MotorsportReg.com Blog (26)

SCCA National Convention Presentation

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Following up on our presentation at the BMW CCA Congress last week, we presented our session on "How to Rule the Web (or at least get started)" yesterday in Las Vegas at the SCCA National Convention.

These slides are a slightly updated version of the BMW CCA deck so please download these.

Download "How To Rule The Web" Slides & Files

Thanks for all of the great questions and comments. Now get out there and make one small step for 2012 to build on!

Update 3/6: I just learned this morning that in addition to Twitter and Facebook, HootSuite's social media dashboard also has installable apps for Flickr, YouTube and Tumblr. This gives you one single place to create and curate your content as we discussed during the preso. Give it a look!

Topics: Marketing, Travel

BMW CCA Presentation Download

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

I'm on my way back from Ft. Worth, Texas from two days with the leadership of BMW CCA chapters from around the country. Every few years, the club holds a gathering for membership, treasurers and driving event staff to get together, share ideas and pow-wow.

I have previously attended this event in Atlanta and Salt Lake City but this time I was on the presentation schedule delivering my "How to Rule the Web (or at least get started)". Covering web, email and social media, this talk originated last year at the SCCA National Convention but was more narrowly focused. Based on some patterns I've observed over the past twelve months, I freshened up the content and included a few more recommendations.

The challenge of a conference like this is the wide range of audience expertise. There are some groups who have sophisticated online marketing programs updated daily and others who don't yet have a Facebook fan page. I attempted to provide enough introductory background at each step so inexperienced listeners have a feel for the who, what, where, when and why but also get specific with best practices and strategies for clubs that have a head start.

In addition to a complete printout, I've extracted all of my "Next Action" slides and links so there is a short document that can be shared within an organization. As I offered in my talk, I hope you find this information helping in planning, budgeting and executing your online marketing strategy. Membership recruitment and retention starts and ends with the troops on the ground (that's you)!

Download "How To Rule The Web" Slides & Files

Don't forget to listen!

Listening through social media for customer service

There is a great article from SocialMediaExaminer.com all about dealing with unhappy customers over social media. Improve retention by using your social media accounts or dashboard to listen to what people are saying about you and intervene to correct a poor experience. Don't forget to also set up a Google Alert which will send you an email any time your organization appears in a web page new to Google's index. These are great ways to keep your ear close to the ground.

Photo credits

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pasukaru76/5268559005/sizes/o/in/photostream/
http://www.surrealplaces.com/
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/10/06/social-media-home-bases-and-outposts/
http://reallymichelle.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/ice-ice-baby/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alfon18/4304973338/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceardach/4549876293/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/elycefeliz/6354180481/

Topics: Customers, Travel

Welcome Mercedes-Benz Club of America!

August 14, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

We are very excited to announce our new relationship with the Mercedes-Benz Club of America. Beginning in 2012, MotorsportReg.com will be the Official Registration Service to the 83 Sections and 30,000 members who support the silver arrows.

Topics: Customers

Updated Google Analytics Integration

August 14, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Back in December we released the first cut of our Google Analytics Integration which allows customers to enter their GA identifier in MotorsportReg.com and start picking up analytics on their registration funnels.

Topics: Features

Upcoming Convention Schedule

August 14, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

For most of our customers, late November through February is the "off-season". For us here at HQ, this is often our busiest time of the year. The phones and inboxes are pretty quiet but we're heads down working on sales and marketing programs, deploying major updates to our service that would be too disruptive for the middle of the season and we're also on the road a lot visiting and speaking with customers.

Here's our travel and convention schedule so far for the 2011-2012 off-season:

Topics: Travel

Strategery

August 14, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

No, it's not really a word, but it's something you should be doing. Most of us are way too busy with jobs, life and trying to have fun with our hobby/passion/pursuit to think long-term. This is natural. But every once in awhile, you see someone else stepping up their game and you think, "huh."

Topics: Customers, Marketing

Google Analytics Integration

October 31, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Google Analytics tracks your motorsport event registration marketing efforts

For those nerdy number crunchers out there on our Premium Plan, we have an early Christmas present for you: Google Analytics Integration. You can hurry to your Account Options screen and input your Google Analytics Property ID (looks like UA-XXXXXX-Y). Once saved, we'll immediately start using it to record visitor statistics on the following pages:

Topics: Marketing, Features

Kart Makes and Hotel Updates

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Kart manufacturers added into vehicle list

A few changes that we want to mention as we head into the quiet winter. The first is that we've added fourteen common kart chassis manufacturers to the vehicle dropdown list to help make it easier to add karts to your garage. While any driver can always use the "Other..." option to enter anything they want, seeing their brand listed provides a warm fuzzy that no blank text field can match. We curate this list to keep it reasonable in length but please let us know if we're missing any major brands. Karting, both indoor and outdoor, is become a major event category for us. We just recently helped Performance Racing Industry manage the Red Bull Kart Fight event that featured top karters and international race stars!

Updated hotel lists includes thumbnails, ratings and prices

Updated hotel lists includes thumbnails, ratings and prices

Also released last month was an update to our hotel program. We have been trialing a different layout for events held at Thunderhill Raceway in Northern California and have rolled out those changes to all venues. The sidebar now lists potential hotels with a thumbnail, quality rating and estimated price for the dates of the event being viewed.

Occasionally we received reports of hotels coming up that were nowhere near the venue. In one instance, a poor HPDE participant booked a hotel an hour away because our partner did not have any inventory near the track! As a result, we switched to a geolocation API that allows us to make sure the hotel is within a close radius of the venue or otherwise does not return any listings.

This work was primarily done by a new member on our team, say hi to Josh!

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

We've been working away on many things including a new hire which we'll introduce shortly but we wanted to let you know about a few small updates released over the past month:

Filter reports by registration date: You've been able to sort reports by registration date for some time now but we've added the ability to filter by a start and/or end date to limit the number of results in your report. This request came from organizers who wanted to print reports in batches, especially detail reports. Now you can limit the report output from the Filter, Group and Sort screen using a new field at the bottom.

We're upgrading our hotel program to use Expedia's recent improvements. The latest template has an improved user experience, a map-based view that allows attendees to see where the hotels are located and integrates TripAdvisor.com ratings as a filter.

Internet Explorer 9 tweaks - we're constantly finding ways that IE9 doesn't play like it used to and making small changes. The latest fix restores the autocomplete functionality for adding members to an event.

Removed formatting and line numbers from Excel reports. Line numbers are redundant in the Excel output. We've stripped out some of the report formatting like cell borders to make it simpler and more easily customized to your preferences.

We've added quite a few validation rules over the summer. You can now validate most vehicle fields including year, make, model, color, official weight, tire brand, GCR/rules page number and log book number. We also added a variant of the membership verification rule that lets you check if the member is valid at the time of registration rather than the start date of your event. This is useful for events with long registration periods.

June 11, 2013 by admin

One of our customers, Torqued Racing Solutions, has been quickly putting together a mobile application to scratch an itch. In owner Shawn Fultz's words:

We were looking for a way to access our MotorsportReg.com event registration information on the go and at the track. We couldn't find anything on the market so we built it!

The application is in beta right now and supports the following features:

View registrations for any event

View driver and vehicle information

View/enter notes for driver or other meetings

Check in drivers (Note: at the moment, this is local to the app and not a feature of MSR, but is something we're working on)

Download data from MotorsportReg.com so that it will work offline

Check out a quick video:

This is not a Pukka Software or MotorsportReg.com product so we can't take any official credit nor provide support for it. However, we're working with Shawn so that he has the necessary tools from us to build something great using our REST API. We're really excited about his work!

See more at torquedracingsolutions.com.

Topics: Customers, Misc, API