Your Car Club Facebook Strategy August 16, 2010
“You have to make a commitment to view [Facebook] as a critical part of your business. Everyone from the CEO to whoever scrubs your floors has to be on board with the fact that these are your customers, and this is how they want to communicate in this day and age. It requires an investment of finances, time, or both. If you treat this as another store, branch, or office in your organization and accept that these are your real customers, your odds of success go up dramatically.”
From growing Facebook leads by 4200% comes an interesting case study on raising the impact of a company’s Facebook presence to drive actual sales. Replace “business” with “club” and “sales” with “entries” and think about how it applies to your organization.
My favorite part is the emphasis that this is how people want to communicate in this day and age. If you’re not talking in those channels, they can’t hear you. This is especially true for younger people who are the future lifeblood of every volunteer organization. We’re working to make it easier.
Is Facebook or other social media part of your official club strategy?
Hashtags and permalinks August 4, 2010
While social media like Facebook is not new to most of you, the nuances of Twitter and, more specifically, hashtags may be. “Tags” are a Web 2.0 method of arbitrarily classifying content rather than selecting predefined categories from a controlled list. The unstructured define-it-as-you-go approach gives control to the user over the server and is the system de rigueur of many popular web sites such as Gmail and Flickr. A hashtag can be thought of as a “social tag”, or one that helps people interested in a common topic more easily find and consume related content. It might mean tweets on Twitter, photos on Flickr or bookmarks on Delicious.
Hashtags are most closely associated with Twitter but their concept is simple: create a short, memorable string preceded by a hash (#) that can be used to identify related content across one or more web sites or services. For example, my first real experience with Twitter was the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. Having visited India, I wanted to know what was going on and the mainstream media coverage was fragmented and repetitive. Searching Twitter for the hashtag “#Mumbai”, I followed a constantly updating stream of everyone talking about the terrorist attacks including many people on the ground with cell phones in Mumbai.
How does this apply to you? Last night we introduced a two-in-one feature for hashtags and permalinks for Premium plan customers. Set on the Basic Settings screen, each event can have a short, unique identifier to be used both as a hashtag and a URL shortening service with our new domain msreg.us:
http://msreg.us/YourHashTagBy promoting a single hashtag, you and your participants can easily find content posted anywhere about the event on services such as Twitter, Flickr and elsewhere. These shorter URLs will also fit better into tight spaces like Twitter’s 140-character limit and are unlikely to wrap in your emails. Compared to our current URLs, the msreg.us version is as much as 75 characters shorter and points to the same place as the longer link.
Ok, maybe you’re saying to yourself, “can I walk before we run?” We realize a lot of organizations still struggle with their web site let alone have a Facebook fan page or Twitter account, but that’s exactly why you need to pay attention to these trends. These aren’t just for heavy Internet users, they’re vehicles you can be using to talk with both the current and next generations of your club. Few things get people as impassioned as motorsports so use these tools to maximize your voice. Start with the easier to remember, copy and type shortened URLs and then start thinking about how to promote the hashtags in your event literature and your social media postings.
In addition to making things easier for you, we’re also making it easier for attendees to share and recommend your events on various services using the AddThis module and, starting today, the Facebook “Like” button. Anyone with a Facebook account can now “Like” your event which in turn may notify their friends and spread the word about your event and organization.
Want some ideas on how to use a hashtag to reach out and grow an audience? This talk by Baratunde Thurston titled There’s a hashtag for that from Web 2.0 Expo last year may help. Warning: some NSFW language in the video.
In addition to a social media user, Thurston is also a comedian and editor at The Onion. You’ll certainly laugh and, like me, wonder at first how this talk is relevant. But! Listen to the recaps and consider what might happen if you could reach out to a wider audience and one that might not be immediately aware of you but could be interested in what you do. If Thurston can make the swine flu funny, odds are you can reach just about anyone with your message.
Think before you leap but get a toe out there and get started!
Bits and Pieces – July July 29, 2010
With just 24 hours remaining in July this post is coming down to the wire. This installment of Bits & Pieces brings some notable enhancements for July. We’ve already teased a few of them but the previously unmentioned updates will also make lives easier for attendees and organizers alike.
First up is a change that allows attendees to update their credit cards or bank accounts on file. Since adding deferred payments last year, we’ve struggled with how to permit accounts to be added, updated and removed while still ensuring that organizers have a valid account on file at all times.
Now under the “Billing” tab, any account on file may be removed so long as it is not the account of record for a current registration. If so, the attendee will have to replace it first using the new update link.
Also new to the payment system is our previously announced refunds capability. Now send money back to the original account using the new refund button to any transaction from an event that has ended in the past 90 days. Beyond that, transactions will be locked.
The form lets you perform full or partial refunds. Unlike regular transactions where the fee is subtracted from the total, for refunds we add the fee on top of the amount. This ensures that you can easily specify how much money should be returned to the account without doing any math. We display your cancellation policy alongside the form making it easy to determine what applies in each individual case.
Refunds are currently being tested by a few customers and initial tests are going well. We’ll be making it generally available soon.
The venerable CKEditor has been our WYSIWYG editor for several years now and is loved by all… except when it comes to pasting from Microsoft Word. The truth of the matter is that Word is a real pig of a generator but as the desktop standard few people are willing to switch to something better. Instead, the latest CKEditor 3.3 has a vastly improved MS Word paste feature that strips out the illegal and irrelevant HTML that Word generates behind the scenes. This has several advantages including making your pages smaller (and faster), being more compatible across browsers and generally being easier to work with.
Two great new features are SCAYT (Spell check as you type) and the Search/Find/Replace feature, both highlighted in the screenshot above. For misspelled words, a red squiggly line is displayed and options are provided to correct your error. Well, not your error but someone else’s error. Because you never make mistakes, right? 
Finally, we added a few new attendee and assignment reports to help new organizers jumpstart their reports. Few of our built-in reports include the custom data collected by organizers in the form of event and club questions. These new reports should help organizers see additional ways of including and filtering their data as they analyze and prepare for their events.
Crossed the 230 mark July 16, 2010
Putting together a list of customers recently, the final tally counts 234 unique organizations have held events with MotorsportReg.com since January 2008. With the exception of a few groups who are now defunct due to the economy, we still manage events for every one of these groups. Our customer loyalty is a huge source of pride for us here at Pukka Software so thanks for picking and sticking with us!
In case you’ve missed it, we announce every new customer on our Facebook page as well as our Twitter feed. If you’re interested in keeping up with us, take a look at both places and consider staying in touch there as well.
Never say never (to refunds) July 13, 2010
At some time in the past I am sure that I said something to the effect of, “we never do refunds”. It’s because by the time someone needs a refund we have almost always sent the money on to the event organizer and no longer have the funds in question. Regardless, refunds due to a participant have been one of the last bastions of paper in a process that we have almost fully digitized.
Well rejoice… I am eating my words because refunds back to the original account are coming to MotorsportReg.com later this week!
Initially we’ll be offering it to a small group of trial organizations while we monitor the process and ensure it’s working as expected. We have tested everything to our satisfaction but there are some things you can’t test without running real transactions; like whether or not the correct amount of money actually winds up on the credit card!
We’re excited to remove another barrier to saving organizers time. Contact us if you want to be one of our trial customers!