This is just another way for another vendor to squeeze every last penny out of the auto dealers. When does it stop? Will all you vendors be happy when we are out of business? Every new tool, vendor, review site, is another way to charge us money.

I can only imagine that Cars.com will charge some round number of about $499 per rooftop to be a "sponsored review dealer". This will line right up with their $275 for video, $425 for specials, and $500 for power positions.

When a company like Cars.com is owned and operated by a failing industry such as newspapers, you get this effect.

Not sure if it's a good idea for an advertiser such as Cars.com to be basically hosting reviews of its very own clients...a little up in the air on this one. The transparency continues to broaden, which I'm all for, but I'll think on this one for a bit.

Here is what Chip Perry the CEO of Autotrader has to say about their role in dealer ratings "We (autotrader) will help them (dealers) merchandise on AutoTrader the fact that they have a great reputation online." He goes on to say that Autotrader dealers will have the choice to opt in if they want the feature. - YouTube to watch it for yourself.....

Howard – thanks for the question (and for being a Cars.com partner).
We’re trying to be careful about making sure this is a feature dedicated to reputation management, and not one about arbitration and mediation. We also knew that making this process easy for ALL dealers is vitally important. We’ve built our initial process to consist of a consumer review (validated and moderated) and a dealer response (also moderated). The goal here is that we don’t want to encourage or require a back-and-forth between our dealers and our reviewers, but we still want to make sure dealers ALWAYS have the last word in the exchange. What we hope (and expect) to find, is that a positive response to a negative review will actually lead to a far better experience for our partners – our research shows that it’s often how a negative review is handled publically that has the biggest positive impact.

Feedback like this is exactly why we wanted to make our announcement now, two months before ANY dealership can choose early enrollment. We'll be in beta for at least the first half of the year, to give everyone (Cars.com included) a chance to really understand the impact of this new feature.
Nick

I love it! This is what the internet is about... transparency for all. Now you get to see how your competition is faring, as well, at least on AutoTrader.com and Cars.com. The shopper rules online, and they trust reviews from their peers far more than they trust a sales person. Managing brand/ dealer reputation should be a daily activity, and monitoring scattered social media conversations can be daunting, but one bad review sitting out there for three months before you discover it will prove how essential it really is to do. There are some very powerful tools out there to do it for you and help you review and respond (SocialDealer, GOSO, etc.)--even an aggregation tool like Google Alerts is better than nothing; but clearly, the time is upon us all to increase awareness of what shoppers are saying about us (and our competition)... and get in on the conversation.

Disclaimer: I work for HomeNet, and we are partners with SocialDealer... but that doesn't change the truth of my words.

Consumers will not be able to post reviews on ATC. ATC will link to third party reviews.

I am very disappionted that Cars.com & as I was told soon Autotrader.com is getting into the REVIEW buisness!! Don't they work for us the "Auto Dealer"! I pay cars.com over $6,000 a month for both dealerships to advertise My vehicles.......I am a top rated (Best of the Best) dealership so I am not as much worried about getting bad reviews but someone that works for me / advertises for me is going to show a non (5 star) review flatterying review is they day I take back my $6,000 dollars!

Nick. As a paying member of the cars.com club Id like to know how your company plans to arbitrate negative reviews? Have you considered a period of time to not display negative reviews like dealerrater so the dealer can respond? As pointed out by others, this is great for some and detrimental for others to the point of dropping use of cars.com.

I wanted to introduce myself to all the readers and contributors here. I'm the product manager for Dealer Reviews at Cars.com; I'll be doing an interview with Jeff for the site but I do want to make myself directly available for questions and feedback here, including why Cars.com will generate reviews instead of aggregating them.

When we set out to develop a reviews feature, it was important to create a level playing field on day one - all dealers will start fresh and have equal footing with reviews. For those already actively managing reputation and soliciting reviews, Cars.com will offer another opportunity to generate additional content that can be used to cement their online reputation. We'll also be notifying our dealers each and every time a review is posted to Cars.com (after undergoing validation and moderation, of course) so that you don’t have to spend extra time monitoring Cars.com or our backend tools.

Thanks to all of you for your feedback and thanks to Jeff and everyone at DealerRefresh for getting the conversation going. If you have direct questions or suggestions for me, don’t hesitate to ping me directly.

Nick Hummer
312- 601-6004 nhummer@cars.com

Great, now there are about 15 websites that can push to our Google Place page.

Interesting point. Taking your concern a little further, it seems likely that the reviews (particularly the negative reviews) would be more of the BDC and lead handling process rather than a review of the whole sales process. This could cut both ways: a good Internet dept (fast turnaround and good pricing strategy) could make a normally marginal dealer shine, while a weak Internet dept. could pull down a normally solid store.

One more place to worry about getting reviews posted and managing them... I wish they would just aggregate reviews from the current primary review sites and go from there. I am following about 12 review sites monthly now and this is one more. The truth is, folks primarily leave positive reviews when you proactively encourage them. If not, typically only the folks that are dissatisfied will go out of their way to leave a negative review. Therefore, as a dealer, I will now have to work at building positive reviews at one more site. I am a big fan of Cars.com, but have mixed feelings at this point...

There are too many review sites.

Autotrader.com has already launched this in test markets. It will be going live in 3 weeks across the country.

I think it is a smart move by Cars.com to make their website more than just an inventory advertising portal. In theory, the site could gain credibility with consumers by having reviews integrated into the shopping experience.

It also opens up a discussion whether dealers who pay for inventory advertising want their advertising partners placing reviews on the vehicle detail pages.

Reviews are an element of the socialization of the Internet so like it or not, actions like the one Cars.com is taking, is adding more transparency to how car dealers operate and treat their customers.

Welcome to the world of the empowered consumer.

The best resource for automotive dealers to learn about new marketing and online marketing strategies, period.

Thanks Ryan! I am looking forward to doing some more exciting stuff this year. I love Dealer Refresh and becoming a community member was the best thing I ever did.

Thanks Brian!

Your community is the benchmark for online engagement in the automotive industry. Your leadership and creativity to birth DealerRefresh years ago has been rewarded not only by an award, but by professionals who come back each day to engage. Congratulations!

I'm glad you pointed this out Jeff: "The member count means little to us – it’s more about the engagement of the community."

Without the community this blog and the forums are worthless. And it isn't the number of participators or readers, it is the quality of the content being left by those who do speak-up.

Thanks to all of you who made DealerRefresh what it was in 2010 - be ready for a really fun ride in 2011

Nice review Jeff. One of my favourite threads was Jerry's Phone Skills.

I just completed the Automotive SEO Study and am already looking forward to the SEM study. If you want to be leading in your market, you need to be always getting continuing education for new ideas and better processes. Brian is one of the best and I encourage folks to join, I'm sure you won't be disappointed!

Trina

The idea is that in order to test A/B landing pages you need to drive enough traffic to see which design is working best. The $1,000 is an approximate number that are suggesting since anything less would mean that you might miss out on A/B testing.

What you learn can of course help you run a small Adwords campaign (<$1,000) you would just be making a call that your design is optimized.

So you don't have to spend it all if you don't want to or the market doesn't draw that much traffic.

Does the minimum of $1000 budget mean that we will have to spend the full $1000, or just what is required to get the results we need? We are in a fairly small (100,000 +) market, and there is very little (if any) AdWords activity in our area, I am unsure of wether or not we would need to spend over $1000 a month.

Pretty sweet deal. Curious to know how many dealers are having Success with Facebook ads.