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Feb 17, 2011

Good point Alex!

If you run a blog for your stores, BEWARE!

Feb 17, 2011

Dear Jeff and the DealerRefresh Community:

My name is Alex Luft and I'm the E-marketing and Social Media manager at Phil Long Dealerships. Firstly, I would like to thank you for your article, as it sheds a considerable amount of light on the issues I've been having in attempting to delete the accounts you outlined -- include the Twitter account as well as the Community Page.

In short, I've been trying to remove the Ning Community page (PhilLongCommunity.com) and its associated Twitter account (@phillongcomm) for the last month and a half. Needless to say, neither is a shining example of communications -- or social media. As far as I know, both were created by third parties; since that time, we've brought all of our social efforts in-house. The third-party in question can not find the logins for either account -- and for the last month, I've been hard at work trying to remove both accounts via the proper communications channels with Twitter and Ning.

This has proven to be more difficult than expected -- since reporting the Twitter account to Twitter's @Spam bot has not resulted in the account being removed -- and contacting Ning is nigh impossible. The moral of the story is that things go down hill when
1) you don't have access to an account
2) the third party that created the accounts in the first place can't find the login info, and
3) getting in touch with someone at busy startups such as Twitter and Ning is a greek legend

It goes without saying that I will continue in my quest to remove these accounts from the face of the internet -- and would appreciate help from the DealerRefresh staff and community in bringing Twitter's and Ning's attention to the matter.

Having said that, here are some examples of Phil Long Dealerships' newly-established social media efforts:
facebook.com/mbcoloradosprings
facebook.com/phillongford

We're starting our social efforts slow and steady and will be picking up steam over the next two months. By that time, we certainly hope to be "knocking it dead," with an article on the front page of DealerRefresh.

Sincerely,

Alex Luft
E-marketing and Social Media Manager, Phil Long Dealerships

Feb 17, 2011

It just proves that dealers are still buying the bright shiney "this will solve all your problems" objects. There are so many options available for dealers to handle their social media, reputation management etc. in house. What it boils down to is a willingness to learn and grow. I love Jareds analogy, but these folks just left the kid in the car while they sat at the bar playing joker poker.

Feb 17, 2011

Holy set it and forget it Batman.....I would think that even if you were to outsource you Social Media 100% you would still be watching. To piggy back on Jared (sorry I'm trying to lose those extra pounds) if you don't know the babysitter wouldn't you set up a babysitter cam???? As Brian points out 5 mins a week. At the least take that 5 minutes and set up some Google alerts. I complain about how busy I am but I'd rather complain about that then being unemployed!!!!

Feb 17, 2011

Ha, ha, ha. LMFAO! What I think is funniest about this are the comments from people who provide outsourced Social Media services... In the end, if a dealer has to fake Social Interactions (by using an outside company), then they have no business being in Social Media.

Feb 17, 2011

WOW!

Disclaimer: As their used car website provider, it wasn't us. We will bring it to the store's attention. However, I couldn't relocate the "ladies" page

Nice find, Jeff!

Feb 17, 2011

As a side note, this is exactly what can happen to your online community if spammers find it and you don't stay on top of it (and even if you do stay on top of it, they can make your life a living ____). There are a number of ways to fight spam on an automated basis and investing in them can be well worth the money so something like this never happens.

Feb 17, 2011

Great post, Jeff; thanks for sharing this important example of how NOT to handle your social media presence.
It's important for dealerships to be aware of the fact that they DO have an online presence, whether they realize it, or are a part of it, or not.
Share the work when you can - have a reliable company help promote and monitor your brand, invest in some solid advertising - on and offline - and make sure to be adding valuable content and speaking to and with your audience consistently. That way, if you come across bad reviews or spam, you can catch it immediately.
And most importantly, as your blog post demonstrates so clearly, at the end of the day, make sure you personally inspect your dealership's online reputation.

Feb 17, 2011

Great post, Jeff... The scary reality is that so many dealers are in this same boat with no awareness or knowledge. When and if they do, so many don't know what to do or where to turn. Good analogy, Jared.

Brian Pasch · Feb 17, 2011

Great post Jeff and a strong reminder for dealer principals to be educated on how to inspect their online visibility.

This is a great example of why it is important to inspect the work of vendors and brand messaging. Others possible landmines include ex-employee attacks, competitors attacks, and disgruntled customers posting blogs about the dealership.

I've seen many ugly things, but this example is at the top of the list.

If this article does just one thing, I hope it causes all stakeholders at dealerships to invest just 5 minutes a week doing a few searches on their brand name in Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Also, to click on the review sites rolled-up in Google Places.

Yes, there are tools to automate this but dealers may not want to login to another dashboard, read another email, etc. The hands on 5 minute a week experience is much better. It creates a brand inspection discipline.

Feb 17, 2011

I love this article, well done! Jared your comment is spot on. This catastrophe would have been avoided if they had a Facebook mom. I became "friends" with my Mom on Facebook and she's like my moral content police. If any inappropriate content gets posted by myself or others I get a scolding text (almost immediately) It's a quite reliable system. Almost like Google alerts but with more shame.

Feb 17, 2011

That's a fantastic analogy Jared. I'm going to borrow it if you don't mind....full credit to you.

Feb 17, 2011

Ouch - A powerful message.

When people ask me how much social media they can outsource I tell them to think of their kids. You can hire a babysitter to lighten the load, but you would never outsource 100% of your relationship with your kids. Your relationship with your customers or "your community" is the most important thing for your dealership. Keep a close eye on it.

Its your brand. Own it and stay on top of it.

Thanks for example jeff.

Feb 15, 2011

Way Ahead As Usual...

Great Job B.W. and Elead/FB teams! 'Socialization' is the new leverage of this industry. Innovative dealers are going to appreciate what your newest service offerings will do for initiating and managing 'the conversation' with their existing and prospective customer bases.

At the perfect time, Elead should host a weekend-long "eCarSocial Carnival" just to allow the consumer and dealering communities to come together in a common virtual space where all the bright, shiny lights of these products may be put on display. And, I could help...but of course, B.W., you already know that!

bpulseadmin · Feb 14, 2011

eLead - eCarSocial Provides Auto Dealers a New Digital Marketing Platform

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Industry leading automotive CRM and marketing provider, eLEAD CRM, announced today the addition of the digital marketing platform, eCarSocial, to their flagship CRM solution. Included in the latest product release are auto Dealer search engine marketing, custom Web Sites, search engine optimization, Web Site TweetEnhancer, Social BDC and WebPush. eCarSocial gives auto Dealers the power to publish, manage, measure and engage customers with their marketing activities across key social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter.

WebPush – an auto Dealers’ social media marketing, management and conversation hub

WebPush provides real-time, intuitive views of Dealers' most important social content, built on top of the powerful marketing platform that serves as a their reporting, permissioning, management and workflow. The platform provides live Twitter and Facebook feeds including home feed, mentions, searches, reviews, keywords, and fan page wall posts. Dealers’ benefit from the integrated team-based approach by managing smart campaigns that leverage multiple social channels to engage with customers, build their brand, and increase revenues.

Social BDC – an auto Dealers’ full-service social media management

Social BDC helps Dealers publish, manage and measure their marketing activities across key social media channels and engage with users around that content. Strategic processes and procedures are designed to function virtually utilizing WebPush. Social BDC has support for the most important social marketing channels in use by enterprises today, including foursquare, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and other branded online communities. Dealers’ benefit from the cross-platform integration approach by proactively monitoring targeted keywords to generate leads and reputation management.

TweetEnhancer – promotes Dealer specials and incentives

TweetEnhancer is a simple interactive tool that allows Dealers to promote specials and incentives on their Web Site via custom branded pop up or pop under coupons. Users have the ability to post and moderate content in Facebook and tweet, re-tweet, direct message, and follow in Twitter. Dealers benefit and leverage their viral marketing by gaining free advertising, a larger target audience and immediate visitors to their Web Site.

ECS Sites - Dealer/OEM Custom Designed Web Sites

ECS Web Sites encompass search engine-centric designs that are W3C compliant and customized to include image tagging, friendly URLs, easy-to-manage back-ends and Title and Meta optimization. Customized ECS Sites integrate with search engine webmaster tools and push inventory to Google Base, Twitter and other branded online communities.

For a product demo or additional information, visit eLEAD CRM at the NADA 2011 at booth 2226S in the South hall of Moscone Center, San Francisco NADA Convention and Expo.

About eLEAD:
Founded in 1985, eLEAD has steadily grown to over 700 direct employees with the number one automotive call center in the nation. eLEAD offers a bundled solution approach; a single login gives dealers access to CRM, desking, pre-owned inventory management and marketing. The company’s unique month-to-month business model fuels their sense of urgency to deliver monthly results. Along with an impressive number of recent groups that have chosen to partner with eLEAD, the company focuses heavily on maintaining their large reference list of over ten year customers. For more information visit www.eleadcrm.com, www.eleadcrmblog.com.

pcauto · Sep 19, 2011

I know I'm late chiming in here (and a newby to the forum too), so
please pardon my intrusion. Just thought I'd comment that as a local SEO
and Google Places professional, I think it warrants noting that over
the past several months, really going back to last year to be more
exact, Google has been changing maps/places and organic almost as much as I change my socks!

Add to that... with more frequency they are demanding re-confirmations
and even have been known to remove listings until meeting with approval
in what is their effort to eventually clean up the Places mess they've
created.

So I would agree with the others to NOT put in a tracking number for
Places page, as tempting as it may be. I'm sure you would regret it. I
wouldn't be surprised if your page got totally de-indexed for a while
(weeks even) by making any major changes to your citation.

Before coming on board with the dealership I now work at, I did
freelance work for local businesses and a large part of the work was in G
Places. If I had to go back to freelancing, I would not even touch GP
for the money I used to charge. I would triple the fee and give scant
guarantee, thanks to that uncertainty principle known as Google.

Jun 4, 2011

Eley,

We're all in the same boat. Here's my work-around.

#1). Use images for toll free numbers. New and Used Chevrolet Dealer McMurray | Sun Chevrolet (see top right) Google does not read images.

#2). Footer of New and Used Chevrolet Dealer McMurray | Sun Chevrolet I took the risk and used Toll Free numbers on footer.

#3). "About Us" page is letter perfect: http://www.usedcarking.com/aboutus.asp I point the Google Places to the about us page in the hopes that google will associate the 2.

#3a). We have multi-roofs, so rather than point to the about us page, I make an landing page for each store and point the Google Places page to it.

Store#1 landing page.

Loading…

www.usedcarking.com

Google Places for Store#1.

Loading…

maps.google.com

All 3rd party sites that are intended to be the "dealership contact page" get the local land line #. In the merchandise presentations, I use the toll free numbers.

It's not perfect, but I get to keep both needs alive.

Eley Duke · Jun 4, 2011

Stephen, we are a Centuray Interactive client, just started 60 days ago and like it. We just started dealer Rater 20 days ago, using the same 8XX tracking number for Dealer rater as we use in our 2 Google Places account (Duke Automotive & Duke Chevy Buick GMC Cadillac). We have a dynamic number on our web site. But the web numbers and Google Places and all other 3rd party web numbers do not match, all are tracking numbers. All other 3rd party sites that I have claimed our info on so far I am placing tracking numbers.

As a dealer I want to know where my traffic is coming from and where I need to market, as well we use Phone Ninja's for phone training and its well worth it so I really dont want to give that up.

I am hearing a lot of things; that I should NOT use different 8XX tracking numbers for all my 3rd party, yp.com, bing, yahoo, yelp, etc. and use 1 number for all. And for my web?

Then Stephen says its ok to use a dynamic tracking number ,which we do.

Then I hear I should be using my local number that I have had for 40 years for everything (that would eliminate any tracking and call recording we use for training purposes)

So Stephen, let me know, or call me, what we should be doing. Because I want Google Places and all these 3rd party sites linking correctly and matching up our info as close to 100% as possible. I still want to see my traffic, and record calls for training.

I guess one simple way to solve this is to know if you have the ability to track and record our main number that we have had for 40 years?

Apr 26, 2011

Every Local SEO consultant will talk about consistency of local number across all sites. Google takes data from other sites to determine ranking on local listings in Places with more matches giving higher value.

The recommendation to use local numbers that differ across the many local portals is majorly flawed. The data you are recommending to altered is often distributed by Aggregators using one number. Changing it to a different number is where people get into problems of not only poor rank but incorrect data rendering. Stick with your main local number is the only recommendation.

JCollins · Apr 21, 2011

Uncle Joe does it again.

Apr 10, 2011

I do Google Places for a living and I would never, ever use a tracking number on my place page, whether it's local or 800. It will absolutely kill your signal strength ... not only on Google, but on every other site that ranks your listing based on distance, relevance and prominence.

If you're using a tracking number on your Google Place Page, dump it. Get in the habit of asking every customers how they found you. Yes, I mean every customer. If you disagree with me, I can tell you that you have no idea how much business you're loosing from trying to outsmart the local search engines. Dump the tracking number.

Alex Jefferson · Apr 5, 2011

Does anyone else have a latency issue when forwarding call tracking numbers to cell phones? Have anyone figured out how to resolve this issue?

Feb 17, 2011

Nicely said and way to cap off a great discussion! I hope we get a chance to work together sometime soon.

joe.pistell · Feb 17, 2011

Stephen,

I'll say it again: "...IMO, your core product is not to track calls, so much as it's your ability to improve dealers decision making..."

Surely, we agree with this, that's what your reply is all about.

In your reply, you've mixed 2 different topics.

#1). Ad source measurement
#2). Sales operations (namely sale processes)

re: Ad source measurement
Sorry Stephen, I am aok with not knowing how many calls a FREE white pages based search is sending to me. Would I like it tracked? Sure, I love to measure everything! But as Dennis Galbraith from Cars.com said, I'll us my own words... not if the tracking number presents risk to my "Yellow Pages" traffic (i.e. "Chevrolet Dealer").

re: Sales operations (namely sale processes)
If Google Places gave me 25% of all incoming phone traffic, I still have 75% of the traffic from which to optimize sales processes from. Thats a truck load of calls to listen to. Heck, we ALL know that we can only listen to a fraction of the incoming calls anyway! (unless you have callrevu.com

.

If I were to drill into what I am missing the most from not tracking Google Places listing, it's probably service calls (ala white pages calls). Stephen, you track these calls specifically, am I correct? what are your thoughts?

Lastly, if I may address on last line you wrote:

"...one thing I've observed that successful dealerships have in common is they track every call coming into their store...."

From my seat, this is how I feel about your company:

"...one thing I've observed that dealerships that use Century Interactive have in common is they are very successful...."

Century's reputation is best of class in this arena and i've never laid eyes on your platform!

Feb 17, 2011

Joe, are you sure your last name isn't spelled "Pistol?" ha.

If you're a dealer, are you okay being in the dark on where 20% of your phone leads are coming from? Oh, it's not 20%, how would you even know? Say it's only 10%; 1 in 10 calls into your dealership aren't being tracked, so you don't know which employee handled the call, what the prospect was calling about, or how long it took to answer the call. Did your receptionist make a prospect hold for 2 minutes?

Call tracking is more than ad effectiveness. Yes, I'm biased, Joe, but one thing I've observed that successful dealerships have in common is they track every call coming into their store. The GM has the best view on what's working because he's standing at the top of the mountain.

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