Motorcycles and Social Media

This weekend, as part of my assignment, I had to make an analysis of the social media efforts made by a certain industry. Without even thinking twice I chose MOTORCYCLES!

It was actually kind of fun when you research and follow something you like… I compared Yamaha, Honda and Harley Davidson.  The first two were lagging a lot with respect to the use of tools available with Web 2.0 but Harley had a really good strategy in place.

Their website had lots interaction, sharing and collaboration. You could customize your bike and buy accessories from their website (the others you could only print a list and go to the dealer), upload pictures from your rides and have access to their events calendar, ride plans and even schedule a tour to their manufacturing plants! You could really feel the sense of community! And on top of that, all of their social media websites were integrated. You could become a fan on Facebook, MySpace, check their YouTube Channel with lots of cool videos… And that’s probably one of the reasons they have over two million fans on Facebook (I am one of them now!) versus less than 40 thousand from the other two combined.

If you analyze it from a business perspective it really makes sense! I could see the benefit of social media… Now, when you look at my personal use… what a waste of time!!!  Next time I’ll share my experience creating my profiles!

Why should I care?

I never understood the need that we seem to have nowadays to share everything that we do or think...

"Going to the movies!" - Good for you!
"Just came back from my yoga class, it was great!" - Who cares!

I can be alone on that, but I hate social media! I'd much rather ride!

Maybe it is payback (my wife surely is laughing at me all the time!), but now not only I have to join all social media sites I know, but I also have to blog!!!

This month I started my last class for the Marketing Certificate Program at UC Berkeley (Strategic Marketing 2.0: Social Media and Other Innovative Technologies). When I saw the name of the class I had a bad feeling... when I started reading the first book and it was explaining how to create a blog I knew I was in trouble... but when I read the assignment for my first module I said $#*!

During the next few weeks I'll try to share my experience with social media. Maybe I'll learn something... If not at least you can laugh at my misery as I struggle in my journey!