The Sound Room

Social Networking

by John Wanderscheid

So I am pretty new to the whole concept of online social networking but while doing some research last week I found a really cool website. YUB.com is a social networking website that rewards you for doing online shopping and making recommendations. It is a points system that basically works like a cash back bonus.

YUB is "buy" spelled backwards and is an acronym meaning "Young Urban Buyer". Members of the site are called "Yubbers" and the site gives you the opportunity to meet people with similar interests in music, movies, fashion and a whole lot more. It is sort of like going to the mall with a group of friends but in this case, the mall is virtual and the friends are online. YUB.com gives you the opportunity to rave about everything from your favorite drink to your favorite religion or politician.

Initially, a few red flags were raised when I learned that it was owned by buy.com but after further research, the idea is really intriguing to me and I think it could be interesting to Aperion customers. I know Aperion customers are smart and this is a perfect opportunity for you to share your insights with other smart consumers and earn rewards for your time. After all, you are the go to guy or girl anyway, so you might as well be rewarded for your opinions.

Check out YUB.com and if you would like to see Aperion products there, follow the recommendation link on their site and ask them to add us to their virtual shopping mall. Even if you don't join, it is a cool place to visit and read peer reviews on all kinds of products. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Promoting Online Community Involvement

I had a meeting this morning with some of our home theater gurus to discuss some options on increasing activity in our forum. We came up with some great questions to ask forum perusers - Things that could get them excited about posting their thoughts and comments. Some of them included:

• Confessions of a home theater junkie. Tell us your darkest home theater geek stories.
• Blue-Ray or HD-DVD?
• Your no-holds barred, what's your dream system?
• Digital music copying, HDCP compliancy, and who the heck cares? Aren't people going to always be making copies of their music and movies?

Our hope is to make the forum a place that is more fun and interactive. I'd love any other input or recommendations you may have.

Blogger's Rant

by John Wanderscheid Being a marketing guy I like to analyze things. When it comes to blogs, I want to know how many people are blogging about us and what they are saying. So, I visit Technorati and Google Blog Search as well as a few other sites just to see what's happening. In many cases, I am extremely pleased to see what customers are writing about our products and the experience they have with our Aperion Audio. But... all too often I am disappointed when I follow links and land on blog sites that are purely designed to deliver advertising. The content is cut and pasted from wire services and other websites then thrown into a schlocky layout with the hopes that someone might click on one of the ads so the owner can get a revenue share. Don't get me wrong, it's great that blogging is cheap and accessible to everyone but I think there is a certain responsibility that goes with setting up a blog. You should actually write something that is meaningful to someone. Redistributing press releases and copying parts of reviews just isn't going to cut it. Hopefully the folks at Google and Yahoo search will tune into this problem and require real content to be posted on a blog before a blogger can link to advertisers. In the meantime, be careful and avoid these blogs so the web can be a better place for all of us.

Organic Evangelism?

by Ben Fowler

As relatively unknown speaker company who sells their wares on the internet, Aperion relies heavily on referrals. In other words, since we can’t do the face-to-face selling of our speakers, we rely solely on customers and reviewers or editors to help sell the product by their word of mouth. In the world of the web, this equates to user reviews (check out www.amazon.com), customer testimonials, forum threads and posts, and the occasional blog. Because of the ubiquity of the internet, one bad review can really hurt. So we try to make sure everything from our company – products and services – are well above the customer’s expectation. If we do that, then we prevent any nasty or negative product reviews, gain some kudos, and more importantly gain a customer for life.

So far, Aperion has incredible feedback from our customers, both at our website and abroad. Places like Cnet, Audioreview.com, avsforum.com, hometheaterforum.com all have great feedback from customers. Unfortunately for me, I want more. I envision Aperion being mentioned in all the AV forums. And I want to see more positive posts about our products than any of our competitor’s. Potential shoppers are often very interested in what the hottest product is, i.e. what is the most popular. If they see a lot of posts about Aperion then they’ll see the popularity of Aperion and go there to see what’s so hot. My intention isn’t one of greedy salesmanship here. I honestly believe we offer an incredible product, better service, and overall better value (hey, I work here, so I get to be biased).

To that end, I’d like to discover a way to generate “organic evangelism”. I’m not interested in suspicious guerilla marketing tactics that aren’t honest (some companies have been known to start threads on their own, or hire people to do it). I want it to be honest and real and inspired. I’m just curious if it’s possible to foster organically-grown evangelism. If we generate this kind of enthusiasm with every single person that we have contact with (could be a shopper or a buyer), then we’re onto something big. So the reason for bringing this topic to you is to see what you think about all this. Tell me how you think we ought to do it.