Automotive Social Networking – Still Needs Some Help
Automotive social networking still has ages to go as far as recognizing how things work in social settings. Right now we have two very large extremes going, one has strict guidelines and the other tolerates aggressive spam tactics. Personally I am not an advocate of using spam techniques or highly redundant content and attaching my name to it, for some it does not matter.
On the other hand restricting content because it uses a vendors name and it is not favorable to a specific automotive provider is actually worse than the latter. People who spend anytime on social networking sites recognize spam and can see past it. While I do like rules that do not allow overly self promotional content, wordpress.com thrives with these rules in place, but censoring free content which speaks out about vendor interactions or pointing out flaws in marketing pitches is anti social networking.
While it can be considered a privilege to contribute it these arenas and they can be great marketing arenas if you provide value to the conversation these types of sites do need our content to survive. Neither extreme builds interaction or willingness to contribute and that is possibly why neither platform is doing extremely well.
I have had my comments edited at and trackbacks deleted to www.drivingsales.com, the site with higher than normal standards, when they actually provided value to the conversation and drove traffic to the site. On the other extreme at www.automotivedigitalmarketing.com, site with tons of spammy content, I have people attack on a personal level in a very unprofessional manner.
I can now understand why the guys over at www.dealerrefresh.com do not spend much time in either place. They spend their time working on their own property and building their own their tribe at home, where as I have tried to spread out all over the world wide web.
In a recent post at www.drivingsales.com the admin deleted a vendors name when a consultant blogged about Cobalt Websites trying to take credit for his work. While there is no way to verify the validity of his claims but Cobalt does have the ability to respond and offset it or try to make the situation better. However when the post was edited Cobalt’s website division may not know they have a problem and it may possibly cause this great contributor to not give them anymore content.
Maybe it is best to provide the real content on your own property and just use the commenting to drive traffic to your own property instead of building someone else’s.
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Paul, nice post. You’re right, our industry does need some help with social networking (and a better understanding of the “rules”). But I will have to say, it has moved along since a post I had written back in April of 2007 “Why
are Automotive Dealer Vendors and Consultants Possible Hypocrites?”
You said “I can now understand why the guys over at http://www.dealerrefresh.com do not spend much time in either place.”
You offer valid points about the other sites, but the truth is I would love to spend more time contributing on both sites(including yours and others) but there is not enough time in a day to spread out like that.
I do question how others have the time to do so much damn writing, especially over on ADM. I guess if I would drop that demanding job I would have more time to write and network (less money to support the family
)
thanks for the post, isn’t that funny how they edited me?
Paul,
I appreciate your zeal for your opinion, but your post is not accurate by claiming that DrivingSales.com “moderates heavily” it’s users posts. Of the hundreds of blog posts, discussions threads and comments etc that we receive, this is one of a very few number of times we have edited someone’s post. There was a time when we edited your comments, and you and I had spoken about it. There was a third time where I had felt I had crossed the line, so I went back and moderated even my own post. We certainly don’t have any large volumes of moderation; rather we find the community sticks to the loose tenants and cultural guidelines we set out quite well. Also, to simply edit the name of a company without changing the message of the article, to do so in a different color font so all readers could tell it was changed, and then leaving a comment stating what was edited and why would hardly be considered by most standards as “heavy moderation.”
The focus of our blog community at DrivingSales is to provide best practice content and tactical knowledge; it is not a place for vendors to sell themselves or to insult competitors. Our community provides an inviting and knowledge filled experience for our users and we do our best to insure that culture is maintained, we fell that is the most conducive to the social networking experience of our industry. It is also important to note that we lead the industry by providing the first and largest Vendor Rating system where dealers can rate and reviews their vendor experiences and glean wisdom from the good and bad experiences of others. The vendors can use the reviews by the dealer to learn about strengths of weaknesses of their offerings’ per their actual users, so the system is a win-win for all. However, since we have the outlet of the vendor rating mechanism, we request that our blog community not be the place for competitors to insult one another.
In your post you talked about two extremes like nobody had found the balance. You claim we have too much moderation yet others not enough; on one side control, on the other side spam and unprofessional personal attacks. The difficulty is what you deem as unprofessional the other thinks is fair game. With so many opinions and the judgment call being subjective, the publisher will never please everyone, for what was unacceptable to you was acceptable to another. The publisher or site owner’s best bet it to set the rules and live by them, as we have done. I believe our loose rules are correct and our community is thanking us for the culture we have created with membership growth approaching 30% per month. We opened up our community to the industry only 6 months ago, before that it was a private network, but growth as we have experienced would be a great success by most standards. You are a talented blogger and I appreciate your opinion, but we disagree on this one…
Best practice and bad practices both need to be shared. The vendor ratings platform at drivingsales does not allow other service providers to express problems and issues.
Drivingsales is not heavily moderated it is conveniently moderated and not allowing trackbacks to appear even if they disagree with the original poster is bad form.
Actually that is a way to gain traffic in two directions and let others see both sides of a story or marketing pitch and allow contribution to the web.
Best practices is more then just what happens at the store. You have an awesome opportunity to show best practices at all levels.
[...] and drivingsales.com, drivingsales removed the vendor name and I did another post about this automotive social networking [...]
Paul,
Thank you for such an interesting and thought provoking article… Although I agree with the points you are trying to convey, I think it is important to recognize that not every automotive industry community, or online network seeks to be the same as the other. So, whereas one community may choose to practice what they believe to be a reasonable amount of moderation and editing, another community may choose the opposite route and practice an open unmoderated forum… Still others may restrict who is authorized to publish original articles while allowing, within guidelines, anyone registered to comment on those articles… The cliche’ of “different strokes for different folks” comes to mind.
Regardless of a blog’s, or in the case of ADM a network of blog’s, moderation and censorship policies I believe that each serves a place in allowing automotive professionals a place and platform to express opinions, ask questions and showcase the work that each contributor may be proud of.
When I started ADM almost exactly a year ago, I did so in response to being heavily edited, censored and eventually banished from another automotive community. Because of this, I decided that ADM would be uncensored, almost moderation free and have a “freedom of speech” focus that would reflect the opposite of what I had grown to despise at the automotive community I was banished from… However, along with this open format comes a few undesirable side effects, some that you mentioned such as a tendency for vendors to be overly promotional to the point of spamming along with a few other aspects. For example, the freedom that each ADM member has to publish articles within their own assigned ADM Blog space results in a lot of content being either repeated from other sites, or repetitious in nature. In my opinion, that is one of the downsides of having such an open and unfettered community.
However, on the upside, most ADM members know they have a place where they can truly express how they actually see things, using language that may not be family appropriate, or even business appropriate, and their words will see the light of day regardless of how inflammatory or even perhaps even entirely inappropriate they may be… In a manner that allows a level of freedom of expression that is rare anywhere else with a significant amount of industry professional traffic.
THAT is ADM’s niche… ADM was not created to be a copy of DealerRefresh, and I know that DrivingSales.com was not created to be a duplicate of ADM. Each has multiple unique aspects and differences in atmosphere and community character that will attract different people to greater or lesser degrees.
And, you know what? I say viva la’ differance! Wouldn’t this be a boring world if EVERY online blog and/or professional community was managed exactly the sames, with the same publishing and commentary guidelines?
Again, I appreciate your article and agree with with almost everything you have stated in it… EXCEPT, I believe the differences you describe are actually good and benefit both our industry and the growth and development of automotive professional blogs and communities.
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