Your future manager is a multi-tasking fiend. She or he will embrace every form of social media and communicate with staff by email or instant messenger.  Technology use will be first and foremost on his or her mind, with an understanding that it doesn't always work perfectly, but incorporating technology into processes is crucial. They will demand it!

I am the oldest of 6 and also have quite a few younger cousins that I'm very close to.  They range from 5 years old to 26.  The females spend a lot of their free time on MySpace and/or faceBook and are texting fanatics.  The males also spend a lot of time playing XBOX Live.  They all play team sports, take lessons for a particular musical instrument, read books, and do fairly well in school if they're engaged that semester. They all have a cell phone (except the 5 year old), a computer (or three), their favorite flavor of social media, and over 900 channels of television to chose from along with an arsenal of movies to watch & videogames to play.

When I get into conversations with my parents, aunts and uncles about the comparisons of what the younger generation has and does compared to what they did, it always boils down to amazement at how the kids can do so much in so little time.  Some of these kids have been wrongfully diagnosed for ADD because they can't multi-task in school - they don't have Attention Deficit Disorder!  But they do their homework beautifully because they can do their school work while watching TV and messaging friends without worrying about a teacher getting upset.  They're addicted to multi-tasking.  I am too....as I'm writing this article, I'm also watching the news, following Twitter & faceBook on TweetDeck, and responding to emails.  I don't find it amazing - I think it is just normal.

When we can't multi-task, we're bored.

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My parents, on the other hand, focused on one thing at a time growing up.  Playing with friends in the neighborhood or doing homework was pretty much all they could do after school.  They didn't have a TV in their bedroom and computers certainly weren't around.  They had to walk into another room to use the phone and they also had to stand next to that rotary dialing thing.  They weren't bred for multi-tasking.


I'm going to take things a step further.  Have you ever played a video game?  Yes, you probably have. Have you ever played a video game online with other people working together toward the same goal?  If you're over the age of 40, chances are you probably haven't. The current main-stay game on XBOX Live is Call of Duty 4 where you are a special ops soldier for the US and you take on missions to stop terrorism.  It is fast-paced and requires that you know your weaponry quite well in order to complete a mission effectively.  There are goals and achievements to be made and you have to pay attention to quite a few different things all at once while playing. Then throw another 20 players into the mix and you've got an unpredictable human element compounding all the other stuff going on.

My point is, these kids who are playing XBOX are learning to strategize, memorize, plan, and work with others to achieve a common goal.  Sounds like some damn good training to me!

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Yeah, there's that gory video game element, but is seeing something in a video game that you can see on the news or in a movie harmful enough to deny these skills that are being honed?  I guess that's a different topic for a different blog.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that there is a gap of misunderstanding between the younger and older generation.  I want to point out the good in what our kids are doing today, and say that you need to be ready for what they're going to do to the workforce in the next 10 years.

Next up:  Hiring based on which RTS game someone plays.....just kidding!

WHITE MARSH, Md., May 5, 2009 – XIGroup (www.XIGroup.com), the website industry’s leader in providing the best user interface for car buyers, and a division of Dominion Enterprises, now provides car buyers and car dealers with real-time inventory updates for all XIGroup customers using Dealer Specialties services.

Inventory updates—such as a change in price, photos or dealer comments —made using any Dealer Specialties tool will appear automatically on the dealer’s website(s).

“For years the industry buzzword has been ‘real-time’—now it’s a reality,” said Joe High, XIGroup general manager. “Dealer Specialties is the largest provider of inventory collection services in the industry and we are proud to offer our clients instant updates of their data and photos.”

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Al Hess, general manager of Dealer Specialties, said of the integration, “In choosing Dealer Specialties inventory management and XIGroup websites, dealers now do not have to worry about manually updating their website with mid-day price and inventory changes. Those changes on a dealer’s XIGroup website will be seamlessly done through the Dealer Specialties IVM tool. We believe this makes the combined offering between our two companies the most unique in the marketplace today.”

Real-time inventory updates are available free of charge to all XIGroup website clients using Dealer Specialties for their inventory and requires only a confirmation call from the client to turn on the service. Interested clients should call 888-924-6448

About XIGroup
XIGroup is an industry leader in providing website value and customer support. For more than 10 years the company’s proven online services have empowered franchise and independent dealerships by helping them interact effectively with potential Internet car buyers. Easy-to-use, SEO friendly and cost-effective tools and superior customer service are the hallmarks XIGroup. For more information, visit www.XIGroup.com.

ContactAtOnce! delivers intelligent routing of auto dealer chat leads to trained staff when dealership personnel are unavailable.

ATLANTA, GA – May 5, 2009 – ContactAtOnce!, (contactatonce.com) a leading provider of auto dealer
chat and other internet marketing tools that move online shoppers into live conversations with car dealers, today announced the immediate availability of its chat rollover feature and managed live chat service. The ContactAtOnce! auto dealer chat service gives dealers the industry’s most popular tools for answering their own chat leads and intelligent routing of chat leads to trained staff when dealership personnel are unavailable.

Adding auto dealer chat to a website has been shown to increase the number of site visitors with whom a dealership is able to set appointments; however, dealerships using chat have had to choose between answering their own chat leads, or outsourcing to a call center, both of which presented challenges. Dealership personnel are more informed and effective at engaging potential customers and setting appointments. On the other hand, outsourcing assured that someone was always available to answer in a timely fashion. The ContactAtOnce! auto dealer chat solution gives dealerships the best of both worlds by allowing dealership personnel to answer when available, and automatically rolling chat messages to a qualified answering service when dealership personnel are not able to respond immediately.

“Sales people in the dealership are very effective answering a shopper’s questions and setting appointments, so we strongly prefer that they handle our chat leads,” said Drew Fitchett, Owner of North Penn Imports VW Mazda in Colmar, PA. “That said, there are times during the business day and certainly after-hours, when our sales people are not able to answer, yet we still want our prospects to be able to connect with someone immediately. The ContactAtOnce! rollover feature intelligently forwards leads during those times, and ContactAtOnce! managed live chat personnel have demonstrated excellence in handling rollover leads exactly how our dealership wants them handled.”

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The ContactAtOnce! auto dealer chat rollover feature works by automatically forwarding inbound chat
requests to an answering center if dealership personnel do not answer within a specified period of time.
The ContactAtOnce! rollover feature can forward chats to any answering center, a unique feature,
according to founder and executive vice president of products for ContactAtOnce!, Marc Hayes. “We
have many dealers with existing outsourced call center and business development center (BDC)
relationships. As a company, we welcome the opportunity to work with those providers and have designed the rollover feature to support multiple partners.”

“The fear of ‘not having someone to answer all the time’ has kept some dealers from adding live chat to their website,” said Hayes. “To them, I say ‘fear no more’. Now every dealership can set more appointments by giving shoppers what they want – the ability to chat.”

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Both the auto dealer chat rollover feature and the managed live chat service are available immediately
from ContactAtOnce!.

About the Auto Dealer Chat Provider ContactAtOnce!:
Contact At Once!, LLC is a leading provider of auto dealer chat and internet marketing tools for
automotive sales, apartment leasing, and other industries where consumers conduct research online
before visiting a dealership or office. The ContactAtOnce! service typically moves at least 25% more
website visitors into live conversations with sales people by utilizing a suite of technologies such as
presence, IM/chat, VoIP telephony, video chat and text messaging, resulting in increased revenue and a better return on marketing expenditures. ContactAtOnce! is the only solution with features specifically for vertical search websites and over 35 such sites, along with thousands of merchant businesses, are using it today.

DealerRefresh Welcomes a new sponsor - DealerFeeder


DealerFeeder simplifies social network marketing for dealerships because they set-up, customize and manage your profiles for you. They also make updating all your networks at once as easy as sending an email.

DealerFeeder takes the work out of social marketing and puts the power in your hands, bringing traffic and deals to your dealership through effective social network management.

As a client of DealerFeeder, we'll already have set-up and customized your profiles for you, so there's no work to worry about. And your messages are uploaded to all of your social profiles at once, simultaneously. What was once a daunting task is now effortless.

To read  more about DealerFeeder and their services, click here.

Please Note: Our sponsors are important to us, and we hope to advertise products and services that we feel would be relevant to the community, however sponsors are not necessarily "endorsements" of dealerrefresh. As with any purchase, always do your research and comparisons. Find out if Advertising on DealerRefresh.com works for your company.

Guest Posting by Chris Reed

NYC Google Automotive Summit 2009

Google has been holding a series of briefings for OEMs and agencies across the country. The NY program has some great speakers from inside and outside the industry. As you might expect, a primary topic was “when will this pain end?”.

John Casesa, the auto analyst and an advisor to the Auto Task Force, had some great historic analysis identifying that a lot of the intensity of the current slump is the result of several years of “unnaturally” high demand that was propped up by easy money and incentives. In terms of what got the domestics into their current fix, Casesa took the long view and said the root cause dates from the 1930’s when the National Labor Relations Act and State Franchise Laws were passed in reaction to predatory OEM practices. Unfortunately, these laws shifted the power dynamic in the opposite direction and created a structural rigidity that, over time, lead to bloated labor costs, inflexible rules and excess capacity in the franchise network as market shares declined. This, in turn, led to less product innovation and excess debt as import competition squeezed margins and volume.

His views, most likely shared with the task force, is that radical surgery is required to “fix” both of these issues. His take was that a GM bankruptcy was now “probable”. On the dealer networks he forecast the end state may be closer to 10,000 rooftops than 15,000 if the dealers are going to have sufficient financial strength to return to profitability. He even speculated that more radical distribution changes – sales only mass retailers, internet sales - could be enabled by the growth in volume of simpler electronic cars. The good news is that he is forecasting a relatively quick rebound to the 11-12M unit range in 2010 and a slower growth ramp (3-5 year) to a “natural” demand level of about 16M units. The dealers that do weather the current storm and adopt modern sales and marketing practices will do very well over a 5 year horizon.

Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, mostly focused on macroeconomic trends and supported the general consensus that if we are not already bumping along the bottom of the recession we can see it from here. The vast majority of government stimulus funds have yet to hit and that should help counter balance on-going bad news on the employment front. Google is doing some promising research on “predicting the present” – correlating search volume for auto terms with near future sales volume.

Google and Compete reported preliminary results from new research on online buyer behavior using clickstream data linked to auto registration records. The top level take-away was confirmation that the internet shopper does not follow a linear path from 3rd party site to OEM site to dealer site but visits all these types of properties, in different proportions, at all stages of the purchase funnel. This puts the burden on the dealer to engage shopper as all of these stages to insure they ultimately return to your store.

The program was capped off with a commentary by David Bell, former Chairman and CEO of Interpublic (one of the world’s largest advertising agency groups) and now Google advisor giving an amusing perspective on why traditional agencies have been so slow to embrace digital marketing. It appears they need reinvention as much as the OEMs do. More nimble digital marketing specialists are still leading the way and are having increasing presence at the figurative table where marketing campaigns are planned by OEMs and their primary advertising agency. We will see better integration of Digital into OEM execution and better message coordination with regional and dealer sites to turn the marketing funnel into a “pipe” to the dealership – a consistent consumer experience with minimum leakage.

Bonita Stewart and the Google Automotive team put on a quality, thought-provoking program. It is clear we are still at the start of the digital marketing revolution in automotive, there is much innovation to come and profits to be made by surfing the wave.
About the Author: Chris Reed is the Chief Marketing Officer for the Automotive Marketing Services for Cobalt