBRACE the social media marketing and the digital revolution, don’t just accept it, by doing this…

    • Put your dealer #hashtag in clear view.
    • Create social contest and games awarding ongoing contribution and participation (stay top of mind even when I’m between cars).
    • Curate your UGC (user generated content), so you aren’t just talking to yourself about yourself all the time (an industry preoccupation).
    • Show and share, share and show – look to learn from and listen to your customers and strip the overblown rhetoric, BS and games.
    • Realize that the real VALUE you create is so much greater than the short term profit on any given deal (hard to convince your greedy sales force they are best served by long term thinking, but they are, and continuing to screw people is over, done, finished).
    • Your most important asset is NOT on the lot but online – your reputation.
    • Reduce your footprint – all those cars on the lot as advertising is stupid, expensive and unnecessary. Look hard at your 80/20 rule and manage to that.
    • Understand social media is NOT just deal flow. You can put deal flow into social NO MORE than 50% of the time. 90% deal flow confirms you don’t get social media marketing.
    • The other 50% of the time, SHARE authority reinforcing content such as reviews, information about innovations and news.
    • Ask for your customers’ social contacts and then segment your customers based on power users, middle and beginning social media marketing status. Soon every customer will use social media, but not all social media users are equal. Car dealers should know who is across the desk from them. If you are selling a car to Seth Godin or Chris Brogan, BE CAREFUL and don’t be a jerk. Good advice even if Marty Smith or Jane Smith is across the desk.
    • Use gamification (Download my free and no obligation Gamification: Winning Hearts Minds and Loyalty Online white paper) and social capital so we can discuss something other than MONEY. Also keeps me interested in you even when I am not buying a car.
    • Don’t be a jerk, since I can make your being a jerk go global in nothing flat, because someone in a position of authority where big money is involved being a jerk is some of the most viral content on earth.

    Car dealerships can change, and those who do will make more money. Those who don’t will be looking for work. As with anything, 20% of the dealers will make 80% of the change and thrive while the rest of the car dealers will look around and wonder what hit them. I can answer that too. What hit you was an empowered public who is tired and not going to take it anymore. Next time you sell me a car, it would be a good idea to know if I can reach out and touch 5K or 10K people as you are speaking to me.

    Marty

    Created New Revolutionary Scoops. Please visit:

    Martin Marty Smith on Scoop.it (home of Curation Revolution where you can discover why Scoop.it ROCKS)

    Social Media Marketing Revolution

    Digital Revolution Leaders