Thank You Veterans

Anonymous Veteran Honoring Others at Santa Monica Veterans Memorial

I want to take a moment on Veterans Day to thank all the men and women who have served in our country’s military.  While we should always remember our veterans, today is a special day to recognize sacrifices made by so many to protect our freedoms and rights.

I took the above photo on November 11, 2003 at the Veteran’s Memorial in Palisades Park in Santa Monica, California near where Wilshire Boulevard hits Ocean Avenue.  The Santa Monica Veterans Memorial is a very unique memorial consisting of 5 granite columns representing each branch of the military.  At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month (which is when the Armistice for WWI was signed), the shadows from the columns line up exactly with the bricked-in shadows.  The man in the picture is standing on one of the bricked-in shadows and it is amazing to watch the shadows align with the brickwork.

Our family was visiting the memorial that year and just before 11am, this gentleman solemnly walked up to each of the 5 columns.  He placed a rose at the foot of the column, took 2 steps backward and snapped off a salute which he held for 10 seconds or more.  He then repeated this procedure at each of the columns.  It was a very moving tribute by just one individual, and one of my fondest Veterans Day memories.

Is There a Disconnect Between Social Media Job Descriptions and Compensation?

A less-than-satisfying experience with a recruiter for a social marketing/community manager opening at a $1 Billion+ retailer got me thinking this week about social media job descriptions and compensation this week.  I also noticed that the blog post with My Social Media Job Description continues to be my most frequently viewed post.  Plus, I happened to see the summary of Forum One’s 2009 Social Media and Community Compensation Study.

So, a perfect storm of coincidences led me to this conclusion:

For many companies, there appears to be a disconnect between the experience and expertise they seek and the compensation they are offering.

Let’s begin with my first experience this week.  The $1 Billion+ retailer that got me started on this rant is looking for a combination social marketing and community manager.  And this company is not just looking for any old social media “joe”, they want to hire a social media guru who can:

• build a social media and community plan
• execute innovative campaigns
• position key company players and partners as experts
• manage blogs and other social media channels
• collaborate with other departments
• be responsible for customer relationship marketing and segmentation
• have knowledge of ecommerce, content management systems, customer service software and best practices
• create a community central hub
• present the brand online
• stay on top of social media trends and viral technology

Of course, they want a candidate who has excellent verbal and written communication skills,  has a passion for social media and has a demonstrated experience in a wide variety of social activities.  The kicker is that the target salary range for this company is just $50k to $60k per year – which is at least 50% lower than what I would rate the position for a company of this size with a well-known brand especially when the company is lagging in their use of social media.

Next we’ll move to the latest social media community compensation study from Forum One.  The Forum One study is good as it presents some interesting data points in an industry where there is a lack of good data and presents an average salary of $81k.  On the other hand, just looking at the salary averages and median in the report is misleading.  As noted in the excerpt below, there are peaks on both the high end (more than $150k) and on the low end (< $25k).  For medium to large companies and established brands, the peaks on the high end make definite sense.  The peaks on the low end are for non-profit and other volunteer-run communities and should not be included in the averages.

Here is an excerpt from the 2009 Forum One Compensation Report executive summary:

The average salary of the research participants, $81k, is the same as last year. The mean was $77.5k, which is $10k higher last year. As in 2008, there were peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k). There were also peaks and dips throughout the salary spectrum for 2009, including peaks for the following salary ranges; $50-55k, $65-$70k, $90-$95k and $100-$105k.

Several respondents mentioned feeling like they were being inadequately compensated because of lack of data available regarding community and social media salaries, as well as lack of understanding of community and social media ROI relative to their organization’s activities.

For comparisons to the 2008 report, check out my blog post “So What Do Community Managers Make?”

The entire 2009 40+ page report is available from ForumOne for $99.

From Forum One 2009 Social Media Community Compensation Survey - Average and Median Salary by Region

With that, here is my advice to companies who are in the market for a social media and community people:

1. Broad experience is critical – Social media crosses many corporate silos and in addition to strong social media credentials you should expect your candidate to have experiences in marketing, strategy, product marketing, press and analyst relations, business development, technology, sales, project management and quantitative analysis.  The candidate will need to use all of their vast experience to bear in order to be successful in planning for and implementing social media across your organization.  And by the way, the social media credentials are pretty easy to validate – by just looking at someone’s blog, Twitter stream and LinkedIn profile, you can get a pretty good handle on how someone uses social media in their day-to-day life and how they would use it in your company.
2. Strategy and planning experience is very important too – Social media is not another channel, it is a strategy for listening to and interacting with customers, partners and prospects.  In many cases, the candidate will need to develop and sell the social media strategy internally before embarking on an implementation plan.  And quickly dismiss candidates who have not shown that they are able and willing to roll up their sleeves to implement their social media programs.
3. Look for maturity – The question is: do you really want to trust your social to a 25-year just a couple of years out of college and who has not really been around the block yet?.  I’m not saying that the 25-year old can’t do a great job, it’s just that it’s a risk I wouldn’t take.  In many cases, the candidate will become the external voice for your company and brand, and you want someone who has done this more than once.  The candidate is also going to have to work with people from throughout the company from the C-level executives down to people who actually ‘touch’ the customer so it is important for the candidate to be able to be credible at all of these levels.
4. There are only a so many social media gurus and rockstars – If you specify that you are seeking a social media guru or rock-star, then expect to pay a premium as these people are rare and they have many options.  If you are not willing to pay for this type of expert, then don’t use these descriptors in your job posting.  To further illustrate my point, check out my Spend It On Beckham blog post which includes a discussion of productivity between the best (rockstar) and worst (mediocre) software developers.
5. Be realistic with the salaries – Or as my wife reminds me, “don’t get cheap”.  Getting cheap or settling for second or third string talent when hiring for a social media position is not going to get where you need to go.  In fact, it could even set back your social media efforts by 6 to 12 months or longer.  Check out my blog post on Community Managers and Quarterbacks to see why.  There may not be an comparable salary for this position in your company because you are seeking both a broad generalist who has specific experiences in driving social media programs.  This also means that companies will need to triangulate the salary by comparing positions in several parts of the company and coming up with a hybrid salary model.  This also means that companies will need to triangulate the salary by comparing positions in several parts of the company and coming up with a hybrid salary model.  If you are a medium to large firm with an established brand, you should also try to match your comp ranges to companies in your peer group.

Please share any other ‘disconnect’ experiences so collectively we can educate all companies who will be hiring in the near future to beef up their social media efforts.  I look forward to your comments.

_______________

11/12/09 Update – I just Amber Naslund’s excellent post titled “Hiring for Social Media: The Ugly Side“.  Amber outlines 5 missteps that companies take when putting together social media and community job descriptions.

Without giving away too much, here are 5 missteps that companies make with their job descriptions:

1. Heavy focus on tools
2. Assuming that anyone can do this job (and cheaply)
3. Neglecting engagement
4. Thinking content is inherently valuable
5. Making social media synonymous with traffic or lead generation

Amber’s entire post and extensive list of comments are worth reading too.

Using Quantcast To Measure Your Website’s Audience

Are you interested in measuring metrics for your website?  Are you already using Google Analytics or some other service?  In any case, you should definitely check out the free service from Quantcast.  Quantcast will not necessarily replace your current analytical solution, but it is a good complementary solution to track your website traffic because of the demographic, frequency and lifestyle stats and way they track your data.  And since it’s free, there is no reason not to try it.

I was reminded of Quantcast last week as I’ll be using it for one of my upcoming clients and I am amazed at the types of and formats of reports I was able to get from their free service.  For example, some of the more interesting stats provided by Quantcast include:

• Traffic – stats like people, visits, pageviews, pageviews per person and visits per person.  This information can be viewed by day, week or month over a range of 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or all.  This is very similar to what you are used to seeing in Google Analytics.
• Geographic – a breakdown by country, state, DMA and city.  For some reason, my blog is big in the New York DMA and the city of London even though I am based in Los Angeles.
• US Demographics – since Quantcast uses cookies, they can infer gender, age ranges, ethnicity, income and education.  My blog seems to be most popular among the 35 to 49 crowd
• Traffic frequency – which identifies whether people are addicts, regulars or passers-by.  For my blog, 17% of the visitors are regulars and they account for 39% of the visits and 83% are passers-by accounting for 59% of the visits.
• Lifestyle or Audience Also Likes – this section identifies other types of websites that visitors frequent which can identify brand preference and life style traits.  My highest affinity is science/nature at 2.1x which means that my visitors are 2.1 times more likely to visit science and nature sites than the typical internet visitor.

For a more detailed view, here is a screen shot of my blog’s Quantcast page:

Tom Humbarger's Blog on Quantcast - click on image to see in full screen

If you have a hosted WordPress.com blog (like mine), Quantcast is already gathering statistics on your site.  Otherwise, you need to set up an account and add your website so Quantcast can start tracking metrics.  Here is an article that describes the steps to set up Quantcast.

The other neat thing about Quantcast is that you can also use the service to review the statistics on other websites, such as your competition.

What is Social Media? Courtesy of Marta Kagan

This presentation from self-described bonafide marketing genius Marta Kagan (@MZKagen) is one of the best ones I’ve seen recently on Social Media.  Not only is it informative, but it is highly entertaining and beautifully visual with some great data points.

Marta reminds viewers that social media is more than just another marketing channel.  In fact, social media is a corporate mindset and has a role in:

• PR
• Customer Service
• Loyalty-Building
• Collaboration
• Networking
• Thought Leadership

The other key point that Marta made is “to stop thinking campaigns and start thinking conversations“.

The presentation wraps up with this simple rules:

1. Listen
2. Engage
3. Measure

With that, here is Marta’s complete presentation:

Note that this presentation is a follow-up to Marta’s presentation from a year ago called “What The F**K is Social Media?“

Using Slideshare to Promote Your Business

Another great and easy way for small-to-medium businesses to leverage the social media channel is set up a company account on Slideshare.

Slideshare claims to be the largest community for sharing presentations and other documents with over 23 million visitors  who view more than 60 million pages per month.  It’s free to use and it is a great place to store company presentations, whitepapers and other marketing collateral.  Presentations and documents can either be totally open to the public or you can set the privacy to only you or to people with whom you share the secret URL .  Slideshare is a great way to promote and broaden your company’s exposure with a fairly low level of involvement on your part.

I also find many great presentations and documents on Slideshare, so it is worth your time to explore some of the great content.  You can easily embed a presentation in a blog or share it on other social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Delicious.  Slideshare  has many other features like events, slidecasts, groups, a community and widgets that are worth checking out too.

After completing your profile page, uploading content to Slideshare is very easy.  Simply click on the Upload button, locate the file or files you want to upload from your computer, then add a title, description and tags.  Within a couple of minutes, your files will be ready to be viewed on the Slideshare site.  It is really important to include a complete description and as many relevant tags for each file as this will make it easier for others to find it and to get picked up by search engines.

Some quick tips for using Slideshare for your business include:

1. Create an account with your company name in it
2. Make your profile as complete as possible and include a logo, picture, address and URL
3. Upload great content and make sure that the title, description and tags are complete
4. Tell people your content is on Slideshare by sharing with prospects, customers and others,  and by sharing on other social media sites

As you can see from the example company profile below, you can include a fairly detailed profile including address, phone number and website.  All presentations or documents that you upload are also displayed on your “My Slidespace” page along with the number of times each document has been viewed.

Example Company Profile from One of My Clients on Slideshare

For businesses that want to use Slideshare as a lead generation channel, there are now two options called Adshare and LeadShare that were launched in October.  I have not had an occasion to try either service, but I did explore the website to see how they work.

AdShare is a way to get targeted visitors to view your content.  When you sign up you get to pick which documents you want to share and the type of content or category that you want to sponsor.  You only pay when someone clicks on one of your documents.  The current rate is $.25 if you don’t select a geography and $.35 per click if you select a geography.  AdShare works a bit like Google Adwords but your message can be longer than 50 words and documents on Slideshare are viewed as ‘content’ and not ‘advertising’.

LeadShare allows you to leverage your content by capturing the viewer’s contact information.   Pricing starts at $1 for a call to action and moves to $3 per lead if you want to capture contact information.  As you add additional information you want to capture, the price per lead increases.  For example, it costs an extra $2 to get a phone number and $2 per qualifying question.

I am sure I will experiment with one or both services before the end of the year.  For more on these services, I have embedded Slideshare’s presentation that explains the programs.

While there are other file sharing solutions on the market today including Scribd, DocStoc and Yudo, I think that Slideshare is the current gold standard and definitely worth using to promote your business.

Social Media ROI Is Like An Oreo Cookie

While watching Olivier Blanchard’s great presentation about Social Media ROI that I ‘discovered’ on Mashable this week, I had a revelation.

Social Media ROI is like an Oreo Cookie!

It would be hard to find anyone who hasn’t taken apart an Oreo cookie to eat the frosting.  Some people claim that the middle of an Oreo is the best while others claim that there are no calories in the frosting which means that it doesn’t really matter.  In any case, one of the slides in Oliver’s presentation resonated with me and it made me think of Oreo cookies.

There are a lot of activities that people quantify and measure when looking at the ROI of an investment – but the only 2 ones that matter are the Investment Impact and the Financial Impact.  The investment relates to the limited resources of  people, technology and time for the activity, and the financial impact relates to increased revenues or decreased costs.

Social Media ROI is Like An Oreo Cookie (loosely borrowed idea from Oliver Blanchard and Nabisco)

In other words, the Investment and Financial Impacts are the cookie outsides and the non-financial action is the stuff in the middle.  And just like an Oreo cookie, the stuff in the middle doesn’t really matter.  At least it doesn’t matter from in a return or investment sense.  Web visitors, impressions, customer complaints, positive reviews, blog posts, click-throughs, emails, Twitter followers, blog comments, etc. do not translate directly into quantifiable revenues until those actions convert into incremental sales or confirmed cost reductions.  The non-financial impacts are predictors of success, but they are not success in and of themselves.

When it comes down to it, the only things that matter is how much did you spend and how much did you make.

Most importantly, Olivier says to:

• Establish a baseline – so you can measure the changes from
• Create activity timelines – so you can correlate specific actions to
• Analyze sales revenue along several dimensions – in terms of Frequency, Reach and Yield or F.R.Y. (transactions per month, net new customers, $ amount per transaction)

With that introduction, I give you Olivier Blanchard’s Basics of Social Media ROI presentation from Slideshare which he originally presented at the Social Fresh Conference in August 2009.  He uses images from the 1970’s British television show, UFO Series, which makes for an interesting and amusing presentation:

You can also follow Olivier on Twitter at @theBrandBuilder.

Speaking of ROI, Maddie Grant summarized 6 other blog posts on Social Media ROI in Social Media Today this week.  Here are repeats of her links:

1. NTEN – The Three Dimensions of Social Media ROI
2. The BrandBuilder Blog by Olivier Blanchard – Defining Social Media ROI once and for all, and understanding the action-reactive-return narrative
3. Adam Cohen (A Thousand Cuts) – The Basics of Social Media ROI
4. Social Computing Journal – Measuring Social Media ROI: Does size matter?
5. BrandSavant – What’s Wrong With Social Media Marketing Strategy
6. Jacob Morgan – The Importance of a Social Media ROI Diagnostic

Forrester Groundswell Awards for 2009 — commonground Wins Supporting Award

Forrester Research announced the winners of their 2009 Groundswell awards today at the Forrester Consumer Forum.  The 13 winners in the 3rd annual contest were honored for “excellence in achieving business and organizational goals with social technology applications.”

According to Josh Bernoff, senior vice president of idea development at Forrester and co-author of the Groundswell (the book):

Every year the quality of business social applications goes up, and marketers become more sophisticated.  This year’s winners stood out in a very competitive field; all of them demonstrate not just creative use of social technologies but impressive, measurable results.

For 2009, the winners by division are as follows:

Business-To-Consumer (B2C) Division:

• Listening: NASCAR Fan Council by Vision Critical
• Talking: Lion Brand Yarn Blog and Podcast by Converseon
• Energizing: Norton Advocates by Zuberance
• Supporting: myFICO® Online Customer Community by FICO
• Embracing: Scholastic Book Clubs Reading Task Force Community by Communispace

Employee And Non-Profit Division:

• Managing: UPSjobs Problem Solved by TMP Worldwide
• Social Impact: Flowerdale (Australia) Bush Fire Social Outreach

Business-To-Business (B2B) Division:

• Listening: CDW Advisory Board by Communispace
• Talking: The Conversation by Eloqua
• Energizing: UNLEASH 2009, The Mediasite User Conference by Sonic Foundry
• Spreading: MetricStream Community by Regalix
• Supporting: commonground Global Community For Environmental Professionals by EDR
• Embracing: The Archer E-GRC Ecosystem by Archer Technologies

Links to coverage of the Forrester Groundswell 2009 Awards are below:

• Forrester Groundswell 2009 Awards press release announcement
• Groundswell 2009 Awards blog post by Josh Bernoff with details on all of the winners
• commonground Groundswell Award announcement

commonground is a virtual community for everyone in the environmental and property due diligence industries to share ideas, ask questions and network

I am most excited with the news of EDR’s commonground community winning the B2B Division Supporting award because I have done a bit of consulting work for them this year.  Mark Wallace is the VP of Social Media at EDR and I’ve known Mark since his days at Shared Insights and Mzinga.  Besides hockey and his family, making sure that the community was thriving has been one of his top priorities over the last year.  Barbara Hannan, the commonground community manager, also deserves a great deal of credit for driving growth and conversations on the site.

According to the Groundswell blog post, commonground won the B2B Supporting award for “helping to increase EDR’s search ranking and contributed to 93% of its clients rating its service good or excellent.”  In addition,

commonground has also contributed to EDR’s customer loyalty. According to a recent customer satisfaction survey, nearly 90% of clients indicated they feel EDR strives to provide great customer service, 88% indicated feel strongly that EDR is a thought leader, and 93% rated EDR’s customer service as excellent or good.

Since September of 2008, EDR’s Alexa ranking has improved by 446,000 positions and traffic is now in the top 1.29% of web-sites in the world. Since commonground version 2.0 was launched on June 1, 2009, Google indexed pages have increased by over 3000%.

commonground’s first effort to offer premium content far exceeded expectations, achieving 170% of the revenue target. And, members are getting referrals and business, which ultimately helps drive sales for EDR. With the feedback received, we will be introducing a standardized nationwide training curriculum and an environmental service provider directory.

The commonground community now has more than 5,200 members and this growth has taken place during an unprecedented recession in the commercial real estate market.

Congratulations to Mark, Barbara and the rest of the EDR/commonground team for this well-deserved honor.

Customizing Your Twitter Profile Page

Have you customized your Twitter page yet?  If not, you should be and here is how I did it.  It’s pretty easy to do, and a person or company with a customized page is more likely to generate attention, conversation and followers.  Plus, a customized page shows that you’ve taken the additional step to share more information about yourself – and transparency is what social media is all about.

For example, I rarely follow anyone who does not have a profile picture, a web link or bio.  And if someone has a nice background page, I am more likely to follow them back and check out some of their links.  Since Twitter only lets you display a 140-character Bio and a thumbnail picture, a customized display lets you go into much greater detail.  This is especially important if you have a business account on Twitter since Twitter’s default screen gives users a lot of screen real estate on the left hand side of the screen that you can use to tell your own story beyond the 140-character limit of Twitter.  On most screen resolutions used today (i.e. 1280×800), there is at least 250 pixels wide by 650 pixels tall or about 2 1/2 inches by 6 1/2 inches.  Unfortunately, the links you put in your Twitter background are not clickable as the file is just an image.

While there are many different ways – some free and some not so free – to customize your Twitter background, I wanted to be able to fully control what I put on my screen.  Plus, some attempts at customizing a Twitter background actually look pretty bad so I know others must be feeling the pain too.  My approach uses tools that almost every has already or are relatively inexpensive to purchase.  I used Microsoft Powerpoint (download my template on Slideshare) for most of the work, Nattyware’s free Pixie tool to identify color palettes and SnagIt to generate a JPG image.

These are the 3 easy steps I used to customize my Twitter page.

1. Create Powerpoint slide and generate JPG – First, you can start with the Twitter Background – Generic that you can download from Slideshare.  On the template, you can edit the file to include your name, a picture, some details about you, URLs for your website and blog, and additional ways to connect with you on other social media platforms.  For my template, you can change the background image and sidebar background to any color that suits you.  Notice that the background color should be all one color as you will be matching this color using Twitter settings in a later step.  Many people select colors that match or complement their logo, or select colors that set them apart from other users.  Be careful about getting too wild with your color schemes as that can definitely be a turn-off.

When you are done with customizing the template, I select Print->Preview to see what the image will look like.  From there, you need to generate an JPG image of the screen shot.  My preference is to use SnagIt from TechSmith (see my SnagIt blog post for more), but the new Windows 7 has a Snipping Tool that will accomplish the same thing.  You can also save the file as a JPG in Powerpoint, however the resulting JPG file on my PC was not as crisp as using SnagIt.

When you are still in Powerpoint, you need to use a color picker tool to get the HTML color code for the colors you have selected.  My preferred tool is called Pixie from Nattyware.  For example, the dark gray below is A6A6A6 and the lighter gray is D9D9D9.

Using Powerpoint to Create Twitter Custom Screen

2. Upload JPG file to Twitter – After you have a JPG image of your customized Twitter screen, you need to upload the file to Twitter.  Under the Settings in the top menu, select the Design sub-menu.  Then use Choose File to upload the JPG file you saved in the first step and Save Changes.

Upload Your Saved JPG File with Custom Background Via Twitter Settings

3. Modify background colors to match JPG – The last step is to change the design colors in Twitter.  First, you will want to use the HTML Colors noted above.  You need to change the background color to the same background color on your Powerpoint template.  I have found that matching the sidebar color to the color of the box and the links to the color of the background on the template works well.  While some people like to add color to their text, my recommendation is to stick with black or a dark shade of gray.  Click Save Changes when you are done.  Then it’s time to check out what you’ve done.  If you don’t the end result, you can easily adjust the colors or even redo the template.

Change Design Colors to Match JPG File in Twitter Settings

With these simple steps, you should be able to easily customize your Twitter background in 15 to 20 minutes – and take advantage of providing more information about you and your brand.

Crowdsourcing New Car Pricing

TrueCar - Find Out What Others Really Paid

Wouldn’t you like to know exactly what others have recently paid for the new car you are thinking of buying?

You no longer have to wonder with the new TrueCar pricing service.  TrueCar is a spin-off from Zag.com and opened for business in April.  Zag.com and TrueCar are founded by Scott Painter, a serial entrepreneur who was also part of CarsDirect and PriceLock.com.  The parent company, Zag.com, provides a white label platform for auto retailing to companies like USAA, American Express, CapitalOne and Overstock.com, and their mission is to make the automotive retailing experience better for both the consumer and dealer.

Ok, TrueCar is not actually crowdsourcing new car pricing in the literal sense.  But they are collecting and analyzing data on individual new car sales from over 30% of all transactions taking place in the US.  In a sense, TrueCar is bringing social media openness and transparency to the process of purchasing a new car by leveraging the power of crowds to transform pricing practices that formerly favored the auto dealers.  The TrueCar pricing service provides consumers with the power of real information to transform the new car buying experience and minimize the stress involved with buying a new car while shortening the purchase cycle for automobile dealers.  Essentially, the no-haggle, upfront pricing is a win-win proposition for consumers and dealers.

TrueCar has a very intuitive and easy-to-use interface.  You start out by selecting a make of auto and inputting your zip code.  Then, you select the specific model, style and options.  TrueCar then provides you with a very good-looking and graphical set of reports showing a curve of what others paid, a bar chart, details of specific prices paid, price history over the last 6 months, vehicle pricing table and cost breakdown.

Being involved with business intelligence and reporting for much of my career, I am very impressed with how TrueCar is serving up their price reports.  Until you have a chance to check it out for yourself, here is an example of the Details report which shows the actual number of purchases in my local area over the last 4 weeks.

TrueCar New Car Pricing Details for 2010 Toyota Prius

So, how reliable is the information from TrueCar?  Here is what they say about the pricing on their website:

The TrueCar Price Reports are backed by data and rigorous statistical analysis. Today, we collect extensive sales data on more than 30% of all new vehicles sold. All data shown on the site is less than 4 weeks old. TrueCar does not manipulate the raw data, nor do we interpret it. TrueCar has no hidden agenda, is not beholden to anyone, and nothing is holding us back from reporting the facts. It is TrueCar’s goal to equally serve consumers and dealers.

And how does TrueCar’s price analysis differ from other pricing services like Kelly Blue Book and Edmunds?  The primary difference is that the other services use opinions of what the price should be instead of actual prices paid recently.

Finally, as CEO Scott Painter said in an article in Wired in April:

We’re transforming the market.  Those dealers not willing to give an upfront price are going to go out of business.

TrueCar is offered both online, and by phone at 1-888-TRUECAR, all free of charge.

Here are some related links to check out.

• TrueCar Price Tutorial
• TrueCar The Truth Blog
• TrueCar on Twitter
• Zag.com whitepaper – The Case for Upfront Pricing
• CEO Scott Painter interview on vator.tv

Creating a LinkedIn Group for Your Business

I wrote a blog post in August 2008 about creating a LinkedIn Group for a community site.  Since then, LinkedIn has made it easier to set up groups and they have added new features to the Group pages to make them more useful.  For example, you can now hold interactive discussions, post links to articles and blog posts, set up RSS feeds, add job openings and create sub-groups.  Additional information on LinkedIn Groups can be found on the LinkedIn website.

With these new features and the growing influence of LinkedIn in the social media world, every business should set up their own LinkedIn Group – and you can set it up in less than 5 minutes.  Here are some quick tips, benefits and ideas for maintaining your group.

Example of a LinkedIn Group Profile I Set Up For One of My Clients

Benefits – LinkedIn is seen as a business-oriented social networking site and people tend to act more professional in this network than they would in Facebook or MySpace.  Plus, many professionals tend to visit this site more frequently than they would other social media sites as they use LinkedIn to research companies and potential contacts.

There are many great benefits for having a LinkedIn Group for your business.

• Individual Visibility — when someone joins your group, they can elect to have a small badge representing the group display in their profile (and people generally opt in for displaying the badge).  This badge signifies that someone has a particular affinity with your company and brand.
• Corporate Visibility — the group gives your company additional visibility.  When someone sees the group badge in your profile or the profiles of others, they may click on it to see what the group is all about.  If a customer joins your group, it shows that they are committed to what you are doing and makes them ’stickier’ and   less likely to take their business to another company.
• Corporate Announcements — you can use the Groups feature to contact your group members with an announcement or other news.  While you can only use this feature once per week, it is a low cost way to keep members informed about new programs, offers or company news.  The alternative would be to use an email or newsletter solution that could cost you from $25 to $100 per month or more.
• Job Postings — you can also use your group to post job openings for your company or affiliates.  Only members of the group can see the postings, so this is another reason for people to join your group.
• Better Connections – even if you are not directly connected to another group member, you can still send that member a message or invite them to connect with you because you share the group affiliation.
• Group Newsfeed — any activity in the group is reported in the news feed for anyone who has joined the group.  For example, I can easily see if there are any new posts or news added to the group site by reviewing my newsfeed.  Users can also opt to get daily or weekly email updates of new activity.

Getting Started – It is pretty easy to set up a group, and much easier than it used to be.  After following these simple steps, your group will be set up in less than 5 minutes.

1. Go to LinkedIn Create a Group
2. Upload a logo or picture
3. Fill in the details for your group
4. Click on the Create a Group button

Building Membership – Once you create the group, you need to build up the member base.  You should definitely put a prominent button on your website that says “Join Our LinkedIn Group”.  Creating a group would make a great blog post topic for your corporate blog and you should also include it a newsletter or email blast.  Some people even put a link to the LinkedIn Group in the footer of their email template.

Maintaining Your Page – The final step is the ongoing maintenance of the Group page.  You don’t have to update the page daily, but you should definitely spend some time adding fresh content to the group on a weekly basis to keep your company in the forefront of your members’ minds.  You can easily add the URL of an interesting news article or blog post, or start up a discussion topic that may be of interest to your group members.