I want to buy a Toyota Yaris. An experiment in VRM and word of mouth

I want to buy a Toyota Yaris... really, I do.

After reading the previous post, there may be some who a conclude from the supermarket analogy that it makes life easy for me to show up at one place where the prices are good and I can get 'all I need'. And therefore I'll back the jack-of-all-trades model.
(Worth noting, however, that you're getting all 'everyone' needs at the supermarket - you are being served as part of a mass, the lowest common denominator...)

I get where you are coming from. Who needs the hassle of chasing round the internet?
Doc Searls' Vendor Relationship Management project at Harvard has a response.
Brief description: "(providing)... customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties."

This should mean that if I mention that I want to buy something in a blogpost, facebook status update, twitter feed etc - then that is the right time for the supplier to reach out to me.

Yes, if I had google adsense on this page a supplier would be reaching out right now (and they may well be where this post appears as an rss feed elsewhere). Trouble is the google adsense advertiser would 'reach out' with a 'broadcast' advert - one which didn't answer the particular questions I will raise. They wouldn't start a conversation with me. It would be down to me to click-thru and trawl through options, likely as a result of some bland white lie such as 'best price'.
No one would have recommended the click receipient to me, either. Trust?

What else could we expect our vendors to do? Well, clued-up service and product suppliers need not wait for the VRM project to do everything for them. They have proto-tools available now, if only they look around them.
They have google alerts, rss feeds, rss aggregators, etc etc. How many are actually using them?
So I'm going to test to see how well and if any are using them.

There's a prize at stake, of sorts. The winner gets to sell me a car.

I want to buy a Toyota Yaris - and I'm going to blog about this fact (and twitter a bit) to see if this simple piece of disaggregated content gets picked up by someone savvy enough to sell me one.
It's also a test of word of mouth because it's possible that the dealer (owner?) with the car I want isn't clued up... but he might know a friend, or a friend-of-a-friend who is.

So let's begin.
I'm in the UK.
I want a low mileage Toyota Yaris in either T3 or TR spec, registered late 2006 onwards (new shape one). Must have aircon of some form. Ideally 1.3 petrol but will consider 1.0. Probably go for the five door. My wife prefers silver (and it will be her car). Ex-demo would be ideal. Will consider new if you can do the kind of deal that makes me accept the ludicrous VAT costs involved.
Don't need to do part-ex.

Over to you.

Selling content sucks - if that's all you do...

The difficulties facing yet another vendor of content marks another milestone (gravestone?) along the road to the new media ecology.
There are lessons for all of us who sell content. There may be lessons for everyone who sells.
Fopp - one of the UK's biggest music store chains - is the latest to be hit by what is reported by the mainstream media as an issue that's all about competition from downloads and online supermarkets:
"All specialist retailers of CDs and DVDs have been hit by growing competition from online downloads and supermarkets. HMV today reported a 70 per cent fall in profits. Music Zone’s demise was blamed on the same factors..."
Supermarket competition impacts at the mass end of the business. Smaller retailers can respond to this. It is not to go head to head with the high volume - top 50 sellers. It is to serve the long tail and respond to local (community) needs. It is to provide a very different experience.
When I was a kid the local record shop (and even the small town where I grew up had one) was one-part youth club, one-part information exchange and one-part market place. I could sell old records I no longer wanted, order something obscure (they couldn't carry everything!), hang out, load up on some vicarious cool, share what I thought, form a band, etc etc
How far removed is this from the experience of buying in a supermarket?
Online vendors of downloads have (where they succeed) replicated this far better than bricks and mortar rivals.
They have understood that communities form around music - communities who want to share (is that the new marketplace of buying and selling secondhand records?) information, recommendations - and just spend time together discussing what they love and why they love it - and marketing their favourites to each other.
But that's not to say a music store couldn't capture much of the same. And by facilitating the physical meeting of communities they could take what online retailers have discovered and make it still more engaging.
Perhaps they have to accept two things:

1. Turn yourselves into a music marketplace - where people can come together to exchange information, buy (and sell/share?), and be entertained (God forbid, perhaps they could even put on the occasional gig?)
2. Offer downloads. Seriously - it is the disaggregation of digital content (the ability to choose which tracks you want, rather than buying whole CDs), that's driving download sales. Convenience is important, price is important. But serving of long-term diverse choice is the biggest factor. And it's the part of the market that is emphatically NOT served by supermarkets.

Fop, HMV, chains in general... seem to have forgotten that the marketplace was always about much more than buying your goods.