Outstanding!!  Not only that but people are burning out on facebook as the novelty has worn off.  They spend less time there and post much less frequently.  User growth has leveled off - what little growth there is in in preteens and retirees - and the early adopters are starting to leave the service.

HOO-RAY!  Well done, Darrin.  Did you see the recent POLK/Autotrader buying report?  While nearly everyone reported visiting Facebook, less than 1% said it played any role whatsoever in their purchase decision.  We "bought" our way to 1000 fans, then stopped the "buying" a while ago.  Still at 1000 fans.  I keep asking myself, why would I want to "like" my dealer?  And unfortunately, I keep coming-up with the same answer: I wouldn't.  But it suuuuuuuuuure is a big BUZZ-WORD right now, so gotta play the game...

Great article. You also end up with followers from all over the country and not locally, and I have seen fights over prize give aways on FB pages. Grow organically!

Bill

Phil can you call me about what you wrote...I'm doing a project creating a iPad application as a Kiosk fpr customers to write a review as they exit the dealership.  I would like to populate Google et el with these reviews.  Any help would be great.  let's talk.  603.234.4859  Regan McCarthy

Hey Mark B,

I don't see what you are getting at with the parallel between Reynolds accounting, Google and DealerRater. Are you saying that it is an either/or situation? Can you clarify your comment or question? I admit that I can be slow, but I am just not following you.

One thing I can tell you for sure is that the DealerRater team doesn't train an either/or strategy, the new PUSH feature serves as evidence to that. The principles we teach are much more holistic in terms of ORM. You need to be aware of everything so that you can actively leverage the things that are marketable to improve lead to show and closing ratios.

Who owns Dealerrater? 
Google controls the internet, like reynolds and reynolds controls our accounting.  Do we need Dealerrater, or just utilize what Google wants us to use, like our relationship with reynolds?

Jeff, thanks for the kudos but I'd prefer you giving my product much closer scrutiny .

Please understand there's much more depth to this program than I could treat here without getting bogged down in people's understandable imaginings of what it is we actually do. Our impact is far beyond "show,"  I assure you. You may believe you've seen the "pitch" before but whatever it was it was not for anything resmbing what we do because we have yet to find anyone competing on our battleground.

I guarantee you nobody does what we do. Furthermore, there's no need to use scare quotes around the number of our partner sites. That's a real number.

Jeff, you're correct that these sites in themselves are generic and have no industry authority, and I certainly didn't mean to suggest our product as an alternative to DR, Edwards, or others like them in the particular ways they represent the auto industry and serve consumers. Instead, I was building on your lament about the shortcomings of relying upon one site to provide for reputation management needs, and I did so by pointing out the limitations of merely widening the scope to include a handful of others like them.

While we cannot do much of what they do (and we don't intend to) the fact still remains they also cannot do what we can do, and that cannot be so easily dismissed before comprehending completely the full impact of our branding model on dealership marketing goals. Remember, each googe result the client owns is one less distraction threatening to steal away the prospect who started out focusing on you but who never makes it to your site. SEO cannot solve this problem, whether for your site or industry sites like DR. Presumably DR and most dealers have SEO in place while still losing prospects who never make it to their site.

I hope I don't sound arrogant with this next statement, but I submit to you that the authority inherent in our model is the highest authority of all: that of the happy, satisfied customer whose positive testimonial is no longer stuck in a folder buried in a dealer managers's desk or waiting patiently for visitors to that corner of your website so assigned to that occasional task - if they get there. We are backed by the authority of a happy consumer whose testimony is now actively engaged and multipled so that each review we launch is the online equivilent of Madison Square Garden full of screaming fans.

We proliferate the same review across so many sites that along with the other content distributed similarly we are able to shape what the viewer sees when they search your dealership. Our snippets utilize "title expressions" (our in-house term, hence the scare quotes) taken from the customer's own words in upper-case, so a viewer scanning the search results page sees positive, glowing sentiments strewn throughout the page. Consumers give more credibility to other consumers "just like them" (or so the subtextual thinking would have it) than they do to paid spokesmen. Sites with authority as I think you mean it are a modern high-tech variation of the same concept of the paid spokesman.

Still, we don't intend to be an alternative to much of what they do EXCEPT in obtaining the greatest value you can get from your legitimate consumer testimonials. So what are the benefits of our model which give it such exalted value?

Eighty-one percent of consumers search a company with whom they might have interest in doing business. Use the Google ad word tool to measure the total monthly searches under your trading name(s) or URL, and compare to the total number of unique visits you get. Most firms find they get 10-20%.

Losing 80-90% (or even half that) of prospects who started out interested in you but disappeared along the way is not only an illustration of burning leads before you even see them but also represents the ultimate neutralization of your marketing and advertising campaigns which got them to the point of googling you to begin with. THAT's the bleed-out we staunch, except unlike Rambo cauteizing his own battlefield wounds with a red-hot knife our approach doesn't hurt because we are also a branding tool and a reputation management tool.

Each of these reviews is back-linked to the client site, which adds a significant and growing boost to their SEO. We normally are able to at least double the traffic from company search results, and often more.
 
Jeff, I could go on here but I already have gotten into making points better covered in the tour my CEO would love to personally present to you online. He comes from the auto industry; our company used to design high-conversion (30% plus) websites for the dealerships and lenders until we accidentally stumbled onto this solution.  We completely changed our business model to this product line once we grasped the ramifications.

No insult intended but it seems you may be drawing some conclusions as to what we do and the limitations to dealer value you perceive. It's reasonable to do given how little substance I am able to communicate in this format but you can't fully grasp the power of this thing unless you've seen it up close. In this you are not alone; because what we do is so far outside wide-ranging previous business experience people constantly express to us after the presentation that when we first approached them they had no idea that what we were talking about would lead to what they had just seen.

So, as a courtesy I want to offer you a challenge and a small wager (the fact I'm not a betting man ought to tell you something). You give my CEO 25-30 minutes for the presentation along with your active participation. Ask him all your questions and challenge him all you want.  I advise you to allow another 15 minutes or so because your inevitable questions will likely cause us to go to 45 minutes (an hour is not unusual once our prospective client becomes better acquainted with us). BTW, I've never seen anyone dismiss our product after the presentation and bail out with no further interest. There is always discussion.

If you hold to your original position and dismiss our product's value to the auto industry then I'll send you a $10 Starbuck's gift card as "consolation" for lost time. Of course, it's not much nor is it intended to be so to keep the focus on what's really important. I mean this as a friendly wager only; I'm playing for higher stakes such things and don't want to be distracted by that which has little value.

OTOH, if you are impressed by Mr. Coleman's brainchild and express that via an agreement with Younger's and/or an alternative but similar arrangement then I'll quite naturally "forgive" the gift card.

Who knows, contrary to your initial take the tour experience might make great fodder for a future blog post. If appropriate or desirable you even may invite Alex Snyder, Joe Pistell or anyone else you choose.

We operate out of Vancouver WA (we draw our engineering genius from the rich talent pools emanating from Microsoft & HP) so the earliest we can meet with you is 11:00 a.m. EDT (8:00 a.m. PDT) M-F, but conversely we can stay late (8 p.m. EDT) with you as well.

To take me up on my offer you may contact me at the e-mail in my post sign-up here; again, I'll again refrain from posting my contact information on your blog. Besides, it'll have so much more power behind it if you eventually come to recommend your readership to examine us for themselves.

Phil Steinacker

Jeff, you said:

This affected many dealers (including mine) that had been focusing on only one site while not getting dealership reviews across multiple review sites

My contention is that any strategy focusing on either "one site" or "multiple review sites" is inherently flawed because it is unnecessarily too limiting as well as supportive of review sites which are structually damaging to business (auto dealerships as well as all other business models).

Why not publish and mass-distribute your positive customer testimonials across the Internet via a network of 5,000 independent sites? Similarly, why not mass-distribute video (both testimonials and commercials) for the same purpose to the nearly 500 video sites out there?

Saturate the first three pages of Google with your content and boost search-driven traffic by almost 100%. Bump bland, negative, or competitor content by replacing it with your happiest customers shouting from the rooftops your great story.

Stop bleeding out profits from continually losing 80-90% of folks successfully motivated by your marketing to seach for you but who NEVER make it to your site.

You can't achieve this with 3rd-party review sites or even dealerrater.com, who may not promote your competitors on the same page as you (they ARE only a couple clicks away, though) but still soesn't remove negatives. Most importantly, all your content is on one site - you cannot mass-distribute your good news across the World Wide Web.

There is so much more I wrote but deleted it for length. However, when you're in someone else's house you should always mind your manners, as I will in yours. I will not post any contact info for your readership but I'd love to talk about this to you, Jeff. instead ask you to contact me through the e-mail addrss in my sign-in for this post.

Nice Post!

I agree!! COPY , PASTE....  Customers always need a user friendly way to do it! Or it will never get done...

This is awesome.  I love how they create their strategies.  DealerRater has created some of the best concepts in the industry.  It is not just the service that they provide but it is the lessons that we learn that help us succeed with other websites such as google, yelp, edmunds, etc.  I now read reviews every time I go to buy something.

Sorry, I'm confused, one of whose indicators?

Copying a review is one of the first indications that it is fake.  I like the concept of Matthew's "Push" strategy until he said, "very quickly copy and paste."

TJYoung
 
If the employees at the dealership choose to waste their time surfing porn, they are most likely not the right people that will serve the dealership in the long term.  In my experience, poor work habits by employees is a reflection of the leadership at the very top of the organization.  Painful to hear, but so often this is the case.
 
The commitment and passion of the employees at any company is directly related to the leaders of the company.   If the dealership employees have no respect for their time and the investment made by their dealer principal, there are bigger problems at play.
 
Internet access is not the biggest one by far! 
 

Being from a large dealer group you get the 'porn surfers who will literally surf porn with their customers standing just on other side of the screen', the 'youtube sales reps who watch golf all day long', and of course the facebook "look at me, aren't my pics and my life pretty and wonderful... please tell me that"
 
Social media is a passive endeavour for those who are flaked out on the couch/in bed and don't wish to be marketed to. They are just catching up with friends and  gossip. Thats about it. The rest are '1 person companies' holed up in their basement claiming to be social gurus and trying desperately to get us all to believe the world is coming to an end if you don't get on the bandwagon.
 
Show me a dealer or two knocking them dead in social media, selling cars and loving it.
 
Good luck

Jeff, thanks for pointing me to this post. I just shared my experience with a dealer group that had blocked social media access and after I showed how their staff could monetize social media engagement, the light bulb went on in the dealer principal's head.

I wanted to offer DealerRefresh readers who may be interested in participating in a webinar on this topic, to send me an email to: brian@pcgmailer.com . If enough people reply, I will setup a webinar in March and share my presentation that open some eyes on why the chains should come off social media access.

My dealer, Larry Van Tuyl, thinks Facebook, social media, and even the internet are all just fads that will soon go away. They still think there are millions of people with good credit that think the web is too dangerous to "surf". They believe Americans want to be abused and conned just like we've always done it. We've been told that repeat and referral business is nothing more than a figment of a bunch of "do gooder's imagination. Consequently, after we get through with a prospect we're pretty sure we'll never see them again, unless it's in a courtroom. I sure do hope Mr. Van Tuyl is right.

Ed - I just wanted to say thanks for the inspiration:  IT, oh how I love thee – DealerRefresh

Ed - I just wanted to say thanks for the inspiration:  IT, oh how I love thee – DealerRefresh

Ed - I want to jump on your first question because you're right, it hasn't been touched yet.  And I hope my perspective can shed some light on why you asked this question in the first place.

I have a lot of experience with dealership bandwidth issues from my time with Checkered Flag.  Checkered Flag is located in an area with fantastic options for getting more bandwidth.  And Checkered Flag was not afraid to put more money into satisfying their employees' technological needs.  However, now that I am on the vendor side of the fence I am looking back and asking the question:  why did we even have bandwidth issues in the first place?

I believe that Checkered Flag evolved their IT needs the same way many dealerships have:  from a security standpoint that was based on the needs of an accounting department.  Because there is a lot of paranoia around security (over a huge number of things), and justifiably so in a few cases, systems are strained by bottlenecks.  Lots of firewalls, lots of switches, lots of whatevers have all done their part to strain the flow.  And increasing the size of the bandwidth pipe really doesn't make a noticeable difference when there are hardware bottlenecks.

On the other side of the fence that I now sit on, IT's first responsibility is usability of the network.  It is about making the bandwidth available for employees to do their jobs fist, then patching-up any holes that could be exploited.  

So, that is a long way of saying that I have been exposed to two types of IT perspectives:  1 with security as the priority and 1 with usability as the priority.  These different priorities make for some massive differences!  

With so many technological advances happening so often, and so many changing bandwidth needs, it is probably time every company decide which priority makes the most sense today.

The factors I am not seeing discussed here are:

1)  The bandwidth drain that YouTube and Fb would have on our already thinly stretched pipe...

2)  The potentially damaging effect on the dealership as a brand if too closely connected to its employees in a social setting...

Thoughts?

Ed Shaffer

I am sad to say that we do have all od the social sites blocked on the desktops at work. That doesn't mean that the guys aren't doing it. They are accessing it through their iTouches and phones. It is something that we do have to consider since social is such a hot topic. I don't think that the guys will be on the playing farmville or anything like that so I think that we would be safe.

We have open access to Facebook and other social sites but block the games on those sites. We found people playing farm-ville and mafia wars instead of working.

Years ago, we had filters on the sales staff computers.  Then we realized we only needed good rules and understanding by the (adult) sales staff.  We've had no problems.