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Shaun Ryan: [0:02] Hi, I’m Shaun Ryan from SLI Systems and this is “The Ecommerce Podcast.” Today I’m talking to Tammie McKenzie from Cruiser Customizing. Tammie’s the director of marketing. Welcome.

Tammie McKenzie: [0:13] Thank you very much.

Shaun: [0:14] So Tammie, traditional first question, what’s the first thing you ever bought online?

Tammie: [0:19] The first thing that I ever purchased online I believe was a pair of shoes from zappos.com and that was about 2001, 2002.

Shaun: [0:30] OK. Oh, that’s the first time I’ve had that answer, but I’m familiar with their company. And was it a good experience?

Tammie: [0:37] It was an interesting and frightening experience. As I’m sure everyone else would say that started purchasing online way back then. You know, security wasn’t as strict as it is now and I’m sure we were all taking chances with our identities to some extent.

Shaun: [0:54] Yeah. And how about what’s the most recent thing you bought online?

Tammie: [0:59] Actually a regulator rectifier for my Yamaha V Star 1100.

Shaun: [1:04] Wow. Very cool. Where did you buy that from?

Tammie: [1:08] I purchased that from a company called… Actually, I purchased it from a competitive company I’m not going to share the name of. We don’t sell OEM parts.

Shaun: [1:16] No, I understand. [laughter]

Tammie: [1:17] Yeah.

Shaun: [1:20] So Tammie can you give me some background on yourself please?

Tammie: [1:23] Sure. I guess, let’s see, I was in the Navy. I served in the United States Navy on SEAL Team ONE and after that I started doing work in instructional design. Which evolved into working on web based training and distance learning projects.

[1:47] Which evolved into web consulting, and I was with a web consulting firm for about nine years doing many different projects for Fortune 500 companies. And then my career evolved into e-retail and with a new media focus. So I’ve been doing that ever since.

Shaun: [2:05] And how long have you been at Cruiser Customizing?

Tammie: [2:08] I’ve only been at Cruiser Customizing for about six months. Prior to that I was with a company called MediaZone, running their motocross channel.

Shaun: [2:16] OK. Great. So tell me about Cruiser Customizing. What do you guys do?

Tammie: [2:21] Well, Cruiser Customizing was started by our CEO, Uwe Druckenmueller and we started in 2001. In 2001 Uwe had this idea that he wanted to provide a way on the Internet for bikers to communicate with one another and share information.

[2:41] So way back in 2001 Uwe was already thinking social networking when not too many people were going in that direction yet.

[2:48] And so at the inception of Cruiser Customizing, it was a database of motorcycle products and people could come and they could sign up and they could review those products.

[3:02] What happened was there was so much reaction to this offering online that he started to research ways to make revenue to support his community endeavor. That’s how Cruiser Customizing evolved into an e-retail company.

[3:18] Now, as our focus, we’re trying to get back to the roots of Cruiser Customizing and evolve more back into the social aspects. We’ve always had the largest online metric community. We’ve always had the largest number of product reviews of any motorcycle e-retailer out there.

[3:40] Now we want to be able to provide our customers with a little bit more of an experience. So our vision is for bikers all over the world to connect, learn, share and make informed buying decisions about the products that they choose for their motorcycle.

[3:56] So within our community we’re not shoving product down people’s throats. We’re actually educating them. Our community director Kyle Bradshaw is one of the, I’d say, the top motorcycle customizers from a metric perspective in the country and he is constantly doing tips of the week. He’s constantly doing new product installs.

[4:17] We associate all of this content that we’re creating with the products so that people can click, read, and easily see customer views. They can see if there’s a video available. They can see if there’s a blog available, if there’s any discussions in the community about that particular product.

[4:32] We have a forum that’s called Bikers Helping Bikers. Bikers Helping Bikers has just been an amazing anomaly. The growth has just been incredible and people go there and they’re good to one another and they help each other. And it’s just, it’s been fantastic. We just launched in September and the growth has been exponential.

Shaun: [4:54] Fantastic. Now, it’s really interesting hearing a story of a company that’s started off as a community, then gone into retailing and is now sort of trying to encourage that community spirit even more.

[5:08] Because a lot of the retailers I talk to are sort of retailers first and foremost, and are thinking about trying to create a community around whatever it is that they’re selling.

Tammie: [5:19] Right.

Shaun: [5:21] Whereas you’ve done exactly the opposite. Which I think means you’re going to have a much more passionate community.

Tammie: [5:27] Well we are. I mean everyone here, yeah everyone here is passionate about motorcycle racing. Every kind of motorcycle. It doesn’t matter. If it’s got two wheels, we love it, we’re excited about it.

[5:37] The attitude and passion of bikers is something you just don’t run across in any other social group. It’s just people are good to one another, they take care of each other and they always do their best to treat other bikers with respect.

Shaun: [5:52] That’s fantastic. And so the community is, I presume, your primary vehicle for actually selling your product.

Tammie: [6:03] We actually are in many different channels. The community, like I said, we just launched… Well, we have, there’s actually two communities. We have the original community, Cruiser Customizing, where people came and they signed up. They entered their bike information and they reviewed products.

Shaun: [6:22] Yep.

Tammie: [6:22] Along with a few other little features. That’s about 180, 000 to 200, 000 people strong.

Shaun: [6:29] Wow.

Tammie: [6:30] Then we have the community, the social network that we integrated with their API to combine a third party social networking tool in with our existing member base.

[6:44] Then we provided opt in opportunity for people to join this other social network where they can share video and they can share photos and all of the standard social networking activity. That base right now after it just launching in September is over 40, 000 people that are interacting. We see 10, 000 to 20, 000 active login users per month.

Shaun: [7:08] OK. Well that’s fantastic. And I’m sure our listeners would be interested to know what is the third party tool that you use there?

Tammie: [7:17] Sure. The third party tool is KickApps.

Shaun: [7:19] KickApps. And you would recommend it for other retailers looking for a similar sort of toll?

Tammie: [7:26] I would. I think sometimes the performance is a little bit as an issue, but as far as the featurship goes and the level of custominization and integration that you can do with the API is an excellent tool.

[7:41] We evaluated four or five other community tools including some open source options and we ended up with KickApps. But we definitely did do due diligence in selecting that application service.

Shaun: [7:54] OK, great. Tell me about your marketing that you are doing online. How are you attracting visitors to your site?

Tammie: [8:05] We do, of course, pay per click SCM. We have pretty extensive SCO. We do marketing for our community. We are in all of the shopping networks. We are in Google affiliate networks, and in addition to that we are in social networks.

[8:26] Right now, we are specifically in social networks for Cruiser Customizing only, so our demographic there is 31 to 60. We are currently in FaceBook with a pretty strong presence and we are starting to tweet quite frequently and provide links to our Twitter within the community cell.

[8:49] For example, Kyle, our Community Director, he went to Myrtle Beach last week and led the big rally.

[8:56] He was tweeting and taking pictures the entire time from his iPhone and constantly updating that Twitter feed. And we did see quite a bit of traffic. But that is more just sharing; it is sharing and building growth and loyalty within the community.

[9:11] So, Twitter and FaceBook now, when we start doing more social networking around some of our other sites, like livegear.com we will probably move into the MySpace Ap area because it is a much younger demographic.

Shaun: [9:24] OK. That is interesting. I want to talk about your other sites in just a moment, but just to delve into the Twitter side of things a little more, does Kyle have a personal Twitter account, or do you have a corporate Cruiser Customizing Twitter account?

Tammie: [9:46] We have our Twitter account as Cruiser Custom, because they limit the number of letters that you can have. And Kyle does have a personal account, and I have a personal account as well. We are working on how to best integrate that because you can’t tweet the same thing to the same place at the same time.

[10:11] Twitter doesn’t allow that, so we are currently evaluating some tools for managing Twitter that are desktop tools. Hoping that someone will come out with those tools soon that will allow us to tweet from two accounts at the same time.

Shaun: [10:23] Yes, it is all so new that people are still working out what is the best way to be doing it from a corporate point of view, versus the personal one, and the personalities involved. I am interested, because we are doing the Twitter thing ourselves and it is interesting to see your take on it.

Tammie: [10:43] I think that Kyle is a strong personality in our community, so there is a huge benefit to him having his own personal account. But for now what we do is we just say, “Hey, it is Tammie” and “here is some info”, or whatever. We just designate ourselves.

[11:01] But we are not a large corporation. We are not like Zappo’s where they have 850 people on Twitter and they are using it for corporate communications.

Shaun: [11:10] Yeah. How large are you? How many people do you have in your…

Tammie: [11:15] We have about 45 people, 50 people.

Shaun: [11:18] OK, that is a nice size. Tell me about the different sites. I believe you have five different ecommerce sites.

Tammie: [11:27] We do. We have Cruiser Customizing, which is kind of the mother ship. That is focused on metric cruiser custom accessories and obviously Metric Cruiser Riders.

[11:40] I don’t know if you are familiar with motorcycles, but motorcycles like the Yamaha, the Star, or the Voltive, anything that has that look of a Harley but it is made by a Japanese manufacturer, that is a Metric Cruiser.

Shaun: [11:56] OK, got you.

Tammie: [11:57] And then we have our site wheelhouse.com, and wheelhouse.com is for the sub Harley riders. We have a site called goldwingcountry.com, which is obviously focused on the Honda Goldwing. And we have a site called ridegear.com, which is focused on sport street riders.

[12:16] Our last site is called dollarrider.com, which we focus the least on, and that place where we just throw of our slow moving and obsolete inventory that we are trying to clear out and we do a little promotion around it.

Shaun: [12:31] OK, interesting. Why have you chosen to go this route with the five different sites, rather than having one site where you can find everything?

Tammie: [12:44] It is really a very social reason. It is because Harley people don’t like to deal with Metric’s people, and them being in a community together isn’t going to work. Goldwing people are far too proud to deal with Harley people or Metric people.

[13:02] And the street people are just a completely different demographic. They are much younger, fast moving, dare devils. They think Cruisers are what you get when you are ready to retire.

[13:12] It is just that they are so different. The people are so different that trying to throw it all into one space, which a lot of our competitors do, it doesn’t foster the ability to build community.

Shaun: [13:25] Right and the site is all about community to start off with. It started with Cruiser Customizing, how did you then build out the other sites? Did you purchase the other sites, or did you identify that, right, we need to create another site around the Harleys, and another one around the Goldwings?

Tammie: [13:42] For Harley and Goldwing it was identified by recognizing that that was a need and those sites were built. For the street site, ridegear.com, we purchased that at the end of last year out of bankruptcy.

Shaun: [13:56] OK, interesting. What are the challenges in maintaining five different ecommerce sites? Because I presume you are trying to put the best practices that you learn about on one across all the other sites.

Tammie: [14:09] Right. I think the amount of work that has to go into building community is a big challenge. Right now on our high end, our Goldwing site, we are not necessarily doing what we are doing with the Cruiser Customizing community, not to that level yet. But we hope to grow that.

[14:26] With the ride community we feel like there is a huge opportunity for community. But then we have to look at, OK Kyle is our resident motorcycle encyclopedia. He’s really focused in the cruisers thing. We don’t really have his equal in the street thing on staff.

[14:43] So he’s trying to come up with creative ways to incent people to help us generate that content versus him trying to do it all himself. And so I would say building community and content around each of the different genres of motorcycle rider is a huge challenge. From a marketing perspective, as far as you know, traditional channel…

Shaun: [15:06] Yep.

Tammie: [15:07] We leverage the same strategies across SEM and SEO and the shopping networks as far as product sales go. When it comes to social, like I said, there are different approaches because we’re dealing with different age groups.

[15:22] The average Harley rider probably won’t even touch a social network ever in their lives. The average Gold Wing rider, pretty close to that same thing. So getting them to be social and to share information takes different strategies and different approaches.

Shaun: [15:40] Yeah. It’s an interesting challenge. Do you think you’ll ever try and find the equivalent of Kyle for those other communities?

Tammie: [15:50] It’s possible. I think Kyle would be the one, of course, that will be driving that. And what we’ve done with Cruiser Customizing that’s very interesting is because of the loyalty around the Cruiser community, we’ve been able to nominate unpaid member moderators that are doing a lot of that work for us.

[16:11] That are encouraging people to contribute information that are contributing members as well. And doing install videos and doing all of the different, creating all of the different types of media that we have available there.

[16:25] What I’m hoping is that Kyle will be able to drive that member moderator to the next level with the ride care community. It’s a very common trend out there now and it’s really interesting, because people who are members and who are loyal to a website get personal satisfaction from contributing.

[16:46] We have a point system on our Cruiser Customizing community that has a minimal amount of reward around it. But people are so excited about achieving points and getting notoriety in the community that it’s almost self motivating.

[17:02] So if we can foster that type of community on the ride care side we won’t need another Kyle. But if we can’t it will definitely be up to Kyle to identify that person.

Shaun: [17:12] OK. Interesting. I mean, if you can get your community to do it for you without having to pay a dedicated coordinator then that’s a lot more effective, isn’t it? Or a lot more cost effective.

Tammie: [17:26] Absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s much more inline with real social networking.

Shaun: [17:31] Yeah, it is. Yeah, exactly. So tell me, is there a marketing campaign you’ve done recently or over the years that’s worked really well for you?

Tammie: [17:42] Well, one of the favorite marketing campaigns that I’ve done was actually with a company called MediaZone. It was the MediaZone Moto Channel.

Shaun: [17:52] Yep.

Tammie: [17:53] I’ve been in the motor sports industry for quite some time and I’ve done a lot of work and fundraising for a company called Warthog Racing.

[18:03] What Warthog Racing does is they take young riders who don’t have factory sponsorships and they give them the resources and the tools that they need in order to go to the big show. Basically, is what they do. So it’s AMA motocross and supercross.

Shaun: [18:23] Cool.

Tammie: [18:24] So it’s truly exciting the opportunity that they’re giving kids that are less advantaged. So what we did was, with the Moto Channel, we actually were selling subscriptions to the FIM motocross series.

[18:40] And we got James Stewart, who’s an AMA motocross champion and the AMA supercross champion, to do an interview with us and to donate some equipment that he designed.

[18:53] Then we ran a sort of cutting edge social networking push to get people to come and enter to win these goggles and various other products that James Stewart had designed by signing up for the subscription. And as a result Warthog would get so many dollars out of the subscription.

[19:17] So it turned out to be really successful because we had big names associated with it. We pushed it through FaceBook, we pushed it through MySpace and we pushed it through this action sports networking site. Or action sports community I guess you could call it, called Extreme Network.

Shaun: [19:34] Yep.

Tammie: [19:35] And so it was a very low cost push for us and almost everything was donated and we ended up raising a bunch of money for a very great cause. And also giving James Stewart some exposure and selling lots of subscriptions on the Moto Channel. So it was good.

Shaun: [19:50] Yeah, well that sounds fantastic. Very creative and fantastic to see you leveraging the social networks. Which is obviously one of your strengths.

Tammie: [20:00] I talk a little too much social don’t I?

Shaun: [20:04] No, no. It’s great. And it’s really good to have a podcast focused on that. And I take it you’re happy with the service you’re getting from the team?

Tammie: [20:12] I love SLI. Yes. I mean, I don’t know if you saw any of Nancy’s notes from today, but you guys are awesome. You’re absolutely amazing. Bar none, the best search software as a service out there.

Shaun: [20:26] Fantastic, that’s great to hear. It sounds like we’re working on getting some of that community stuff into the search as well.

Tammie: [20:31] Yes, that’s the next big push is figuring out how we can best index that stuff so that we have content coming up with products. I think that’s going to be really an awesome feat.

Shaun: [20:43] Yeah, and I think it sounds like for your site in particular, it could really help things. Because the search should be surfacing all that great content that’s part of the community.

Tammie: [20:55] Exactly. And you know what is a great thing about… I don’t work directly with Matt, I work through Chris Tucker and Eric, but I never get no. There’s never a no. I mean, there’s oh, Tammie, we can’t do that for two weeks or something on some rare occasion.

[21:12] Or that’s going to take us five days. But never is it oh, we can’t do that. There’s just nothing about SLI as I’ve been able to just be so…

[21:23] They’ve been so versatile and that makes such a huge difference because we have strange data. Our product data is make and model driven and it’s a challenge and you just have to make tweaks sometimes. So they’ve just been awesome.

Shaun: [21:34] OK. Well that’s great to hear. Fantastic. I think we’ll take this opportunity to wrap this up.

Tammie: [21:40] OK.

Shaun: [21:41] You’ve given us some fantastic information there about the way this company started with that social aspect and built up into an ecommerce company and the way it’s leveraging that is going to be really interesting to our listeners, I’m sure. So Tammie, thank you very much for your time, I appreciate it.

Tammie: [21:56] No problem.

Shaun: [21:57] And that was “The Ecommerce Podcast.” I’m Shaun Ryan from SLI Systems, tune in next time.