Dwayne Leslie from Global Auction Guide Media Group visits with Aaron from AuctioneerTech about the upcoming launch of the new Global Auction Guide website and the new features it will offer auctioneers. Video recorded in July, 2009, at the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show in Overland Park, Kansas.

Steve from AuctionZip visits with Aaron from AuctioneerTech about the current and upcoming features provided by AuctionZip to auctioneers. Video recorded in July, 2009, at the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show in Overland Park, Kansas.

Julie and Billie Jo from Satellite Prolink visit with Aaron from AuctioneerTech about the marketing products and services that they provide to auctioneers. Video recorded in July, 2009, at the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show in Overland Park, Kansas.

Randy Bregman from NAA Cashless Commerce talks to Aaron from AuctioneerTech about the NAA’s credit card program and how it can benefit auctioneers. Video recorded in July, 2009, at the 60th International Auctioneers’ Conference and Show in Overland Park, Kansas.

Ellen from CUS Business Systems talks with Aaron from AuctioneerTech about CUS and some of the features it offers in addition to auction clerking and cashiering. Recorded at the 60th International Auctioneers’ Conference and Show in July, 2009, in Overland Park, Kansas.

John Economou from Bidder Central talks with Aaron Traffas from AuctioneerTech about LuJohns Enterprises and Bidder Central. Video recorded in July, 2009, at the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show in Overland Park, Kansas.

Kurt from TASS Software talks about the TASS auction software platform. Video recorded in July, 2009, at the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show in Overland Park, Kansas.

See the bottom of this post to play this episode directly or subscribe using iTunes or Zune or your favorite podcatcher on the Auction Podcast page.

Hello and welcome to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. Today is Thursday 18 February 2010. My name is Aaron Traffas and today I’m going to examine branding as it relates to a web presence, looking at the best ways to configure websites, email and blogs. This content originally ran as a three-part series in January on auctioneertech.com and began with part 1, domain names.

The choices you make for your domain name begin begin to build your brand before you think about designing a logo or writing a word of copy. There are some rules to follow when choosing a domain name for your site, and the first is to select a .com top level domain. A top level domain, or TLD, is the last part of the website address. .com, .net, .org were among the first and are still the most common TLDs in the United States. Unlike some other TLDs like .gov and .mil, anyone can register new domain names with .com, .net and .org without restriction. The .com TLD is for companies or commercial endeavors. .org is for non-profit – you guessed it – organizations, while .net is for more personal projects that aren’t as official as .com or .org. There are now many other TLDs, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is planning to begin to allow essentially an unlimited number of new TLDs soon, increasing the number from perhaps 100 current TLDs to possibly thousands.

The problem is that nobody remembers websites that don’t end in .com. Now you’re going to object, reminding us that the new domains offer specialization. “But .pro would be a great choice since I’m a professional!” No it wouldn’t. Professionals choose .com. “But .ca is available and I’m located in California!” Your location doesn’t matter. If you’re in the United States and selecting a business or commercial website, .com is for winners.

The second rule when selecting your website is to own the domain that matches your company name. “We’re a US company and someone already has aaaauction.com,  .us works just as well, right?” No it doesn’t. If someone already has the .com name for your company, you absolutely need to change your business name. That’s how important it is that your domain name exactly matches your company name. If your website is kansasbid.com, make sure that your company name is Kansas Bid and vice versa. If you try to get cute with your domain name, or add hacks like hyphens or underscores, few will remember it.

Rule three is that shorter is better. If your company is named for you, your first and best bet is your last name. In other words, if my auction company is called Aaron Traffas Auctioneers, I would look for traffas.com. It suffers from being difficult to spell, but I’d get around that problem by registering travis.com, traffis.com, trafas.com and so on, having each of the alternate misspellings point to the main account. However, since traffas.com is taken, I’d settle for aarontraffas.com, knowing that it was a little less desirable than traffas.com but not quite a deal breaker.

However, let’s say that I run John Smith Auctioneers. Obviously smith.com is taken. Obviously johnsmith.com is taken. Do I look for johnsmithauctioneers.com? Now I’m getting into the problem of a lengthy domain name. The longer the name, the more difficult it is to predict misspellings, the harder it is to fit on business cards, the harder it is to read on billboards, and – worst of all – the harder it is to get customers to remember the site. They’ll ask themselves if it was it johnsmithauctioneer.com? Was it johnsmithauctions.com? They’ll never think to ask if it was .net or .org or .us or .idiot.

Rule four – own your domain name. This problem is rampant within the auction industry. Many auctioneers are approached from an upselling [read:predatory] website hosting company with a sales pitch that goes something like this. “We’ll host a website for you and even register your domain name so you don’t have to deal with a registrar or mess with any of that techy stuff.” I really like it when they use the word techy, by the way. The company then registers your domain name for themselves and creates your website. Should you ever wish to leave, you can’t simply point your domain name to another provider because you don’t own it, they do.

Find out if you own your domain name. Go to http://www.whois.net/ and enter your website. Sometimes, as in the case with Network Solutions, it will tell you you have to go to the registrar used to register the domain name to see who owns it. Stay with me. This exercise is important. Your website provider can be listed as the technical contact, but you must be listed as the registrant or you don’t own your website.

Rule five is that CamelCase isn’t for websites. This rule isn’t necessarily about selecting your domain, but it’s about how you present it to your users. It will probably generate some opposing comments, but I feel it’s both true and important. Websites are case-insensitive. That means that auctioneertech.com in all lower case is just as valid as AuCtIoN – you get the picture. Why don’t I write my website using CamelCase with the A of auction and the T of tech capitalized since that’s the way it looks in my logo? Because websites should ALWAYS be written exclusively in lowercase. Writing your site using intermittent capital letters may make it seem easier to read, but it also makes you seem a little less – to use the word from our patronizing, predatory salesperson from earlier - techy than the competition. Your customers notice the details, don’t give them the opportunity to think less of you or your company because of something as simple as how you write your domain name.

In summary, your website is the most important marketing component to your business. While many people will come to your site by clicking a link, far more will visit your site because they saw your website in an ad or because they’ve been there before. Make it easy for them not only to remember, but to guess. The first thing we web users do when trying to load a site is to type the company name and add .com. If that doesn’t work, if we’re interested enough we may look it up to see what it was supposed to be, either by referencing the ad or searching in Google. In this case, it’s already a strike against the site and the milk is a little more sour before we’ve even arrived at our destination.

Now that we’ve selected our domain name, let’s look at how we can use our email address to strengthen our brand. An email address has two components; the first part is the user name and the second part is the domain name, which usually matches either your email provider or your website.

The worst mistake you can make to turn customers away is to use something other than your name for the user name. This mistake was the at the top of the list in a recent survey, the link to which is available in the transcript for this podcast at auctioneertech.com. sxygrl47 and ladybug_lover worked great for user names in college, but now it’s time to use first.last or firstlast or just your last name. If you have an address that is checked by more than one person, such as a generic company address, then it’s okay to use something like auction or info as your user name, but don’t use that catch-all address for your official company account unless it is actually checked by more than one person. That’s also not the address you should put on your personal business card.

Outside of the above offense, few other concepts seem more obvious than the importance of having an email address that matches the domain name of your website. Nevertheless, I still see some auctioneers who advertise to their customers a generic, free addresses from email providers such as AOL, Hotmail, MSN, Live, Gmail – or worse, from their Internet service providers such as Cox, SBC Global or Comcast.

Using one of these free providers for a personal email account is okay, though it’s much more fun to spend the 10 bucks and register a domain name for yourself or your family to use for your personal email needs. Using an email address for commercial purposes that doesn’t match your domain name is simply unprofessional.

Your website IS your brand. Why on Earth would there be any benefit in advertising an address that doesn’t include your brand? Reasons I’ve heard cited for using a generic email account for business include the following.

• I’ve always used this address
• I have multiple domain names
• Using Gmail makes me seem cutting-edge and hip
• I don’t know how to set up email for my domain name
• I like the tools offered by this provider
• I want synchronized Outlook but don’t want to host my own Exchange server

None of these reasons justifies letting customers see an email address that doesn’t include your brand. The only reason listed that doesn’t involve lack of configuration or simplicity is the idea that customers somehow perceive Gmail users as advanced. This is true, but only in comparison with other free email providers. We all like to make fun of AOL and Yahoo users, but consumers equally ridicule Gmail users who use Gmail for business. It’s assumed that these users are either too lazy or don’t know how to set up their own, branded email addresses.

The solution is simple. Use a service like Gmail - Google Apps for your Domain is a particularly excellent choice – or use a company that provides hosted Exchange server to allow you to have one powerful interface to check all your email accounts. It’s very simple to configure addresses from one or many domain names to have email delivered to one location. Through the use of rules in Outlook or filters in Gmail, you can easily keep track of all your emails from all of your accounts in one central location. When properly configured, each email you send will appear to come from the appropriate account. The methods to this configuration are outside the scope of this podcast and will depend on your registrar and your web host, but there are many free tutorials available to make your email do what you want it to do for you.

I’ve actually met auctioneers who have removed the website from business cards, relying on different colors to make the domain in the email address stand out, thereby conveying both an email address and a website on one line. This leap of faith that customers will recognize this strategy isn’t for the weak-of-heart, but it’s an innovative idea, nonetheless.

When is it okay to use an email address for business that isn’t matched to your domain name? There are two scenarios.

1. You’re unemployed
2. You don’t have a domain name yet

If the first is true, you’re probably not using it for commercial purposes unless it’s to send, and receive responses from, resumes. In this case, a Gmail account – or, better yet, yourname@yourname.com – will lend the most professional impression to a prospective employer. If the second case is true, press pause, think about what I said in the first part of this episode, and buy a domain name. The first year’s registration costs less than having your logo embroidered on a shirt, and it’s many orders of magnitude more valuable and important.

Your domain is your brand. Your email address is an obvious and easy way to promote your brand and show your customers that you run a professional organization.

Now that I’ve discussed domain names and email addresses as they relate to your brand, let’s take a look at your weblog. The same concepts that apply to your domain names and your email addresses absolutely apply to your blog.

Like email addresses, it’s really easy to get a free blog. Free blog providers include WordPress and Blogger. These free blogs assign a subdomain, which is the part of the domain that comes before the primary domain name, lik e yourauctionblog.wordpress.com. Some, like WordPress, even allow you to assign a custom domain name to your blog. This free blog approach is really great if you’re blogging about your grasshopper collection or you want to keep a diary of your trip to the museum of bad marketing tactics, but if you’re blogging for business, you need to have your blog hosted professionally.

Your blog should be branded. Your domain IS your brand. Your blog needs to exist on your website in order to be properly branded. This rule means that the free sites are out of the question – unless you actually work for WordPress, your blog shouldn’t include wordpress.com in the domain name. Assigning a separate domain name to your blog is certainly better, but it still misses the target of hosting your blog on your primary domain.

But wait! I’ve been singing the praises of WordPress for years, why would I say WordPress is bad? The answer is that wordpress.com is a commercial service that will host your blog. wordpress.org is a site that hosts the WordPress software that you can download for free and install on your own website. By installing the software, you can leverage the power and ease-of-use inherent to the WordPress package while allowing your customers to go to yourwebsite.com/blog or blog.yourwebsite.com. By having a custom WordPress theme created, the user experience can be seamless among your auction calendar, your static pages and your blog.

WordPress isn’t the only blogging software that you can use on your website, but it’s certainly my favorite. Your web host may have different software that can just as easily and quickly be installed and configured to allow you to post your articles and news by simply logging in and typing.

Internet branding is simple. While it may be easier to simply grab a free account from somewhere, it’s by far more professional to have a comprehensive, congruent presence that is consistently branded to provide a seamless user experience.

That’s it for episode 21. Did I miss something? Am I wrong about something? Leaving a comment on auctioneertech.com is much better than replying on Facebook or Twitter to tell me about it. Remember, it’s all about unification of the brand.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the Auction Podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening, now go sell something.

AuctioneerTech - Auction Podcast

You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast. Today is Friday, 11 December, 2009. auctioneertech.com – technology, auction and auctioneers, auction tech for the auction industry.

Hello and welcome to the 20th episode of the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. My name is Aaron Traffas and today we’re going to talk about the trends and shifts in buyer behavior that find consumers looking for items instead of auctions and what we auctioneers should do about it.

It used to be easy. Bidders used to check the auctions section in the newspaper for something to do on the weekends. We used to put an ad in the classifieds that listed the type of auction we were holding, trusting that the customers wanted to come to the auction. If you hold it, they will come.

Not anymore. Now, instead of looking for auctions to provide needed entertainment and activity, consumers are taking every opportunity to find a gap in their busy schedules that might provide much needed rest. Weekends are for chores and sporting events and movies, not traveling somewhere in hopes that there might be an item of interest that may or may not sell to a competing bidder anyway. Regular consignment auctions everywhere are noticing a decline in physical attendance, and with a few exceptions due to asset type or geography, it’s becoming clear that the interest consumers have in spending hours at auctions is waning.

What does this trend mean for the auction industry? Does it mean we should pack up our gavels and Half Mile Hailers and go home? Of course it doesn’t. It means we must recognize this change in consumer buying habits and adapt. There is still value in the secondary market. Consumers are no longer looking for auctions, they’re looking for items and they don’t really care how the items are sold. If we present better information about the items to the prospective bidders, they’ll make the effort to make the purchase.

An auction event is a collection of auction items. We auctioneers realize this marketing tactic, and it’s what sets us apart from other one-off competitive bidding sites like eBay. It allows us to more effectively advertise and use economics of scale to keep our costs down and to  do a better job for our sellers. What we need to understand and respect is that we must be more granular in our advertising and extend past the event and down to the item level.

The Internet is the obvious answer as a mechanism to list the items at our auctions. Since traditional media is becoming more expensive and less effective every day, our efforts should be focused towards driving customers from our traditional advertisements to our websites. Only there do we have the ability to convey the amount of information at essentially no cost to our clients.

What kind of information should we present and how should we present it?

Descriptions
The more information we convey, the better we can serve our bidders. Aspects such as year, make, model, style, color and condition are obvious components to a good description. If you list an item and someone asks a question about it, use that question as a tip to add the answer to the description so the next possible bidder won’t have to ask the same question.

Pictures
Digital cameras are cheap, and so is the film. A big memory stick and some freely-available picture processing software makes it amazingly easy to present many pictures of each item.

Sale order
Consumers don’t want to wait. While you don’t have to know the exact minute an item will sell, publishing a sale order on your website will let a bidder know when he’ll need to be at the auction or, in the case of Internet bidding, in front of his computer. Provide a sale order and don’t break from it.

While our websites are the most important places to present all of this information, they are not only places we should post our items. Internet auction calendars such as the National Auctioneers Association’s auction calendar, Global Auction Guide, the National Auction List and AuctionZip provide free or inexpensive venues to list our items. Craigslist, niche forums and bulletin boards are other places that may take a little more work but may generate a significant benefit for our sellers and our bottom lines.

The amount of information we can convey about each item is substantial. The more details we post for each item on our websites and those sites listed above, the more likely consumers are going to be able to find our items through auction- and non-auction search channels. If a consumer looks for an item using Google and we’ve posted that item on multiple websites with a link back to the auction listing on our site, that consumer is more likely to find our item and participate in our auction. If the item isn’t listed in the auction description, the consumer won’t know about it and will make a purchase from somewhere else.

It sounds like a lot of work. We can’t simply string out the items in a windrow on the lawn on the morning of the auction. Picturing, cataloging, data entry and item-level marketing are all important but labor-intensive and expensive components to modern auction preparation.

Buyers are looking for items. Our sellers are looking for buyers. Technology gives us new ways to advertise items to buyers for our sellers. The next generation of successful auctioneers isn’t going to be successful because those auctioneers have the best chant or the longest company histories . They’re going to be successful because they’ve figured out the most efficient workflow to present the most information in the most places about each individual item they’re selling.

That’s it for episode 20. Have a happy holiday season from AuctioneerTech and we’ll see you in 2010 with more episodes, interviews and the continuation of our video podcast series.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the Auction Podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Jeff Johnstonbaugh, COO of BidSpotter, talks about RemoteBidder, BidSpotter, Internet bidding and the future of the industry. You can play the episode or download it for later using the links at the end of the transcript, or you can use iTunes or your favorite podcasting software to subscribe to the Auction Podcast. Enjoy!

You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast; today is Wednesday 5 August 2009. My name is Aaron Traffas and joining me today for the third in the Vendor Interview Series is Jeff Johnstonbaugh. Jeff is Chief Operations Officer for BidSpotter Incorporated.  Good evening, Jeff, and thank you for joining me.

Jeff JohnstonBaugh: Hello Aaron, it’s a pleasure.

AuctioneerTech: Jeff how did you get started in the auction industry?

JJ: Well, trading and buying and selling and going to auctions has always been in my family. I started working I was about thirteen in the restaurant business, by the time I was twenty-one I was fairly burned out on that career, and so I was buying and selling a lot of equipment at auctions for restaurants and building restaurants and the auctioneer whose sales I attended most them asked me to come and work for him. That was about 1982 and at it’s been twenty-seven years ever since. So it’s worked out okay.

AT: And you were working in what capacity for that auctioneer?

Oh, I started out as a set up and ended up as an auctioneer and ended up as a sales manager and I actually ended up buying his business when he passed away after I’d worked for him for about fifteen years, just your ordinary local, regional neighborhood business auction company.

And maybe we should preface that a little bit – where are you from, where was this and where are you at now?

I’m still up in the Seattle area where I was there and so I actually purchased Jesse Jones Auctioneers and ran Jesse’s company for several years until I got distracted by this whole Internet thing.

And tell us a little bit about this distraction, as you call it, and what drove you to BidSpotter.

Well, like a lot of people, I saw the allure of the Internet and decided to pursue that dream and I was actually working at nordstrom.com at the time, I was interviewing for a position internally and the president of the company stepped out of our meeting for a while, which obviously made me nervous, he stepped back in and said something which made me even more nervous, said Jeff I’m doing to do something I’ve never done before, I checked with the Nordstroms and we’re going to refer you out of the company, which obviously panicked me. He actually was an angel investor sitting on the board of a little company called LiveBid which was one block down the street and he referred me down to them so I took a walk down the street and it turned out that that was just about ninety days before they were purchased by amazon.com and the fellow who was the sales manager there was well known to me because I had taught him bid calling a few years before, and so I hired on with LiveBid and the online adventure continued.

When was that that you hired on with LiveBid?

I want to say it was 1998. It’s interesting; we got enough experience Internet now that it’s starting to get lost in the fog of time. But yeah, we were bought by Amazon and Amazon had an interesting strategy. Amazon saw that eBay was coming after retail so they took at a shot, Amazon saw eBay was coming after retail, so they took a shot at auctions for a while to force eBay to refocus on their core business and it was very effective and one of the things they wanted to do was make sure that eBay didn’t get to buy LiveBid company nor Yahoo Auctions and we were at Amazon for about eighteen months. I had the opportunity to work with Sotheby‘s and I had the opportunity to help develop the first beginnings of different platforms and sort out how industrial auctions and different from consumer auctions and all that sort of stuff. So it was very formative years and very exiting times.

Sure. How then did that job description segue into BidSpotter?

Well, Amazon decided that its strategic move had run its course and after about fifteen months or eighteen months they let us all go. Some friends of mine, Bill Foot and Jeff Harris, went off to form BidSpotter.com, I took a year off and then later joined them and BidSpotter has grown very steadily from a very small company to what we have today which is working quite well for us. One of the unique circumstances that sets BidSpotter apart from other competition is that there’s never been any outside investments. We’ve been cash-flow-positive and work form within our own means since they started out with their own severance checks and it’s built slowly but it’s built very solid. So we are very proud of that.

That’s very somewhat unique in these days of tech startups and Internet companies and it seems like everybody is taking venture capital from various places and having something that is completely organic and as you put it a cash flow positive entity from the get-go is something to certainly be proud of. You say that Bill and Jeff started BidSpotter and then you joined them shortly thereafter. How did you know them? They were in LiveBid, is that right?

Correct. All of us that founded and originated BidSpotter were from within the Amazon group. We joined with some fellows from Canada, Inet Softglobe was the name of their company and they provided the bidding engine around which all of the BidSpotter website is wrapped. And so it’s grown on that basis and now the fellows from Inet and the original founders of BidSpotter are all partners in the deal, but again, there’s never been any outside investment and there’s never been any debt taken on and so its worked out pretty well.

So how long would you say that you were a bid calling auctioneer, is that something you still do on the side, is that locked away as a part of your past, how long did you do that?

I probably did that very actively with one or two sales a week for a dozen years, and something I still can do and I’m 6happy to do, but for me primarily now its pitching in to help somebody else or for a good charitable cause, I don’t actively pursue auctions although I do still cooperate and consult with friends on big projects and so forth occasionally.

Sure. Well Jeff, tell us about BidSpotter, how would you describe BidSpotter to somebody in an elevator? What does BidSpotter do and what kinds of Internet bidding does BidSpotter support?

BidSpotter.com

Okay. BidSpotter is a website where folks primarily go to buy industrial machinery, plant machinery; I like to say things that make you money. The ways that BidSpotter works with the traditional auctioneers is to provide technology for a Web simulcast where you can bid against the live crowd in the room with the traditional auction, a strong area of growth in future trend, is the timed auctions, the online auctions that are more of an eBay style auction but we still present them as an event as opposed to random items in this gigantic mishmash of offerings. Each of our auctions, whether it’s a timed online auction or a webcast auction, appears in a calendar fashion, it gets its own standalone credibility. The buyers tend to migrate amongst the items there and consolidate their shipping and figure out how to work with one rigger or machinery mover to get the stuff home. They develop a relationship with one auctioneer to buy multiple items at that event and then they package up the goodies, pay the bill and go home. The timed auctions are far more popular with our European clients and we do have a very strong European representation. We also are active in South Africa and the live webcast auctions are really the bread and butter of the American industry although it is a growing segment. I would say that the main reason that BidSpotter trended toward the industrial machinery sales away from its generalist origins has to do with the demands of the industrial auctioneers, the ways that they like to do aggregates and groups and with a privilege and frequently change their mind about how stuff is going to be offered depending on how the crowd receives their proposals of how to give you choice on the next hundred or you’ve got to take the next five or put them all together or what have you, and the BidSpotter platform has always been very facile and very, very quick to present with clarity, those different means of grouping and choosing items and those seem to be a requirement primary of the industrial auction culture.

You mentioned something in that description that kind of focused my attention and you mentioned how you list the auctions as events especially for your Internet only, your timed auctions. You list them all as an event and it is essentially a group of items in an event as opposed to as you put it, individual items in a sea of staggered ending items. Why do you feel that that is important? And I’ve noticed that that’s the primary difference between the way that we as auctioneers market items as opposed to your traditional eBay sellers or eBay style sellers who will list individual items with varying seemingly random closing times, why do you feel its important to list items, Internet only items, in events as opposed to on their own?

Well, I guess for me it goes back to the way Jesse used to run his auction business. My original auctioneer mentor Jesse Jones was an antiques dealer and that’s the perspective he came from, but he was always collecting something, whether it was schoolhouse bells or parish prints or flow blue or Tiffany glass, whatever it was, and he would gather these little bits and pieces together for a year, two years or five years, and when he had enough of whatever it was then he would create an event auction and he knew that by creating an event, the value of the item was far superior to the little bits and pieces and odds and ends that he picked up along the way. So when you had an auction of Maxfield Parish prints, suddenly you drew the attention of Maxfield Parish print collection community. I think that the way we as auctioneers approach the process, especially the industrial auctioneers, it’s generally about a building clear-out. So you have a focal point to begin with. This plant made this number of seats or they made those General Motors cars or they made these plastic water bottles. And so obviously all the items have a cohesiveness to begin with because they all contribute to making that product. But furthermore, you’ve got a geographic focus and you’ve got a timing focus. And an auctioneer works out an advertising budget that’s amortized across might be a hundred lots, might be a thousand lots. He is working on a labor budget that’s focused on getting out of the building in sixty days. So that event focus makes us very different than the person who is trying to sell one antique teddy bear that they found at the flee market and they want to throw it on eBay and find the other antique teddy bear buyers. Our product comes with a built-in focus and therefore it behooves us to go with that flow and maximize the advantages that we have, being so focused.

Remote Bidder

Jeff, BidSpotter recently, relatively recently anyway, came out with the RemoteBidder platform and product and you’d mentioned what BidSpotter did and what its strengths were especially in relation to asset type and market. What then is the cause for RemoteBidder and what is its target and focus?

Well, I think that everyone knows by now that in the end of last year, eBay left the live auctions space. And we had actually had a deal with eBay from 2004 to 2006 and we decided of our own accord to pull out of that deal because we didn’t see them supporting auctioneers as auctioneers in the way that auctioneers need to be supported. So with the news that eBay was leaving and knowing that the primary, the vendors, the most successful vendors, the biggest vendors in that consumer goods, fine arts and antiques kind of space were, by and large, resellers of eBay platform, we decided to go ahead and put up a product to approach the consumer market but approach it with the needs that the fine arts and antiques buyers in that culture wanted. What I’m finding as I pursue this business is that there are distinctive and unique cultures, even though we use the word auction across all of them, the guys that are buying livestock at auction have very distinct different needs and demands than the guys that are buying cars, they are different than the folks that are buying arts and antiques and industrials and so on and so forth. So with RemoteBidder, we partnered with Antique Week and Antique Trading Gazette to try to establish as quickly as we could, the broadest email list bases and customer bases that we could, and then we are actually using technology for the live bidding platform from the folks at ATG Media which we think is superior at serving the consumer good demands, it just – its prettier, it provides bigger images, it provides a different style of presenting the information that the fine arts and antiques folks are more receptive to. And its growing slowly like any new brand and new business it takes a long time to get the thing off the ground but we are very pleased with where it’s at and we are very happy with our partners at Antique Week and Antique Trading Gazette and we expect big things in the future.

And so you’ve kind of mentioned that – first of all, when did RemoteBidder have its first auction, when was it launched?

January this year, January 2009.

Are there any major differences outside of demographic focus and asset type – I guess those are some pretty substantial differences. How close is the technology between BidSpotter and RemoteBidder and what makes these platforms different from other competing products and platforms?

Well, the technology for the RemoteBidder platform has been tested with the saleroom.com in the UK for about the last 18 months to two years. So we know its solid technology, but it is a Flash programming based technology instead of Java which BidSpotter uses; Flash is installed in substantially more home user computers already, so it makes it more accessible to folks. Also its informed by a lot more knowledge about how people pursue personal entertainment or the things that they’re going to buy in life as opposed to the machines in the machinery business. So it is a lot more amenable to enjoyable browsing and sorting out and watching just the items that interest you and that sort of thing as opposed to the machines which are by and large dictated by “does it meet the specs and is it a catalogue item and lets cut the chase and get this done with”.

Something that you want because it is desirable to you not because it’s a commodity that fits your specifications of what you need to buy

Exactly, exactly. A lot of it has to do with just being able to cut through the clutter. At some point, these different auction sites reach a saturation point where you can hardly take it all in and so it’s helpful to have a different channel on the TV so to speak.

Sure. What would you say the biggest benefit is to building a bidding platform for a specific market as opposed to one of the larger more generalized other competing platforms?

Like I said, I just think it’s the ability to tailor to a cultural need. I cannot envision the day for me when I am just as happy having heavy equipment auctions with bulldozers and road graders on the same platform as diamonds and vases. Those different users all approach their computer differently, I mean, for one thing, by and large, the consumer good users are a much older demographic, they are much wealthier demographic and they have just a different set of expectations. The guys that are high tech and very, very dialed in their computers that just bid like mad men on the server auctions and lab equipment auctions, they have a lot less need for support and they have a lot less need for a happy touchy-feely kind of experience than your consumer goods folks who are really buying to entertain themselves, they are buying to have the enjoyment of it. So, the whole thing needs to be a very enjoyable experience. Quite frankly, a lot of our industrial users would get frustrated with the enjoyable parts of the experience, they just want to cut to the chase, they want to buy what they want to buy and move on. And that’s the main difference. The technology underlying it, there is a lot of varieties for technology, there is a lot of ways you can approach it and I just think it all needs to be driven by the nature of the event and the nature of the customer you’re trying to appease.

So what are some differences in the product offering for auctioneers between the two services? If I am an industrial auctioneer and I utilize the BidSpotter service, what kind of advantages do I see either in a pricing model or a feature set as opposed to if I am an antiques auctioneer and I’d like to utilize the RemoteBidder platform?

I would say the primary benefit from the perspective of the auctioneer is going to be the marketing assistance. BidSpotter has an amazingly well-dialed and database of industrial buyer as opposed to RemoteBidder which is accessing that great mailing list that Antique Trading Gazette has throughout Europe and Antique Week has in the US. The technology is going to appeal to the different buyers so they are going to get a smoother and happier customer. I would say on the industrial side, they are a lot more demanding and I guess the primary difference of the BidSpotter platform is not so much the software but the skill and the mindset of the people running the business. The folks that are taking the remote sales or the implementation specialists who are out on the ground and can actually wire phone system or Internet connectivity for a couple of hundred thousand square foot plant without breaking a sweat and make sure everything goes off perfectly. Whereas antique auctions are primarily from a well known venue and auction gallery that’s a lot more controlled situation, the folks with BidSpotter, the BidSpotter auctioneers are a lot more inclined to want to hire our staff to take care of things for them, the folks at RemoteBidder are a lot more inclined to handle themselves and they want an easier interface that is more readily accessible. They want the simplest way to achieve the audio instead of the way that most accommodates the challenges of working on the road. Basically we run them as two different businesses and those two different businesses address the needs of the clients and the clients are radically different. The guys that sell ancient Chinese antiques have a completely different approach than the guys that sell bulldozers from a vacant lot in the middle of the Midwest.

You mentioned the implementation specialists and with the approach that each is a separate business, what are the different implementation options for each one. In other words, if I am an auctioneer, how technical do I have to be as far as the way that I interact with the service, do you offer a turnkey solution, do you offer a self service solution, do you offer a mixture of both? What does it take someone to utilize either service?

That’s an excellent question, and again it all goes to what the auctioneer would like to have. We completely consider our business from the perspective of being in service to auctioneers. We can run the whole thing for you and literally be another staff member on the ground at your sales site with you and that is generally the way that the auctioneers who are running multiple millions of dollars of sales with us a year like to have it be. As a matter of fact, its very, very common for our clients to pick favorites amongst implementation specialists and ask to make sure that James or AJ or Mario or whoever it might be, is in attendance at their event in particular because they work so well with them. That’s going to be the case where we send someone out with a big sachell full of gear and they make it happen, whatever needs to be done to make sure that you can hear and you can connect to the Internet – the whole works. The other end of the spectrum, both platforms are completely capable of being turned over to the auctioneer in-house staff and run completely self-sufficient. Again I would say that the remote bidder platform is easier for an operator within the auction house to run, it has less bells and whistle therefore there is less clutter on the user dashboard and its just a little easier to understand. In the middle of that is a very economical compromised that is something that I originally worked out back at Amazon and has become an industry standard which is the remote broadcast. And the remote broadcast simply is putting a cell phone usually, with a headset, on either the auctioneer – which works far better – or as an alternative, to a ring man or just a clerk on the ground, where the headset can pick up the noise from the PA system. We use that feed from the auction floor to run the bidding from one of our office computers and when a bid comes in from an authorized and approved bidder, we relay that bid back to the auctioneer via the cell phone and the bid is process that way. The advantages are that it saves all that expensive travel and trying to run the auction that may or may not be able to support technologically. The disadvantage is you’ve got a couple more links in the communication chain and that’s why I said it works better if the auctioneer wears the headphones themselves because there’s just a couple less links in the chain because you’ve got this message being passed from bidder to the computer to our computer, our computer to our persons, thoughts and brain and then they say it over the phone and that person using the phone has to relay to the auctioneer and even if all this happens in a couple of seconds, those elements of the chain can be a frustration to getting a bid in very quickly. My recommendation for remote sales is they are best done, and this is kind of standard practice for our bigger clients, if they’ve got a huge auction, they tend to have someone there. If they’ve got a modest size auction, say its going to be under a couple of hundred lots and it’s a fairly simple situation, most auctioneers in that case will be selling a little slower, a little less stress, a little less pressure, and then not bearing the burden of traveling and so forth is a perfect situation to use remote broadcasting. All three have their place and all three are very good tools for an auctioneer to use depending on what their circumstance is.

What kind of pricing structures are associated with each of those three options and is there a difference in the pricing structure between BidSpotter and RemoteBidder? And what kind of volume would an auctioneer need to have to justify utilizing either service?

Well you know, it’s interesting because the volume to justify has been a question that goes back a long ways. I remember when we first started this with LiveBid, the event fee was twelve $12,500 per event, I could guarantee you the Internet wouldn’t keep working, I could guarantee you no one would bid, but I could also guarantee you that every single live television news truck in town would be outside your auction talking about your auction that night in the local news. So the value was a little strange then. You fast forward to ten years later now and the event fee is down to $350 on BidSpotter, the event fee for RemoteBidder is $500, and that’s just a consideration of the fact that we sell so many more lower price point items on RemoteBidder that in order to stay in business ourselves we have to charge a little bit more event fee. The percentage that we expect as a buyer premium bump on both is the same, 3% to folks that win online bids, so that’s pretty simple math. $350 bucks is not a big advertising hit or $500 for RemoteBidder is not a big advertising hit for most sales. Its kind of more of a question of where do you want to push your business. I know that we have several clients – I would say Gallivan Auctioneers is probably the  best example – who readily acknowledged that they used us with the online broadcasting as a very integral part of building their business to make sure that they were investing in reaching further and further and expanding their geographic boundaries every time and as a result, they may have taken a lot of sales early on that other people might have deemed not worth spending money on. So the value proposition isn’t always about does this auction justify it, but sometimes the value proposition is, can I use this as a tool to help build my business and establish myself as a very forward thinking, ambitious and technologically sophisticated auctioneer who is availing themselves with every marketing resource they can come up with. Sometimes that’s the value proposition that an auctioneer needs to consider. I would never put a specific dollar amount on the deal but I will say that it is much more common for our auctioneers doing lower gross volume sales to run the software themselves and my standard description of the person who can best run that in-house is if you have a niece or nephew who is between he ages of seventeen and twenty-five and grew up in the auction business and they play video games all their life and they have no fear whatsoever about a computer, there is no doubt whatsoever they can run any of the online auction platforms very successfully for you.

That’s a pretty good analogy, I know that my years playing Counter Strike probably suited me very well for being able to click the bid receive button. Jeff, I’m going to switch gears just a little bit, I’m looking at a press release from – the published date is very early June of this year – that talks about the BidSpotter.com announcing a dealership liquidation program. Tell me a little bit about what that program is and who that targets.

Well, you know, its been announced with General Motors and Chrysler in the last sixty days at the most, that they are going to be closing thousands and thousands of auto motor dealerships across the country. We started seeing some of these dealerships and they were generally about a $100,000 auction and looking at different resources I’ve noticed that a lot of them are going to local auctioneers who have never done anything online before because the relationship and the business isn’t coming through Chrysler, is not coming through General Motors, its coming through the owner of the dealership who is a neighborhood businessman and knows the neighborhood auctioneer. So what we did is we put together a package that really simplifies the whole process for, especially for an auctioneer who has never used us before or maybe never done an online auction before, and we took the different flavors of implementation out of it, we know from our experience that the best way to run one of these moderate sized auto dealership auctions is to be on the phone and do a remote broadcast, and we know that we can support this very effectively with a discount nonetheless. So it’s a $350 event fee, flat rate, implementation included for any dealership, and it doesn’t even have to be an auto dealership, it would be a John dealer dealership, it could be a moped dealership, but dealership auctions, they’ve got a special featured category on the BidSpotter homepage and that’s something we think that auctioneers across America are going to be busy with for the rest of this year at least and probably six months after that. So we put out a special offer to support our local auctioneers. I think what really drove it home for me was when I saw a couple of dealerships in Casper, Wyoming, and I just know that we don’t have an industrial user base in Casper, Wyoming, amongst client auctioneers and it brought home to me that these are going to come from all different directions and hopefully it’s a chance for these auctioneers to have an opportunity to try it out and see if they like it and we want to keep it simple, and straightforward.

That’s an exciting new program from you. What are some other features from either platform that we can look forward to, to seeing released in the future, what kind of development is going on, on the backside?

The most exciting features we’ve got coming along are along the lines of client integration. I know that for a lot of years a lot of auctioneers have had a strong debate of whether or not they are building our business or building their business and whether or not they want to drive their clients, their bidders to a portal website like BidSpotter. Coming in the future, the technology has come to support the idea that the sale can appear equally well in both locations and bidders who are loyal users of BidSpotter can find the event on BidSpotter calendar, they can log in, register, get approved, all that good stuff, and they will perceive that they found the auction through BidSpotter. But we have coming out shortly opportunities for auctioneers to embed a tool or a page within their website that allows branding with their logos and their colors to be able to traffic from directly within their site and maintain more of the feel that you’re working right within the auctioneer’s website. So really it’s going to be the best of both worlds. And those tools are in development, we except to roll those out in the fall. In conjunction with that, we are also focusing very heavily on back office systems. We have a channel partner in the UK that should allow us very shortly to be able to offer a very comprehensive package of enterprise management software for auctioneers to use that will do all your basic accounting functions and track your consigners and print your invoices and all that good stuff that you need to do, live at the sale site as well as with the online purchases because obviously when you get in these timed auctions and so forth, you have the dilemma where 100% of the bids and the bidders are coming through the website, but you still need to put them through an enterprise management software back office system that allows you to get the invoices out and check your bank deposits and make sure everything is as it should be so you’re running your business properly.

And so, let me jump in there, you’re talking about a web-based clerking and cashiering system, is that right?

Yes.

So someone, and let me form this question, for the real time live streaming auctions where I have a crowd in attendance and I’m taking bids from the floor and I’m taking bids from the Internet, will the system support then the recording of the winning bids for both Internet bidders and on-the-ground bidders and let me generate invoices all from this one spot?

That’s exactly what we are shooting for.

Nice.

On the customer side there’s also a lot of nice stuff coming along. There are new cultural things, new cultural expectations in the realm of the online auctions, some of which are bleeding over from eBay and some of which are kind of driven by the fact that we are event oriented, and people are going to want to be able to manage their favorites and their watched items and their items they are bidding on in a much more focused way. And so we are developing a lot of tools along those lines to allow people to dial in a little more tightly from the bidder perspective what they are interested in. And we think that will lead to more loyalty and better focus and more follow-through when it comes time to finalize the bidding.

One more follow question to what you described as essentially and a combination portal / integrated solution. That will provide auctioneers the ability to have the same inventory set hosted on his website as well as on BidSpotter or is one or the other?

No. The goal is to have the inventory data and the bidding exist in a space between the two and all we are changing is the way it is viewed from one perspective or another. So yes, it should be exactly the best of both worlds and whether it’s a live or timed auction won’t matter. The bidding will be competitive amongst all the bidders but their perception of where they came from and where they are existing on the internet will be colored slightly differently based upon where they began.

One more question on that. Do you anticipate a different pricing structure for an auctioneer utilizing that option and also is there a difference in the pricing structure between a real-time bidding auction and a timed auction?

At this time we don’t. You know, we have never done a whole lot of differentiation pricing-wise because we’ve really just always built whatever tool next seem to be most in demand and it’s a very competitive market and so we haven’t put out a lot of “gee, now we are going to get you to pay more for this and pay more for that.” The a la carte thing is never been anything that’s been a very much interest to us. So instead we are all about trying as best as we can to maintain the pricing structure we have as low as we can and just keep throwing more features out there as they are either brought to our attention by auctioneers, which is where most of good ideas come from, or whether they seem to answer a recurrent problem or a recurrent bidder demand.

What are some of the features that you offer that you are seeing of your most successful auctioneers utilizing? What are some of your most successful auctioneers asking for as far as feature sets, and what are they doing to set their auctions apart from the rest of your client base?

To be honest, I don’t think that the successful auctioneers are dependent upon a technology or something that we are providing. I think that the biggest difference and the most successful auctioneers for online auctions really comes down to their mindset regarding embracing the online bidders as real people, actual bidders who are just as genuinely interested in making good purchases and doing good business as the folks on site, it just so happens that they are at a remove, whether it’s a time management situation because they cant go to the auction because its their daughter’s wedding rehearsal that evening or whether they cant go to the auction because they are twenty-five hundred miles away. The biggest challenge for auctioneers is always about vetting the bidders and making sure they are doing good business. And we certainly appreciate that with my own auctioneering background, I’ve done enough bankruptcy court sales where the building has to be cleared in time and the bills have to be paid in time and I’ve even done sales in cases where I was liable for any deficit if someone didn’t pay their bill. On the other hand, if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I usually have no more guarantees that someone is going to follow through with their purchase when they have registered live in person. We certainly don’t track whether or not people leave the sales site before they’ve paid and we don’t do a whole lot when they register except maybe scan a driver’s license and so, you can draw direct analogies between doing good business in live auctions on site in person and doing good business with folks online. My experience has always been, through the ten years of doing this, that the percentage of people who are flakes online is just about the same percentage of people who are flakes in real life, we don’t see anywhere near the kind of fraud concerns that eBay has and I think that is because we are event oriented and we are focused on a whole package, and its still a process, you have to participate and actively, you cant swoop in and steal a bunch of laptops and swoop out like they do on some of the different online platforms where you can use fraudulent credit cards and so forth, but my advice to auctioneers has always been and the guys that do best are the ones that make the effort to reach out to every registered bidder, pick up the phone, see if they answer the phone, see if they sound like a good Joe on the other end and make that human connection, and the auctioneers that accept the most number of registrants are doing the most business and selling the most items. The auctioneers that have the most prohibitive, restrictive deposit demands and registration requirements and a lot of documents and so forth are the ones who are not seeing very many transactions with their online bidding.

That’s a great point in that the higher your barrier to entry, the less participation you are going to have. I mean, it’s a pretty direct relationship I think, on that. Talk a little bit more in-depth if you would about the various options that an auctioneer might have as far as bidder qualification and what maybe the most permissive policy and the highest barrier to entry policies may be.

Well, its kind of interesting because at the last Industrial Auctions Association Conference, Bruce Schneider with Schneider Industries came to us and said we had restored his faith in humanity, because he approves everyone and he’s never had a real problem. On the other hand, the other extreme, we have some of the guys who stick to the old school New England auctioneer policies where you’ve got to put a twenty-five percent deposit down, but they are not considering that from the perspective of the bidder. If you’re a guy in California and you see an auction for a bunch of audio video movie gear, and you think you want to bid on this stuff and you only know of the auction from the Internet, you go online and you register and you see that this guy wants you to send him ten thousand dollars cash – wire transfer – before he lets you bid. Well from the perspective of the guy in California, the bidder, that sounds like the definition of Internet fraud. You don’t know who that guy in New England is, I don’t care if he’s been in business for two hundred years, his name isn’t meaningful to you in the California market, you just know he’s asking for ten grand upfront before you can buy fifty thousand worth of equipment, or forty thousand. So there is the disconnect. Now, we are working very closely to try to establish something in the realm of a Paypal type payment process that is focused on the needs of auctioneers where you are moving actual money and you don’t have a whole bunch of recourse to cancel the deal after you’ve taken the goods and so forth. Most auctioneers right now are working in the middle ground and what we do on our platforms is, we have all the forms to request whatever the auctioneer requires. So if they wish they can request a driver’s license, if they wish they can request banking references, if they wish they can request credit cards for either just a deposit or for transacting the deal, we do not provide payment services at this time but its certainly something we’ve been in consideration of and maybe in future years we’ll be offering that service, we would certainly never require it but as an opportunity and as a feature for auctioneers that maybe something they wish. At the end of the day, it seems to me the guys that apply some common sense discretion to the folks registering online and the ones that use some of the resources that are there to vet some of the bidders and so forth, they do fine. There is an occasional problem, but my experience is that the occasional problem since 1999 is very much the same as the occasional problem before 1999. You just get a guy who gets excited, gets over his head or he doesn’t understand auctions and you’ve got to deal with the situation occasionally. It’s a rare situation. But nonetheless, when you look at that form of requesting approval to bid, if they haven’t spelled their name right or if they’ve got a phone number with eight digits or what have you, well then you know you’ve got a problem or you want to follow up and investigate a little further. If they are a name well known to you as most of our industrial auctioneers have well known clients they’ve never met in person, then you automatically approve without hesitation and its very much like the same policies you use to vet your auction bidders in the past, its just on a new venue.

How does registration work? If I’m a bidder and I find an auctioneer’s item or inventory set on BidSpotter.com and I decide to register into that event, I obviously have some steps to go through that are dependent on what that auctioneer requires for that event, but once I’m registered into that event, can I then reduce the number of steps I have to go through to bid in another auctioneer’s event? And the follow up question is that if there is a communal buyer set, for lack of a better descriptor, can one auctioneer make comments about a bidder that can be seen by another auctioneer?

You’ve hit on a couple of features that are inherent to what we do. I spoke earlier about the differences between BidSpotter and remote bidder and the ability to have a set of bidders who are automatically approved because they are known to you is one of those nice features that we have with RemoteBidder. Because again, if you traditionally sell duck decoys at all your auctions and you’ve got a buyer who always comes looking for duck decoys, then he’s going to be there sale after sale and there’s no reason for him not to and you’re going to know who he is so you can automatically approve that bidder as someone on your good list so to speak. And that’s a nice feature to have. We are a little more wide-ranging I will say on the BidSpotter side and it is very common for someone to come in completely unknown, buy a few machines, settle the business and go away and not bid again for five years until he needs more machines. On that side we do have a system of auctioneers being able to leave comments about bidders and I would like to see auctioneers use it more frequently because it is a very good communication tool when someone does fail to pay their bill or so forth. One of the comments we’ve had in the past about bad bidders is why don’t you block them and never let them register again based on email address. Well, the easy answer is, because someone goes out and gets another Gmail or Yahoo account address and they become unknown to you. I’d rather keep an eye on the guy in the way that we know him and be able to communicate amongst the auctioneers, you know what, this guy hasn’t paid in the past you need to make sure you get deposit or find out what the situation was. But again, those are uncommon things, I’m very happy with the feature we have with RemoteBidder where you could your whitelisted bunch of bidders because it does save time and energy. And again, in the consumer good space, you have a lot more repetitive buyers.

We talked a little bit about some of the things that some of the successful auctioneers are doing with regard to even a paradigm as it relates to Internet bidding and customer registration. What are you seeing as far as some of the mistakes that some auctioneers are making that had they done things a little bit differently they could have done a better job with the Internet bidding and the relationship with those Internet bidders at their events?

You know, I think the number one area for improvement and the thing that seems to separate most the successful online auctioneers and not just the folks that sell the most online but also minimizing and mitigating challenges and problems after the sale, are the level of cataloguing. And I have catalogued hundreds if not thousands of auctions. I know how much work it is. I know that auctioneers often put out disclaimers that it doesn’t matter what I say or what this catalogue is, you are buying as is under your own inspection. Well, that kind of stands at odds a little bit with the circumstance that an online buyer finds themselves in where they are completely dependent upon the auctioneer for description. There is a trend amongst industrial auctions for folks to go down and inspect and then bid online later and I imagine for consumer goods there is still a fair amount of people doing that regionally as well, but you seriously have a lot of people who need to depend on you, because they’re never going to see the item until it arrives in their possession after you ship to them. So the difference between cataloging table as the whole description, and one small low resolution snap shot as opposed to getting very detailed and saying this is mahogany, Ethan Allen table with four leaves and so on and so forth, and putting in three or four images. One of the biggest advantages we have in our RemoteBidder site is how easy it is to manage multiple images and I believe that multiple images is a level upon which all of the different live auction broadcast sites are competing, because the more that that person can see for themselves, the better it works out in the long run for everyone. And a very good example I know came from a recent auction we did with OK Automobilia, it was kind of a fun auction because we run it on both the BidSpotter platform where they have done auctions annually for the last seven years under the name Vic’s 66, which they recently sold hence the new name, and we ran it on the brand new RemoteBidder platform. And between the two online platforms, we did about forty or fifty percent of the auction total gross and it was split pretty evenly between their folks that knew to come to BidSpotter and the new folks in RemoteBidder. But there was a situation that came out after the sale, a fellow had bought a sign – this was a sale of Petroliana and automobile signs and gas pumps and that sort of thing – definitely those kind of guy toys that a demographic works very well for. And the fellow came in and he looked at this sign which had been a hanging sign and it was two sided. And one side which probably had been against the building for years was gorgeous and the other side was very rough. And not to put it too lightly, the guy came in and basically blew a gasket. He said, “You know, I bid exclusively online, I couldn’t come look here, I’ve driven hours to pick this thing up and now I see you hide the back side from me.” And the auctioneer very calmly said, actually sir, lets go see what we had online, because he knew there were photographs there of both sides. In this case the client hadn’t availed themselves of it but it had been offered to them had they wished to look it over and do a little more due diligence and at the end of the day the guy paid his bills, said, “Golly, you know what, to be honest, I think maybe I saw that other side, I just I don’t know what I was thinking I got caught up in the bidding and you’re right, it was there and I need to pay my bill because I bought it and that’s fair.” So that extra effort by that auctioneer to snap one more picture really saved a situation where there could have been a dispute that was without a good resolution. And so I think that’s the place for most auctioneers can avail themselves best, and if I had a magic want and there was one thing I could say to the auctioneers as my rule, I would say catalog it the way you’re going to sell it, and sell it the way you catalog it. Because one of the biggest frustration we get with bidders in industrial sales is when we have a bidder who carefully pours over hundreds of lots of tooling and drill bits and so forth and picks out the twenty that he needs for his business and leaves very good absentee bids and events at sale, and then the auctioneer comes in and says, put the next twenty together, put the next twenty together. And so all over a sudden who left a hundred and ninety dollar bid for his one lot is outbid by the guy who is spending two hundred dollars for twenty lots. And it really didn’t serve anyone’s best interest but the set up guy wasn’t really in tune with the auctioneer ones and so on and so forth. Its important to remember that these folks online don’t have a good way to holler out and say hey, could you sell out 147 separate, I really just need that one piece. So that would be my magic wand wish. I think that most of the opportunities for improvement and more success and less challenges after the sale fall in the realm of cataloging.

Is this something that you’re seeing improve over time, the diligence that auctioneers are using as far as cataloging their auctions and what are some other overall trends you are seeing in Internet bidding in the auction industry?

Absolutely. I had to go to the auction in 1999 of one of the most preeminent industrial auctioneers in America at the time, who later rolled up his business with DoveBid and then now has rolled it back out again. And he was of the mind that people didn’t need to hear the auction, and they certainly didn’t need a picture of every item because there’s just no point. So I went a day early on my own nickel and I took a picture of the lot. And that was the first auction where we did more than 25% to the online bidders. And we made a believer of him that day. Since then, I think the auctioneers understand that its very important. We have a few holdouts who refuse to offer every lot, we have a few holdouts who refuse to take pictures of every lot, but by and large, everyone now is a consumer online frequently enough that we are all beginning to have a shared set of expectations. And we’ve all shopped at Amazon enough, we’ve all shopped eBay enough, we’ve all done Harry and David online for Christmas shopping and all these different things, and so providing that and meeting that expectation really, really sets a level playing field amongst all the bidders and you’d be surprised. What I’ve found over the years is that the online bidders are interested most in the twenty percent of your merchandise that represents eighty percent the value. So you don’t need a whole lot of action online to generate a whole lot of money. I know that in a recent sale two weeks ago, because of a partnership between their client and my client, we ended up going head to head with one of our primary competitors broadcasting the same auction at the same time and they sold a lot more lots and they sold about $17,000 out of the $600,000 sale, and we sold a $117,000 out of the $600,000 sale. And the difference primarily was a $70,000 lot and a $30,000 lot. So being dialed in the right demographic and the right mailing list could make a really big difference. But also, on the auctioneer end, providing the tools they need to make an intelligent buying decision and if you’re willing to risk spending thirty grand or seventy grand. Or we’ve actually had a single million dollar bid online and it went just fine. So it’s all about providing the information needed and setting it up so they can feel confident when they place their bid.

Well, that’s it for Episode 19. My guest tonight was Jeff Johnstonbaugh, COO of BidSpotter.com. You can find out more about bidspotter at www.bidspotter.com and about remotebidder at remotebidder.com. Thank you very much Jeff for joining me this evening.

Thank you, Aaron. I appreciate the opportunity.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening, now go sell something.

Chris Longly from the National Auctioneers Association talks about his role as Deputy Executive Directory and promotes the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and show.

You’re listening to the Auction Podcast. Today is Wednesday, 27th May, 2009. auctioneertech.com – technology, auction and auctioneers, auction tech for the auction industry.

Hello and welcome to the 18th episode of the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. My name is Aaron Traffas and joining me today for the first NAA staff interview is Chris Longly, Deputy Executive Director for the National Auctioneers Association based in Overland Park, Kansas. Chris is on the show tonight for two reasons, the first to talk about his role in the association and the second to tell us about the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show coming this July to the Kansas City area.

AuctioneerTech: Good evening Chris and thank you for joining me.

Chris Longly: Thank you Aaron, I’m honored to be the first NAA staff member to join you on your show.

AT: I realize the auctioneers and vendors I’ve had on in previous episodes do a great job of promoting the association but you are the first official and a representative, give me the ninety second elevator speech about what the NAA is, who it benefits and what its goals are.

CL: Well you know I can even beat ninety seconds. To sum up the NAA, there is no better way to describe it that the NAA was built 60 years ago by auctioneers for auctioneers. Simply put, we are here to serve the auction profession and the auction industry, we are the biggest advocate of the auction industry and the auction profession, our role here is to provide auctioneers and auction companies with the tools, training, education and resources that they need to succeed in the ever changing market place. Auctions are different today than they were sixty years ago when the NAA was founded, it’s continued to grow and change every day. So we are here to help provide those tools and resources, so we can move forward. Actions have been around two thousand years and they’re going to be here in the future, but each day they change a little bit and we are here to kind of grow and change with that industry. And so that is our role, is that we are here to provide that, the training, the resources and that networking environment that so many people come to the NAA for, just to network and to communicate and kind of to connect with auctioneers from all over in the United States or even across the world.

Sounds like that snot the first time you’ve had the answer that question.

I am their PR guy so I’m sorry.

So, talk a little bit about that, what are the official job responsibilities for your position which is listed on the website as deputy executive director and what does an average day consist of for you?

You know, when I first joined the NAA, it was two years ago, I came to the NAA as its public affairs manager and as over time my roles and responsibilities have grown. My primary responsibility as the deputy executive director is kind of an extension of those responsibilities which were public relations, government relations and charitable relations. First and foremost, my job for the NAA is to be its advocate for the association and advocate and promoter of our members, and advocate and promoter of the industry. And I do that through the media, my job is to act as a spokesperson, so I will work with everyone from CNN to for instance this week we had a great story on national public radio about auctions and talking about that growth, so I work with the media to promote and push the industry and promote and push NAA auctioneers. On the government relations side, my job is to, one act as an advocate, whether it be in Washington DC, on behalf of the auction industry or as an advisor, kind of a consultant to state associations when they run into issues, since my time we’ve been here I’ve had the fortune of working on behalf of the association to fight some rules in the general services administration that were going to be prohibitive to auctioneers and really box auctioneers out of selling for the Federal government. And so it’s my honor to work with auctioneers and going to Washington DC and stopping that from taking place. And so that’s just an example of the things we work on, working in the state legislatures to educate them about the auction profession and protecting the auctioneers. That’s what we do on the government relations side.

And then on the charitable side, as many people know who follow the National Auctioneers Association, we are proud sponsors of St. Jude Children Research Hospital in Memphis Tennessee and so my job is to act as a liaison between the auctioneers in the NAA and the hospital. We have raised roughly about four million dollars for St. Jude’s since we our partnership began in 1995 and it’s something we continue to hopefully grow and build upon and get more members involved in raising money for that cause. But then also with the association of our size, most people will think the National Auctioneers Association is a very large organization, staff size, we are actually quite small. So we get to dabble in everything. So today I worked with the landscaping through our front, I am the office barbequer, so I do a little bit of everything here at the NAA.

Nice. How did you become involved with the National Auctioneers Association, what’s your background, where are you from and what drew you to the NAA.

Alright…well I’m a proud Nebraskan, so I hail from the good life state, I grew up around auctions my entire life, my family, grandfather was a farmer and rancher, so I remember spending time with him at the livestock sales, but as I grew older I kind of moved away from that. And my background is politics, I studied politics and media relations at University of Nebraska, so I’m a big Cornhusker Fan. I’ve done politics and managed Congressional campaigns and U.S. Senate races when I left college, and then I moved to the corporate side and I did PR and government relations, we call it public affairs in the industry. Public affairs is the combination of government relations and media relations and I did that for The Venetian of Las Vegas, if people are familiar with Las Vegas, I did a little work for them and then I also did work for State Farm Insurance. So I could insure your gambling assets in a sense. But then I came across an opportunity in the Kansas City area that I saw there was an association in need of a public affairs professional and knowing auctions and growing up around them, I thought wow, I found somebody who could talk more than me and faster than me, so this is going to work for me. So that’s why I came down here and joined the NAA staff and I handled the public affairs.

Great. Speaking of public affairs, one of the biggest, in my mind, one of the biggest presences that NAA has for the average auctioneer is at Conference and Show. So how would you describe Conference and Show to someone who is unfamiliar with it, either someone who is unfamiliar with the industry and the association or an auctioneer who is just now beginning to be involved in the association?

You know, the best way for me to sum up Conference and Show is just that one spot that every auctioneer should be in July and should make every attempt to be there because this is the one spot where you could go to network, ask those questions that you are needing input on, getting that education to help you remain competitive in the marketplace, its all those things in one week, in Kansas City this Summer, next year it will be in Greensboro North Carolina and so on and so forth, its that one week where we get together and have fun, we celebrate our industry, we compete with competitions, we have education sessions, but most importantly its just that shaking hands in the hallway, asking if you are a new person in the industry, asking that thirty year veteran, how have you stayed in this business for thirty years. What would be the one tip you could offer me as an auction school graduate so I can be in your same shoes thirty years down the road. That’s what’s Conference and Show; it’s that one week where you get everything you need. But at the same time it’s that family reunion and that’s one thing we are going to have this year, is that family reunion thing because if you ask many NAA members, Conference and Show is far more than just business and professional development. It is catching up with old friends, what has happened in the last year since I last saw you at Conference and Show last year. So that’s how I describe Conference and Show.

You mentioned it is going to be in Kansas City this year. Why is it coming home to Kansas City?

Kansas City, its coming home because home is where we are here and it is our sixtieth anniversary. 1949, eleven auctioneers got together and created the National Auctioneers Association, sixty years have passed, its time to bring in the family, come to Kansas City to Overland Park and we are going to get together and celebrate sixty years. I mean, that’s something to hang your head on and be proud, so it’s going to be a family reunion in a sense. And we are going to celebrate sixty years because here in Kansas City this is where we are headquartered, so it makes sense to bring everyone home to the family.

Being based in Kansas City and I assume living there somewhere in the area, you should be relatively familiar with Kansas City and the Kansas City area. What are some things to do, what are some night life attractions and what can we expect for some of the extracurricular activities in Kansas City?

Well, and that’s one thing I think many people sometimes get well, what’s in Kansas City and that’s one thing I love telling our members about is, there is so much to see in Kansas City, its really hard to summarize it, but I tell people if you are a history buzz, if you like museums, we have the only World War 1 museum in the world. It is the Liberty Museum, the Liberty Monument and so that is one of the neatest museums that we have in Kansas City, if you like art we have world renowned art museums in our gallery here, Nelson Atkins Museum. If you like shopping, let me tell you, we have a lot of places where you can spend a lot of money here in Kansas City. We have the world famous popular, a lot of people know of it, is The Plaza. It’s a boutique shop fun area, great restaurants, it’s a part of Kansas City that people come from all over the country just for the shopping and for the experience, if you are looking for fun and speed, we have the Kansas City Speedway one of Nascars race tracks here in Kansas City that we are pretty proud of. But then also we have new areas and new developments like the Kansas City Power and Light District, this is a new evening restaurant establishment that was built up this year that goes with the Sprint Center which is our new TV entertainment district but also right next to the entertainment district at the Sprint Center is the college basketball hall of fame museum. So that’s another museum for people to see. The list goes on and on, museums and attractions to see, but there also are a lot of family fun things. The Deanna Rose Children’s Farmstead, that’s an outdoor park where kids can play with the animals. I went there with my niece and nephew a couple of years ago, they have a fishing pond there that you literally stick your fishing pond and fish will just out of the water onto your hook. It is an amazing experience, that’s my kind of fishing that works for me. But there are all kinds of things to see and do. Food, shopping, obviously when you come to Kansas City we highly recommend that you eat a barbeque, but we also have some great stake houses, some great Italian restaurants, you name it, the cuisine is there. And that’s the neat thing about where we are for Conference and Show, is that there are just a plethora of food selections to choose from and sites to see in Overland Park, Kansas.

There is a jam packed schedule of educational activities and tours, there are several NAA educational institute designation courses that are offered and the day is leading up to where it kind of all begins with the opening night ceremonies on Tuesday evening. Talk a little bit about what we can expect for opening night and maybe what some of the big ticket items and banquets and competitions are the rest of the week.

Well, you know, we always start off Conference and Show with some pre conference education. This is an opportunity for members who maybe couldn’t get to one of our designation courses throughout the year, and so the days before we lead into Conference and Show, we have some pre conference courses. We have the AARE course, we have the GPPA course, the ATS, the BAS, the CES and even this year we have the Professional Ringman’s Institute offering some of their course, all in the day before Conference and Show. So for those members who want to get, or non members, who want to come out and obtain a continuing education designation the day before the conference and then head into the conference for additional continuing education, that’s the place to be. Opening night is one of the events everybody looks forward to, this is when I say family reunion, its amazing to see the members just get excited, hugging, shaking hands with friends who they haven’t seen either in a year or more. And this year, because it is that sixtieth anniversary, we have what is called rock and reunion. And so this is going to be a fun event at the Overland Park Convention Center, Sheraton Hotel area where we will be, we are going to have indoor games, we are going to have outdoor games. Obviously the highlight of the night I think will be the auction idol competition. This is an event we are doing that’s new this year, everybody loves American idol, so we thought why not do Auction Idol. And so what will happen is, we have members who have registered and we still have some open spots for the musician out there who would like to compete, we will have members do their musical presentations and then we will be selling tickets for members to buy to use, to vote for their favorite contestants, and all those proceeds go to St. Jude Children Research Hospital. So it’s a fun way for our members to show their musical talents because we have some of the most talented musicians in any industry, I think, and that’s part of the auction industry, there is a lot of stage performance presence and musical talent I think Aaron you’ve got some musical talent, I’ve been told, so I expect you to be in the Auction Idol. But this is an opportunity for them to show their stuff and raise money for a good cause.

Now, while we have that, we are going to have some kid’s activities. We are going to have the moon walk for the kids to play on, and the key to the whole night is the barbeque. We are going to have the world famous Jack Stack Kansas City Barbeque for everybody to enjoy out in the green space, to enjoy the night, I think we are going to have ice cream, cotton candy, and maybe some shaved ice cones, I’m not sure, but then my favorite part maybe, I don’t know, there are a lot of favorite parts, but this one is new, and this one has been fun putting together for our members, and its Wii World. Everybody has heard of the Nintendo Wii, I haven’t played one once you play you are going to be addicted, we are going to have rows wiis set up throughout the hotel and conference center so people can play tennis, they can bowl, we’ve got fishing, we’ve got race cars, we are going to have all kinds of different games for people to play throughout the week but opening night there is going to be outside of the opening night event. And then the kicker is, at the end of the week, those wiis that everybody has been playing on, they are up for sale. They are going up on the auction in the IAC. Now that brings up a good thing; we talk about what are some of the events and activities, competition. That’s something that people come year in, year out to strut their stuff and to take the stage and hopefully take the title. Obviously the most I guess well known event that we have at Conference and Show is the International Auctioneer Championship. We’ve been doing this for I think 21, 22 years. I guess it will be 21 years this year, because Paul Behr was the first IAC champion in 1988, so we will have auctioneers from across the country, actually we’ve had auctioneers from across the world compete for that world title champion. And so this is an exciting event, you just see talent, unbelievable talent come across the stage on Friday and show their stuff. So we will be picking a new world champion male auctioneer and we will be picking new international auctioneer champion woman and they will be our spokespeople and our advocates for the coming year. Now you have the upcoming International Auctioneer Champions, get their practice in the international junior auctioneer championship and that’s going to go on throughout the week with the finals taking place on Friday morning. And this is where we have young kids, I shouldn’t say kids because it starts at eighteen years and younger, compete. So you are going to have third generation, second generation auctioneers, even fourth generation auctioneers come up and start their stuff and you’ll be amazed when you see the talent that comes across the stage, you would think they could compete just as well in the International Auctioneers Championship. So a lot of pure talent coming across the stage at a very young age.

I remember before thinking that there were certainly some contestants in the IJAC, the International Junior Auctioneers, I definitely remember thinking that they were some of those that could just as well have placed very strongly in the IAC.

Exactly. And this is our third year. Trev Moravec who was our first IJAC winner two years ago in San Diego, the previous year I think he was nineteen two years ago, I think when he was eighteen, he was a finalist in the International Auctioneers Championship. So he is competitive across the board, the talent is amazing, Jacob Barth who won last year, again he is fourteen years old but he sounds like he’s been bid calling, now you know he’s been bid calling since birth but his bid call is phenomenal for only fourteen years. So I always look forward to seeing that just because it’s nice to see the next generation moving forward in our industry. And then finally, we have for the third year, the International Ringman’s Competition. This takes place in conjunction with the National Auctioneers Foundation fun auction and this always an exciting auction where you get to see the real talent out there in the field in the ringman’s industry and so we are always looking forward to seeing the excitement in it, the energy those contestants bring to the competition, and they are always raise for a wonderful cause which is our foundation. And so that’s going to be another exciting event that’s going to just get people involved in the association and the competition.

We are past now the early bird registration deadline, I am sure that we have quite a few of our membership procrastinating a little bit maybe more this year looking at the economy and maybe still kind of deciding whether or not to come. What’s the attendance looking like right now and is it too late to register for discount?

It’s never too late to register for discounts, registration numbers look good, we always want more, we tell people, you come that first time, if you are sitting on the fence right now wondering if you should come your first time, this is the perfect opportunity for you. And if you are looking at it and going well, the economy is kind of tough, maybe business has not been as fast or as strong as I’d want, that’s the perfect example why you should be at Conference and Show. Come here, get some ideas, get some inputs and maybe you’ll make a business connection that will give you new business. When its times like this, that’s more the reason you need to tap into the association. Tap into that network of people to help you build your business, you can survive these tough times and actually more forward and make more money for your business. Trust me if you come to Conference and Show, I think you’ll find that you’ll make more money than would spend on conference far and above.

I would definitely agree with that

I hope so; I think that’s a perfect reason why you’d want to come to Conference and Show. But no, it’s not too late. Actually, if we are going to air this before June 5th, you have one last chance to save money on your registration. June 5th is the last cut off date before we get into Conference and Show. So if you have not registered for Conference and Show and it’s before June 5th and you’re sitting on the fence, save yourself seventy-five bucks and go ahead and register today. Whether it’s the Full Pack, the Super Saver 1, Super Saver 2, get in there before June 5th and save yourself seventy-five bucks.

What’s the hotel and lodging situation looking like, are they filling up, what kind of lodging is there close to the Overland Park Convention Center.

Well, you know, all the hotels are showing up pretty fast. So we tell you to contact NAA Travel and I’ve got their phone number here for anybody who is listening. If you are looking at coming to Conference and Show, get in touch with NAA Travel as soon as possible and book your room and that number is 877-363- 9378. If you want to get in touch with them, go ahead and book your room and make sure you are ready to go. All of the hotel rooms are either connected to the convention center across the street or I think the furthest one is maybe a half a mile away but obviously within walking distance of the convention center, there is free packing at the convention center so don’t let parking prevent you from coming, but there is one thing that you will probably want to do when you come to conference and show this year, is that we’re a little bit further away from the airport than I think previous conference and shows in years past. So we would highly recommend you rent a car for the week, but that’s perfect opportunity for you to go check out a Kansas City Royals game in the evenings or better yet how about you take a trip at the Branson Missouri, see a show, come to Conference and Show. But rent that car. So you’re going to need to rent a car but everything, the hotels are nearby and there is still room, so book today.

I sure I’m looking forward to it certainly because I am very close and kind of familiar with Kansas City but also because, at least in my opinion and experience, the traffic isn’t as nearly as bad as it has been at some of the other locations we’ve had Conference and Show and it is away from the airport but its not like it’s a crazy horrible commute, there is a lot of, its pretty much an interstate straight down from the airport to the convention center and so I would definitely agree with that recommendation to get a car, and its really not that bad.

What’s your favorite spot in Kansas City Aaron?

Well, I’m kind of partial to some of the night life establishments, I’ve seen some great shows in the Kansas City area, I am a big fan of alternative country and music in general and so I always coming over and I get to see Ryan Adams out there and some other really great bands, I’ve actually played a couple of times in the area, so there is a lot of great places. I am kind f looking forward to getting to the Power and Light District; I haven’t had a chance to see that yet.

Oh, there is the PBR bar. If you are looking for country music, there is the Professional Bull Riders and they’ve got a mechanical bull with your name on it. So get down there while you’re in town.

That’s just what I need. So, what was your involvement like in the coordination and planning of Conference and Show this year and what can we expect to see you doing during the convention?

Well, I usually tell people when I talk to members; a lot of my interactions with our membership is over the phone. So when I see them in Conference and Show, it’s really exciting to finally meet them in person. So I tell people I am the guy running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Most of my time is making sure that everything is in order for the members, we have ticket people in place, we have food where food needs to be, a lot of my time is working with the media, one of my favorite parts is taking our IAC champions out to local TV stations and introducing bid calling and the art of auctioneering to the local TV anchors, just because they enjoy it, it’s a great opportunity to showcase our IAC champions talent, but its also a good time to talk about the industry. I remember when we were in Nashville last year, a lot of people wanted to talk about real estate auctions. And so it was a great opportunity to educate Nashville viewers about how real estate auctions have grown. So it’s a great opportunity to do PR there. But overall, my job is just to help facilitate the association move and do business because my job also involves memberships, we’re going to talk about growing the association and building that and what we can provide members to make the association more beneficial and useful to them in the future. So a little bit of business but hopefully a bit of fun; catching up. I’m looking forward to seeing the members.

Yeah. You mentioned at the very beginning of the Podcast that next year, we can expect to look forward to North Carolina. What are some new ideas that we may look forward to seeing at future Conferences and Shows?

Well, you know Conference and Show is something we are constantly trying to build upon and make it a better draw, make it more worthy, useful over time, the last thing we want to do is provide a member with a conference that they don’t walk away going, I didn’t know that. We want you to talk away with a notepad full of ideas, pocket full of business cards from members you’ve met, and so we are constantly looking at what education programs we can provide that will be more beneficial, what kind of activities and events can we provide that are going to be beneficial. But next year, we are in Greensboro North Carolina, we are going to be in Orlando in 2011, Spokane in 2012 and Indianapolis in 2013. So everybody needs to put those on the calendar, you know where you need to be till 2013, and hopefully soon we’ll have 2014 picked up real quick so you can go and put that on your calendar there. But we plan these on advance and we are always looking for inputs. So members of the association, even non members of the association, if there is something that you’d like to see at Conference and Show, please let us know. This is your association is probably something else that another member wants, but we need to hear it from you.

Great. One last question for you Chris and I know that with your background in politics I realize that there is certainly some political implications here about picking sides and things like that but now that you’ve been with the association for a few years, what are your thoughts on some of the things that NAA can do to make itself even better in the future.

Well, let me see which way… I guess I’m trying to understand the question, sorry…

What are some ideas that NAA may, in your opinion, look at pursuing to make itself increase membership, make itself more relevant in the industry and things to make it even better.

Well, you know, things that we can do to kind of build our association to make it better is obviously create our presence. Create our presence in the industry, part of the association’s job is to get out there and promote the industry. So we’ve had a lot of successes over the past year, two years on getting ourselves out there in front of the mainstream media and getting in people’s homes, talking about auctions, making auctions no longer this process that sometimes you hear about but you don’t know the facts or details behind, we are trying to bring it to the mainstream and so we’ve had a lot of success there, but we need to continue to have that presence. But it’s not just the NAA that needs to be doing the PR; it’s our members out there in their local communities. Picking up the phone and calling their radio stations or their local newspaper and inviting them to an auction or offering to tell them about an auction. Together at the grassroots level and at the grass tops level, we are going to increase the PR and make the association and the industry and the membership much more stronger and better in the future. From the membership perspective, one thing we are constantly looking to do for our members is create benefits and enhance our benefits. What are some things that maybe we are not providing our members that may be useful. What are some things that really members don’t see benefit in that we can maybe move to something different. So that’s one of the things I’d like to see in my position, is looking at our membership benefits and increasing those and making those better so members can walk away saving money for their personal business. That’s one of the greatest benefits we can do as an association, is not only save you money, but we want to help you make money.

Well, that’s it for Episode 18. My guest tonight is Chris Longley, deputy executive director of the National Auctioneers Association which you can visit at www.auctioneers.org. You can also find complete information about the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show. Thank you very much Chris for taking time out of your evening to join me this evening.

Thank you Aaron and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from Auctioneer Tech. If you have questions, suggestions or comments or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.actioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode as well as find show transcripts on the Auction Podcast page of AuctioneerTech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something!

It’s time for a little year-end housekeeping. With all of the top lists being created regarding the previous year, we couldn’t help but join in with a top list and a review of everything we’ve done so far. Here are our top six posts that we like.

1. ATS designation – Auction Technology Specialist for auctioneers
2. Today is a special day, vote for science
3. Example RFP for new or redesigned website
4. Accessible websites, more RFP ideas
5. Purple Wave unveils grouped extension system for equipment auction
6. Never use letters in advertised phone numbers

Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES is the author of AuctioneerTech

Here is our year in review, with a summary for each month. Don’t forget that you can always go straight to the posts for any given month using the links in the side bar on the right.

July
While the site launched in September, we cheated a little bit by scraping from other sources and populating it with a few related posts made previously on the NAA discussion forum as well as aarontraffas.com. We covered the NAA forum, Ubuntu Linux, and PDF tools, as well as mentioned hosted exchange, some other email clients and Google Apps. We touched on how Internet Explorer is a great browser so long as it’s fully patched. We talked about how while Windows Vista is slower than XP in speed, it’s superior to XP in many ways that count such as security, stability and forward compatibility.

August
We  only scraped one post for August, and that was a short post about Flash and website usability. We dove much deeper into the topic with a series of posts in November.

September
The site launched on September 8, but September 2 featured a scraped article from aarontraffas.com about the release of Google Chrome, which held our attention for a few weeks until we went back to Firefox and Opera. We covered OpenOffice 3, noted that eBay is declining and only accepting Paypal, and had the first article about auctioneers. We discussed advertising for Internet only auctions and Apple’s new iPods, as well as evangelized about Secunia, Twitter, and Skyfire. We migrated from one laptop to another and showed how MozBackup and Belarc Advisor help make the process easier. We examined how phpList makes bulk email list management easier for auctioneers and we also had two posts about PDFs showing that you should use them sparingly and never use Adobe products when the alternatives are faster and cheaper.

This author took part in the Kansas Auctioneer Association bid call competition at the Kansas State Fair and has a live blog from the experience as well as a video to prove it. The experience was the catalyst for a position post on why state associations should use computerized tabulation for bid call competitions.

September saw the first five Auction Podcasts as well as the listing of the series within the podcast section of iTunes. The episodes were based generally on content from existing posts on AuctioneerTech. There was the primier on advertising Internet only auctions, a tech roundup covering several shorter posts, and podcasts covering PDF and phpList.

Robert Mayo. CAI, CAGA, AARE was featured on Auction Podcast Episode 7

October
The first post in October was one of celebration after finally figuring out how to prevent the nasty screen flickering found when using an external monitor on some laptops loaded with Vista. While we were talking about multiple monitors, we showed how Synergy can be used to share your mouse between multiple computers, not just multiple screens. We noted and showed examples of how auctioneers are using WordPress for auction sites and described in depth the new Auction Technology Specialist designation offered by the NAA.

A new resource list was created that is an ongoing project listing all companies and providers involved with auction clerking, cashiering and Internet bidding. We showed how OpenDNS makes the web faster and safer, and how Google Adwords allows auctioneers to find a very targeted audience in a very short amount of time. We announced a critical security update for Windows and explained the importance of keeping your data encrypted while showing how Truecrypt makes it crazy-simple to do. For collaboration needs, we talked about how UStream makes it easy for auctioneers to broadcast video of events for free and how ShowMyPC and LogMeIn make Internet meetings free and much more simple than other expensive solutions such as GoToMeeting or WebEx. For those auctioneers who want to be a little geeky, we gave away the secret to a free education at W3 Schools.

Brandon Harker with Auction Flex was featured on Auction Podcast Episode 9

October’s podcasts covered Internet bidding as well as Adwords and OpenDNS. October found the first podcast guests in interviews with Robert Mayo of Mayo Auction and Realty and Brandon Harker of Sebae Data Solutions, makers of Auction Flex.

November
In November, we caught election fever and wrote about the importance of science in society and of ensuring that our elected officials understand the importance of science and technology. We discussed how hosted Exchange lets companies share Outlook contacts and calendars properly without the headache of managing an Exchange server.

We got geeky with files and talked about how 7-zip is the best compression utility and how a Drobo will let you sleep at night. We broke a story about AVG flagging one of the files in Adobe Flash as a virus, and we’re still getting several visits each day to the website from users searching for information about flashutil10a.exe.
Toward the end of November,we launched a series of discussions on what could go in an RFP for an auctioneer looking to build a new or redesign an existing website. Thanks to our friend Rob Spectre for posting some additional topics. We repeated that it was easy to use Google Docs to build simple web forms and wondered aloud if having auctions on Black Friday was a good idea.

Darron Meares, CAI, MBA, CPPA was featured on Auction Podcast Episode 10

November saw the Auction Podcast shift from being rehashed content on a separate page to new content included on the main page. November’s podcasts included an interview with Darron Meares of Meares Auction Group, a show on how open source software makes life easier and reduces expenses on software, and a controversial episode explaining that in many cases if you’re shipping auction items you’ve failed in marketing.

December
We continued our discussion about RFP ideas with some notes and comments about accessible websites. We looked from a marketing perspective at the importance of never using letters in advertised phone numbers, making sure an auction website had the upcoming auction calendar front and center with thumbnails, and ensuring that video is distributed properly. We also emphasized how important it is to be careful when browsing, and showed that Firefox users can browse freely and safely when running NoScript.

There were some interesting ideas covered such as Mahalo’s introduction of human-powered answers, as well as a New York auctioneer offering to negate the buyer’s premium in exchange for prepaid transactions. The National Auctioneers Association released the NAA Newsroom and Auction Answers and some dude royally ruined an auction by the Bureau of Land Management. Purple Wave released a new twist on the Internet only bidding model, a grouped extension feature that extends the entire group if a bid is received in the last few minutes.

The final Auction Podcast of 2008 covered dual agency with regards to absentee bid implementation. The final posts of the year included articles on letting your computer help science when you’re not using it, using Foxit Reader’s new typewriter tool to write on PDFs for free, and using Mint to automatically track your finances. We thanked you for racking up over 1000 listens to the Auction Podcast and encouraged you to go vote for the coolest tech of the year.

Going forward
It’s been a great four months; thanks to everyone for the kind words. Thanks to all of you who have left comments or feedback in response to articles or other comments, your participation is immensely valuable. Thanks to the guests who have been featured in podcasts and thanks to the guests who have already committed to podcast appearances in 2009. Have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve. We’ll see you next year.

Auction Podcast

The Auction Podcast has reached its first milestone. We’ve recently rocketed past 1000 listens to the series. Indeed, according to WordPress plugin Podpress, each of the first five episodes has over 100 listens.

When we first started the podcast, the goal was a weekly release. We have some exciting plans for the podcast series in 2009, but in order to focus on the quality of episodes and guests we’re going to step back to a monthly or semi-monthly release schedule.

We’d like to continue to cater this podcast to the listeners. If you have suggestions for topics or guests, or if you are interested in being a guest, please let us know by visiting the feedback page and leaving us a message.

This week’s Auction Podcast is an interview with Brandon Harker from Sebae Data Solutions, makers of Auction Flex and Bidopia. We don’t have the transcription finished quite yet, but you can listen to the podcast on the page that will have the transcript when its done.

The episode from two weeks ago featured Robert Mayo from Mayo Auction and Realty and has been the most popular episode so far. Remember that you can listen to any of the podcasts, as well as find free subscription information, at auctioneertech.com/auction-podcast.

You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast
auctioneertech.com – Technology, auctions and auctioneers – auction tech for the auction industry

Hello and welcome to the eighth episode of the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast for the week of 20 October, 2008. In this episode, we’re going to cover two recent topics from auctioneertech.com, DNS and Google AdWords.

Over the last several months, there have been many security bulletins about the vulnerabilities found in one of the fundamental technologies that makes the web work called DNS. DNS stands for domain name system. It’s a fairly complex system, but abstractly it’s fairly simple.

Every device on the Internet is accessed by Internet protocol, or IP address, which is a dotted quad, or sequence of four numbers separated by periods like 208.67.222.222. We remember websites and services and companies by their website domain names. I’ll bet you can name the websites for Google, Amazon, eBay and AuctioneerTech off of the top of your head, but I’ll bet you don’t know what the IP addresses of the servers are that your computer talks to when you visit those sites.

DNS exists to convert the domain names, like auctioneertech.com, into IP addresses, like 67.210.98.40. It’s like a phone book. You know the name, you need the number.

When you type the website www.auctioneertech.com into your browser, you computer first checks its cache memory to see if it has visited the site before. If it has, it further examines the record to see if that record is still valid. If it’s valid, it directs your browser to the computer at 67.210.98.40. If the TTL, or time to live, on that record has expired, the computer recognizes that the information is too old to be valid so it contacts a DNS server to find out the correct IP address of the domain. The DNS server is usually owned by your Internet service provider, or ISP.

Your ISP’s DNS server has a bunch of address records in its memory, each record with its own TTL or time until that record expires. Each time a subscriber requests a site it doesn’t have, it gets it and adds it to memory so it doesn’t have to get the same record again before the record expires.

The problem that’s been in the news recently relates to what is called DNS poisoning. Essentially, it’s possible to intercept the requests made by the DNS server for a domain name’s IP address and reply to them with incorrect addresses. For example, when the record for PayPal expires and the DNS server goes to update that record, a malicious person could catch that request and reply with an IP address for his server, causing the DNS server to tell the requesting subscriber that the IP address to PayPal is a malicious computer rather than the PayPal server. Now that malicious computer would serve a website that looks just like PayPal and have paypal.com in the browser address bar and the subscriber could be tricked into entering his username and password, providing access to his bank account to the malicious person. This attack is not Paypal’s fault, it’s the fault of the original DNS technology which was far too trusting.

Recently, patches and updates have been made to many DNS servers from many different ISPs. The problem is that you may not know if your provider has updated its servers. There is a test located at DoxPara, a link to which is posted on the transcript to this podcast, to tell if your DNS is vulnerable to the latest attacks, but by far the better choice in my opinion is to use a free service called OpenDNS.

OpenDNS makes Internet faster, safer

OpenDNS is a distributed network of free DNS servers that are faster and more secure than your ISP’s DNS server. Because they have so many users, the odds of them having the website you’re looking for are much higher, allowing them to return the IP address immediately rather than to have to look it up. They’re on top of their game, which means you can always trust that they’re running the latest updates and patches.

They have a fantastic control panel which not only provides statistics showing total requests, unique domains, unique IPs and more, they will allow you to block categories of websites or specific domains or IP addresses. You can block dating sites, gambling sites, auction sites, adult sites, gaming sites, religious sites, blogs – the list goes on. If you’re an auctioneer, you probably want to allow auction sites but block adult sites. If you’re a school, you probably want to block dating sites and religious sites as well. OpenDNS lets you block these categories and more. I have music sites blocked, but my staff likes to listen to Pandora Internet radio, so I can block the music category but specifically allow Pandora.

OpenDNS automatically blocks known phishing sites, which means that if you try to visit a site that is known to be malicious or to try to extract personal information from you, it will block it until you specifically allow that site in the OpenDNS control panel.

If you manage a network, simply enter the free OpenDNS server addresses in the configuration of your router and rest assured knowing that your router will cause all the computers on your network to go through the OpenDNS servers. If you manage multiple networks, the OpenDNS control panel will allow you to block and allow specific website categories for each network or all at once. If you have a notebook computer and are accessing the Internet at a wireless hotspot, you can use the OpenDNS servers specifically on your notebook to ensure that you’re really going to the sites you wanted to go to rather than hoping that the DNS servers used by the hotspot are not vulnerable or already poisoned.

One final feature is intelligent redirection. If you type example.cm on a normal DNS server, it will take you to either a page not found 404 error or a scam site or ad site hosted by a domain squatter. Type example.cm on a computer using OpenDNS and it will recognize that you probably meant example.com and correctly take you to the site you meant to visit.

How can OpenDNS provide such a fantastic service for free? When you enter a site like example.cm and it doesn’t have a good guess as to what you really meant, it will display a page of Google-powered search results as if you entered that website into the search bar rather than the address bar. OpenDNS takes a percentage of the ad revenue generated if you end up clicking on one of the sponsored links. You can customize the logo using the OpenDNS control panel so it looks like search results from your company, which is a particularly nice feature if you manage a network. The address bar search is so nice that I’ve found myself getting lazy and entering everything in the address bar because I know that OpenDNS will cover for me and convert the malformed website address into a search query.

With all the baddies on the Interwebs, OpenDNS provides peace of mind that when you type an Internet address in the browser’s address bar you’ll end up where you wanted. It provides an increase in browsing speed which translates to an increase in productivity. It makes you safe and boosts your bottom line. And it’s absolutely free. For instructions to start using OpenDNS, visit www.opendns.com.

Now, a question was posted on the page for last week’s podcast by Joe Abal from Florida who asked if I thought Google’s AdWords is a profitable marketing tool. The short answer is yes, but I thought it would be good to discuss what AdWords is and in what context it works best for auctioneers.

Google AdWords logo

Google is a mammoth company, slowly weaving its way into every corner of the Internet by offering free services that are better than the competing for-pay services. The development of these free services is not cheap, especially when Google allegedly requires only 80% of their employees’ attention through their Innovation time off program which encourages each Googler to spend one day a week on projects that interest him or her.

Google makes the vast majority of its money through advertising. Google owns advertising on the Internet, and one of the most prominent advertising services it offers is AdWords.

When you search Google, there are two kinds of results returned. The organic results are those listed on the left while the paid ads, or sponsored links, are listed in a block on the right and sometimes above the organic results on the left.

Eyetools eye tracking map of Google search results

When test subjects perform searches and their eyes are tracked, the results are pretty clear that the vast majority of the time the subjects look first at the top of the organic results list. There is a very intriguing study from a company called Eyetools showing this concept, and a link to that study is posted in the transcript for this episode. These data confirm that it’s much more valuable to have a high organic ranking than to rely on paid ads.

The problem is that you can’t strong-arm your way into ranking high on an organic search, especially if that search is fairly common. A modern-day snake oil industry has built itself around SEO, or search engine optimization, but the fact is that auctioneers seldom have the time to wait for the tweaking and testing involved in a targeted campaign to rank higher for queries relating to items in an auction.

Google AdWords allows you to buy placement of links on Google search results and on websites using Google’s AdSense product which lets site owners display relevant links and get a portion of the proceeds. AdWords customers are charged based solely on how many users click on the ads. Your ad may be displayed thousands of times, but if nobody clicks on it you’re not going to be charged anything.

For customers, AdWords is an auction requiring three pieces of information. You tell it which keyword you want, how much you’re willing to pay for each click, and how much you’re willing to spend per day. AdWords will display the ads with the highest price first until that customer’s per day limit is met, at which point it will no longer display the highest priced ads, displaying instead those of lesser value. You also have the ability to target specific locations, so an ad can run in Kansas and not in Minnesota, for example.

Let’s say you want everyone in North Carolina searching for auction to be shown a link to your website. AdWords displays about eight sponsored listings per search, so you have to outbid all but seven other AdWords customers. With competition from eBay and Overstock.com, two large companies among many with a vested interest in the term auction, a campaign for such a generic term can be quite costly.

Take the keyword phrase combine auction. Because there are fewer companies targeting that search phrase, it’s going to be cheaper and easier as an advertiser to put that link in front of people searching for that phrase. The downside is that there are many fewer people searching for combine auction rather than auto auction or just auction.

AdWords shines when we try to advertise niche merchandise, and organic returns are more valuable for institutional marketing. It’s far better for a weekly auto auction to work to build a frequently-updated website to rank higher for organic returns for auto auction and to use AdWords to quickly advertise antique or unique automobiles as they come in using AdWords to target those people interested in such vehicles.

We auctioneers have fairly unique needs. We usually have a short time to market specific items. If we had an abundance of time, we could build a website for each item and build the ranking over time. Most times, however, we have a marketing window of a week or two, and AdWords gives us the ability to provide exposure of the specific items we have to specific demographics interested in those items.

That’s it for episode eight. I have three guests who have accepted my invitation to participate in interviews over the next several weeks. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, help promote it by telling your friends or auctioneers you may know or writing a review on iTunes.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something.

You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast for the week of 8 September 2008.

AuctioneerTech – Technology, auctions and auctioneers – auction tech for the auction industry

Hello and welcome to the first episode of what I hope will be many podcasts covering technology, auctions, auctioneers and the auction industry. My name is Aaron Traffas and in this first episode I’ll talk a little about the plans for this podcast, it’s purpose, some of the challenges and how I’ll handle them, and end with a little about me. Since this first episode is really about setting the ground rules, I won’t be offended if you want to skip ahead to the meat of episode two, a primer on advertising for Internet only auctions.

It is my goal to spend five or ten minutes each week covering the top stories on auctioneertech.com. I’m going to do my best to try to relate what’s happening today in the worlds of gadgets and software to the worlds of gavels and box lots. I’ll review new services and software, tell you how to use some of the newest gadgets, provide tips on how to build more accessible and usable websites, and discuss marketing theory with regard to all the new venues that the Internet provides us as auctioneers. I have many friends and acquaintances in the auction industry and I eventually would like to ask many of them to join me to discuss some of the things that they do and the products and services that they use, since I don’t have the opportunity to use all of the offerings and products available in a real auction situation.

There are many challenges relating auctioneers to technology. The auction profession is a grand, time-honored profession with many of the greatest auctioneers having never used a computer until very recently. Even those auctioneers who recently began using the Internet may have difficulties relating the new benefits it provides to the profession that has continued to serve them well for decades.

On the other end of the spectrum, many of the new members of the profession have grown up using computers and already have a solid understanding of technology but may be looking simply for better ways to use that technology to help them be better auctioneers.

I’ll try to accommodate all auctioneers on this podcast. The wide range of experiences gives me license to cover just about anything, and indeed I’ll be covering some fairly low-hanging fruit at times because I don’t feel solid about talking about using a product that I haven’t explained in full. However, there will also be episodes where we’ll get into some higher level theory and techniques. As on auctioneertech.com, when I introduce a new term, I’ll try to throw out a quick definition or explanation and perhaps include a reference for more information in the show notes or at the end of the podcast.

I’m not actively soliciting advertising or sponsors for this podcast. While it seems initially that it will be a significant undertaking in both time and effort, unless it becomes wildly popular I don’t anticipate any out-of-pocket expenses for hardware or bandwidth. I will say that any sponsors I may accept will not be auction vendors. I want there to be no question of impropriety regarding the genuineness of my opinions regarding the topics that we’ll cover here.

I’m a strong believer in the National Auctioneers Association. While this podcast will cover current events and include some how-to episodes, it is not a replacement for the Auction Technology Specialist designation. If you want a solid understanding of how to generate leads, market assets, conduct auctions and build your customer community using modern techniques, from coursework written by many of today’s leading auctioneers in the field of auction technology, I strongly encourage you to enroll in the Auction Technology Specialist course offered by the NAA. You can find out more about this designation, as well as upcoming class dates and enrollment forms, at the NAA website at http://www.auctioneers.org.

Another great resource for information on auctions from auctioneers is the discussion forum offered by the NAA. It’s probably the greatest member benefit and it’s used by hundreds of auctioneers on a regular basis.

About me

Finally, I’d like to provide a little of my background. I’m a proud member of the National Auctioneers Association and the Kansas Auctioneers Association. I have recei ved the Certified Auctioneers Institute, Auction Technology Specialist and Certified Estate Specialist designations from the National Auctioneers Association Educational Institute and I’ve been asked to teach for both ATS and CAI. I’m currently serving on the Technology Committee for the NAA.

I’m a first-generation auctioneer from Sharon, Kan. I began my career in the auction industry while I was in college at Kansas State University in 2001, when I started working at Purple Wave Auction Co. in Manhattan, Kan., developing systems t o better handle the auction merchandise and our ever-changing inventory.

I’ve been involved with every aspect of the auction business, from setting up on-site estate auctions, to floor manager at our consignment operation, to Vice President of the company until the summer of 2007. I’m now VP Technology for Purple Wave, Inc., and I spend my time building the systems that we’re using to scale to multiple locations across the country.

Finally, I would like to mention that the views and opinions expressed on this podcast, like those at auctioneertech.com, are mine and mine alone or those of my guests, and not necessarily those of Purple Wave, the NAA, or the associated firms of guests I may entertain on this show.

That’s it for episode one. When I sat down to write it I expected to have trouble coming up with enough content, but it seems that wasn’t a problem. Hopefully future episodes will be as verbose.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to http://www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcriptions, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something.