May 16

Written by: Guest Blog
5/16/2008 11:47 AM

By: Jody Stoehr, Director of Business Development and Partnerships, R2i

Being in the sales field, social network theory plays a significant role in how I interact and connect with other professionals. With the emergence and evolution of social media sites, we use many networking tools today to connect with others: LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. And, I often find myself asking this question: What is the right balance of cyber interaction versus face-to-face time?

In order to maximize social network tools, it is important to remain balanced, never underestimating the power of personal interaction. The “old school” way of networking is undoubtedly the key to making memorable connections and lasting impressions. But in order to maintain a good balance, keeping a social media presence can be invaluable. For instance, a connection that may have otherwise been unknown is easily brought to the surface. Social media has become a catalyst for these connections, acting as a facilitator or hub for networking. Working together, cyber space and face-to-face exposure assist in building a strong network of professionals. You really can’t have one without the other. Which leads me to my next question: How can we harness the power of these professional connections? Please share your ideas on this topic; I look forward to your hearing your opinions.

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As I approach people in the Car Business to discuss the Social Media happening in the world, I find that there is more skepticism than acceptance. Last year the Auto Industry in the US spent 12-15 BILLION dollars on advertising alone.

Do you know if it worked ?

Did you reach the audience you wanted or did much of fall on deaf ears and eyes and end up in the garbage can ?

You have 100 million of YOUR customers on Facebook alone and yet there is almost no presence in that space. What does this Automotive 2.0 cost you ? Almost nothing, just some time and a caring attitude.

Want your CSI to improve ?

Want to sell more cars ?

Then get involved or keep doing what already does not work ? Don't believe me just look at the results.

If you want to learn more call or email me and I will share with you what I know and how I can help you take advantage before the rest of the world wakes up !

The train has left the station. Wouldn't you like this to be your Dealership ? One of your customers lives right next store but he is now going to drive 30 miles based on the social network site Pricehub.com !

Read below:

TrueCar joins GoodGuide in helping consumers obtain more information about the products they buy - information that sellers don’t necessarily want them to have. In TrueCar’s case, that information is simple yet elusive: just how much you should pay for a new car.

TrueCar aggregates data from a variety of (mostly unnamed) sources to determine how much money other people have paid for new cars around the country. It then places its findings at your disposal so you can determine whether or not that dealership down the street is offering you a good deal. The outcome, hopefully, is that you save not only hundreds and possibly thousands on your new car but the time it would have taken to comparison shop as well.

To use TrueCar, you just have to enter your zip code and the model you’re interested in buying. The price data is offered to you in a variety of visual formats such as bar graphs and charts. And it can be narrowed down to a local, regional, or national level. You can also view the history of how a car’s price has changed over time.

The site currently accounts for only about 25% of all relevant transactions. The founders want to hold off from launching it publicly until they’ve reached at least 50% and they are confident that one day they will hit 75%.

The expert panelists were concerned in particular about the sources of TrueCar’s information and its uniqueness. Jeff Weiner asked where the company got its information and why the pricing information offered by other sites like Edmunds didn’t stack up. The founders insisted that all of the data was out there and publicly available; it was just hard to tie it all together and make sense of it. And since they had built a sophisticated system to synthesize it all, their pricing insights were deeper and more informative.

Don Dodge and Sean Parker were also skeptical that the provision of this pricing knowledge would actually change consumer behavior, since people are lazy and subject to price discrimination, even when it comes to commodities.

Image by scriptingnews via Flickr

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If you are looking for new ideas to help get your business out of it's funk, then click on the video to learn more ! If you have any questions email me at allan@allanbird.com or just give a ring to 415-717-5079. Enjoy the show !

On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that Facebook worked, and in the process he inspired a revolt.

Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard two years earlier, and the site quickly amassed nine million users. By 2006, students were posting heaps of personal details onto their Facebook pages, including lists of their favorite TV shows, whether they were dating (and whom), what music they had in rotation and the various ad hoc “groups” they had joined (like “Sex and the City” Lovers). All day long, they’d post “status” notes explaining their moods — “hating Monday,” “skipping class b/c i’m hung over.” After each party, they’d stagger home to the dorm and upload pictures of the soused revelry, and spend the morning after commenting on how wasted everybody looked. Facebook became the de facto public commons — the way students found out what everyone around them was like and what he or she was doing.

But Zuckerberg knew Facebook had one major problem: It required a lot of active surfing on the part of its users. Sure, every day your Facebook friends would update their profiles with some new tidbits; it might even be something particularly juicy, like changing their relationship status to “single” when they got dumped. But unless you visited each friend’s page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely. Browsing Facebook was like constantly poking your head into someone’s room to see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you had 200 friends on the site — a fairly typical number — there weren’t enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time.

To read the complete article

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?ref=magazine

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Web 2.0 Is Everywhere

No matter which department you're in, Web 2.0 technologies have had an impact. If you've been ignoring their prevalence and adoption, you're at risk of falling behind in your career and your business is at risk of losing ground to its competitors who are tuned into this trend.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we deliver news about Web 2.0's impact on business in addition to news about web technologies in general. Depending on your area of interest, you can find a lot of great information on this subject in our archives. Or simply bookmark this post for easy reference.

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Image via Wikipedia A new set of business practices are slowly but steadily starting to creep into the way companies sell their wares to customers. This new trend in selling is being called “Sales 2.0” by some. It’s an unsophisticated, yet appropriate, moniker for this phenomenon, since many of the tools and methods that are fueling the Sales 2.0 trend have their roots in the Web 2.0 movement.
Before we focus on Sales 2.0, it is instructive to examine and to try to define Web 2.0, which we do later in this paper. Indeed, the definitions of Web 2.0 and Sales 2.0 are problematic since both are relatively new phenomena. They are also hard to define because they are grass roots or bottom-up movements, and as such, have very hazy boundaries. It’s very difficult to determine where Web 1.0 ends and where Web 2.0 begins and the same can be said for Sales 1.0 and Sales 2.0.
Web 2.0 is a movement fostered by incremental improvements in technology and greater adoption of the Internet which fundamentally is altering how we live today. It’s changing how we gather information, how we shop, how we interact with friends and colleagues and touching innumerable other facets of our daily lives.
One of the central pillars of this movement – if not the central pillar – is collaboration. Web 2.0 is allowing us to work together and to share information and experiences in ways we never could before. It is empowering us to convey our thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams and to make them easily accessible to others online. In doing so, it’s allowed us to tap into a collective online wisdom that far surpasses what we could accomplish as individuals in the offline world.
Now businesses are trying to harness some of the same empowering forces of Web 2.0 and to apply them to their sales and marketing efforts. They know from their Web 2.0 experience that working collaboratively online will allow them to better understand and connect with their customers and to market and sell their products and services more easily.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Google doesn't just want to grab market share with its new Web browser, Chrome. It wants to change the way we use computers

by Heather Green - Business Week Article

Browser wars? On steroids. When Google (GOOG) announced on Sept. 1 that it was releasing its own Web browser, Chrome, the immediate buzz was that the bruising battles over browser domination, played out between Netscape and Microsoft (MSFT) in the late 1990s, were back on.

Google, though, has much bigger ambitions. The goal, say Google execs, is not merely to win share of an existing market, but to change the very nature of Internet browsing—and the way we use computers. If Chrome works as planned, it will lead much of computing from the desktop—Microsoft's domain—toward remote data centers. These, in Google's lingo, are known as the "cloud." Google runs the biggest and most efficient data centers on earth, and moving much of the world's computing from desktops into its clouds is the heart of the company's strategy. "Google really believes the future of the Web is running applications on the Web," says Danny Sullivan, who runs Calafia Consulting, a Web consulting firm. "They want to be leading the charge."

As this battle commences, Microsoft enjoys a towering head start. Its Internet Explorer dominates the browser market, with 75% share. And Microsoft is launching its latest upgrade, IE8, which is loaded with new features. Google's Chrome, by contrast, appears bare-bones. Its power, say Google engineers, will come from its ability to run applications faster and more securely, especially those hosted outside the PC, on the cloud. Unlike Google's top-secret search algorithms or the proprietary software it uses to carry out its searches, Chrome was born as an open-source system.

Asking More of Browsers

To understand what's new, think of Netscape, the browsing sensation 14 years ago at the dawn of the World Wide Web. The goal back then was simply to open and read Web pages. This is still important, of course, whether Web surfers are reading a story in The New York Times or checking out a friend's home page on MySpace. Most browsers today, including Mozilla Firefox and Apple's (AAPL) Safari, have grown to provide that Web browsing service.

Google, though, wants people to use browsers to do much more, particularly to run software applications, like word processing, spreadsheets, video editing, and conferencing. In Google's scheme, the browser is a gateway into the clouds, one that will eventually be tapped from anywhere—a PC, a mobile phone, perhaps even a television. And many of the applications available in the clouds, from calendars to e-mail, will likely compete directly with Microsoft's dominant suite of Office applications, including Excel and Outlook. Says Google co-founder Sergey Brin: "What we have is a lightweight engine for running Web applications that doesn't have the baggage of an operating system." Investors on Sept. 2 drove up Google shares nearly 2%, to 465.25.

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