I recently opened a an account with Bank of America for my business banking and signed up for all of the free trials and discovered that I had payroll through them activated, it is not needed yet, and used the chat button to find out what I needed to do to cancel it.

Click on the images to see what outsourced customer chat can do for you.  If anything it will give your customers a good laugh.

Technorati Tags: online chat, outsourcing

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.

Technorati Tags: automotivedigitalmarketing.com, cobalt websites, drivingsales.com

On the other side of the coin you could be using an old (insert website vendor name) site, not really work your leads that hard, rely on customers to secure their own financing and move more cars than those in the first example because you make it easy for people to find you and your staff online.

The key difference is you have traffic and understand that without traffic EVERYTHING fails.

Online traffic comes in many forms and using only one method to generate it is limiting,  like buying the back page of the phone book as your only advertising source. Just as you use many methods to deliver your message using antiquated methods of advertising, (print, radio, television, billboards, grocery store benches, you get the picture) you should explore all methods of generating online traffic.

It is not just about dealership website traffic, that is just one aspect of online traffic, even though in my opinion you should take care of home first and all online traffic generation sources should point back to your main website.

You must have a dealership website where all online roads end, even without all of the other necessities. A high dollar ILM/CRM, 200 tracking numbers, process training, email templates, phone scripts, online sales training, a huge properly priced inventory and the best converting website in the world are worthless without traffic.

There are many ways to generate online traffic for car dealerships:

Highest cost online traffic generation sources:

• Type in Traffic – Radio, television and print website mentions. Targeted customers are not using these methods to find cars on the web, however you can and should use these methods to brand your stores web address if you are still relying heavily on these mediums.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) / Pay Per Click (PPC) – While the cost of using this form of traffic generation is dropping in today’s economy it still is one of the most expensive ways to drive traffic to your stores website. While cost per click can be reduced with proper keyword research the offset to obtain these lower click cost is finding the proper long tails to target. You either have to find someone who will invest the time in your market to find these gems, cheap clicks, or use broad matching, expensive clicks, one offsets the other in the near term. Over the long term having a huge keyword base to work from with proper A/B testing, which generates more traffic and higher conversions at lower cost, improves ROI. Often used as a band aid for a poorly search engine optimized site or instant traffic for a fresh website.
• High Cost Used Car Classified Providers – They can and will provide more than one type of online traffic. Leads and phone calls directly from the source and referral traffic to your website. You may even experience walk in traffic from these sources, rarely properly tracked. Unless you have a large inventory or the right cars your ROI will probably be dismal.
• Purchased leads – While they do not normally generate traffic to your website without follow up they do provide instant online traffic. The leads are generated on another online property so they qualify as online traffic. ROI fluctuates from provider to provider and your process is critical in making the most of them.

referral traffic- Website traffic from other website via a link from one site to another.

Medium Cost Online Traffic Sources

Almost all of these traffic sources can be executed in house if you have the right people in place. For dealers to try to execute these strategies in house they need to be prepared.   A person who is paid only on sales, theirs or a departments, it places too many hats on their head and to hire someone who will perform these services properly from the store will require the dealer to write bigger checks as salary than most are comfortable with.  Where as having someone manage it for them is cheaper and more cost effective.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This is free traffic from the search engines if your site has intelligent design, regularly updated content and a proper linking strategy on site and off. A good SEO will continually study their art. With the search engines continually changing algorithms and ranking criteria it is an ongoing process. While winning some basic terms such as your store name and brand and market area is a good start it is just the beginning of a well optimized site.
• Dealer Micro Sites and Landing Pages – Having other properties to generate leads and referral traffic to your main website can effectively lead to huge online presence and make it impossible for online shoppers to not find you via the search engines. You can promote them just as you would a main online property and therein lie many points of debate on top of fair cost, value and diluted branding issues. They have huge value if executed properly.
• Intelligent Email Marketing – Reworking your database of leads and customers is a great traffic generation tool and does not really require outside vendors to execute, but does require software applications, usually leased, and can also open up legal issues if not properly executed. The legal aspects and bad publicity that a poor email campaign can generate is an area that is not well documented in the auto industry. I get spammed from vendors who sell these solutions to car dealers. Mass email marketing via rented lists is not intelligent email marketing if you do not understand the ramifications. Today I was approached from a vendor who offers these services and was interested in digging deeper into their product for my clients until they claimed 100% delivery rate. When you hear this from a vendor, compliance is not a concern and they are lying.
• Banner advertising buys – Almost all classified providers, local papers with websites, television stations, radio stations and local interest sites offer banner advertising at varying rates. The click through on banner advertising can vary from nil to around 5% depending on how targeted the traffic is. A banner on a car portal that caters to people looking for cars will be higher than people reading the obituary on your local papers website, which provides long term branding. You have to determine the real mission of the banner, the cost of the creative, market prices and the CPM (Cost Per 1,000 impressions) to make a judgment call on the value.

Free or extremely low cost online traffic sources

All of these items listed below can deliver traffic and SEO benefit to your main website.  Some require a lot of work to effectively use them and there are companies and individuals that can help you start leveraging them versus managing it in house.

• Directories – Some are very low cost and most are free. You have local directories, search engine directories, local search directories, yellow page directories, car dealer directories and general web directories.  Directory submissions to the major search engine directories is crucial.
• Free Classified Vendors – Many of your inventory solution providers post to various free classified sites like vast.com.  Many have applications that allow posting to places like craigslist.org and backpage.com but it is very time consuming.  I just started a service that gets car dealer inventory on craigslist and the traffic stats that have been seen so far exceed traffic from major classified vendors in leads and refferal traffic.
• Blogging – There are many free services that will allow you to set up a blog.  Blogger and WordPress are two.  You can set up a self hosted blog for less than $100 a year and you set your own terms of service.  A much better option than using free blogs for car dealers.  If any of your employees or vendors blog get them to link to you.
• User Generated Content – You can get traffic from hundreds of sites that allow you to create pages on them.  They also provide huge SEO benefit.  I love Squidoo.com
• Social Networking Sites – Does your dealership have a facebook group, do your sales people connect with customers on linkedin and plaxo, do you have a myspace page, have you checked out vox (blog and social network)?  You could also start your own dealership social network for your customers and dealership personel to interact, I have not seen a good example of this yet.
• Social Media – Using it to promote a dealership website may do more harm than good but they are great for landuring links to your main online marketing properties.  (A story for another day)  Subscribe to my blog to make sure you do not miss it.
• Forums – Visit and contribute to forums where your customers go.  Local forums, brand forums, enthusist forums, if you are daring create your own.  Also local forums may be good place to buy cheap banner advertising.  Make sure you make use of your forum signature with links to your website.
• Links from suppliers – Most OEM’s and inventory providers have portal sites that will link back to you but think beyond that.  Does your dent repair vendor, cleaning company, Chamber of Commerce, local BBB, Radio Station or anyone you do business have a website?  This will provide traffic and SEO benefit.
• More than one store – If you have more than one store you should have a group portal and create an intelligent linking scheme among all of the stores websites.
• Free or Cheap OEM Sites – Most OEMs give dealers free sites or very low cost sites for their dealers.  I have not found one yet that will not allow you to point your own domain to it.  For example if you are a Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep 5 Star Dealer you actually get four free sites from Chrysler that you can point domains to. Don’t ignore these free or low cost properties and brand them fully with custom top level domains, content and links back to your other site(s).

Having the tools in place for when the traffic arrives is noble.  Having the traffic then deciding which tools you need is better.  It is a matter of prioritizing your online marketing efforts then tweaking and adjusting to acheive maximum ROI.  The return on investment for a whiz bang website, high end crm and process are ZERO if you have no traffic

Paul Rushing
912-266-1629
www.ismintraining.com
“Believer in all things possible”

Contact Me: LinkedinFacebookTwitter

*if you wish to republish this posting you must contact me directly for terms and conditions. © Paul Rushing

Technorati Tags: car dealership traffic, dealership website traffic, online traffic

The automotive digital marketing space is now the wild west of the auto industry and represents the best opportunity for dealers, who have the ability to make informed decisions, to promote their dealerships and inventory online. Unfortunately for most dealers they rely on recommendations from individuals or companies that have a back end motive in recommending products and services to them. Like the scouting reports that General Custer had before “the Battle of Little Big Horn” and are being lead to the slaughter.

Carnival like atmospheres and gee whiz presentations with recommendations from people who have not changed their game plan in relation to digital marketing in several years is a recipe for disaster. In this space with enhanced consumer awareness and online trends changing at an alarming rate cookie cutter products with declarations of how well they did in 2005 should tell the dealer to be weary.

This problem is not only presented by consultants and agencies who are trying to carve out a space in a niche that they do not understand it is compounded by the fact vendors that operate in the digital space make recommendations that only serve them and not the dealer.

Today there are so many different flavors of cool aid that is being served up to decision makers it is easy for the dealer to become paralyzed and choose to do nothing. Another big mistake.

The list of terms, tools and disciplines in itself can be confusing to a lay person. Automotive digital marketing, online best practices, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, micro sites, landing pages, CRM, ILM, SEO, PPC, websites, process, conversion ratios, email templates, social media, social networking, dealer ratings, click to call, online chat, online classifieds, twitter, linkedin, plaxo, leads, online merchandising, pop ups, pop unders, text advertising, banner advertising, online directories, blogging, squidoo, consumer generated content, have you got lost yet?

Now you have vendors pitching these individual products or combinations of them in packages as the answer to the dealers online marketing effort. Not to mention the training that must be performed for the use and implementation and process development.

Here is the typical situation. A dealer attends a conference and hears buzz words such as social networking, web 2.0, blogging, seo and sem. Currently they have a website and are sending their inventory to classified sites such as cars.com and autotrader.com and realize that they are not getting the best return on their time and investment.

So they contact a SEO vendor and a SEM vendor to help deliver more traffic to their website and realize that their process is broke after examining their lead handling. In comes the process consultant that gets them signed up with a state of the art ILM and CRM system and buying every lead in a 200 mile radius of their store. However the dealer has set a budget for expanding her Internet presence and soon realizes that all the based are not covered so she starts exploring more options. The SEM vendor tells them how they are going to deliver traffic to the stores website through an intelligent PPC campaign and the traffic will be almost instant and the leads will pour in through the site and they don’t need to buy leads and give them more money to drive traffic that closes at a higher ratio.

Now the SEO vendor explains to her that SEM is not permanent traffic and gets is more expensive over the long haul and tells her that she can buy leads for half the price that most lead vendors charge by buying direct from the lead aggregators while they establish a permanent search engine presence.

Now the autotrader rep and cars.com rep are waiting in the showroom to discuss the cancellation letter that was sent in because the process consultant told her not to waste money there to free up more budget so she can access discount credit leads that have been sold to six dealers already in the last 90 days.

Finally after three weeks of this circle jerk she has decided that she has tried the Internet and it is not worth it because it is not working in her store. She can’t find the ball no matter how hard she searches for it.

All the time her inventory data feed has been down because the modem for her DMS is infected with cockroaches where the parts manager dropped a burrito behind it in the parts warehouse where he hides to take breaks during the day and every email from the store is going into a spam filter because they have a local mail server and the F&I manager and title clerk are sending porn and the email around that says microsoft is going to give them $286 for every time it is forwarded to their 800 person contact list putting all the email address in the to field and the person who did online sales two years ago has an autoresponder set up to send every person who has ever submitted a lead through the website a daily email to call him on his disconnected cell phone to get the best damned service and because they need a car today and it is time for them to step up.

And people wonder why dealers have such a hard time getting it.  It is not their process that is broke it all the processes going on around them inflicted by the vendors who ply their trade in the niche or people who are trying to figure out a way to stay in the car business in a consultave role when they do not even know how to set up an email client.

The good thing is for people who are serving the dealers with integrity and for the dealers that operate with integrity and own a franchise other that one of the big three there is hope.  Current market conditions are going to rid the industry of posers and carnies at all levels.  OEMs, Dealers, vendors, consultants and dealership employees who have been faking it for years.

Now is the time for the dealers to act to own their competitive markets and make rational choices.  This can be done through education or finding consultants that can guide them who do not have an interest in pushing a certain vendors products.

Transparency is a buzz word that vendors and consultants use in their pitches to dealers telling them they need to be transparent with their ionteractions with consumers now dealers need to hold them transparent as well.  If a consultant or vendor that is recomending other widgets for the dealer to use in their online marketing efforts will not provide full disclosure as to ther relationship with these other parties the best thing the dealer can do is tell them to play their shell game at down the road motors and seek education and non biased recomendations.

Now that you are ready to leave and go back about your day take a minute and leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Technorati Tags: automotive internet sales, automotive vendors, online marketing

The top 10 reasons to avoid wordpress.com for a dealership blog

1. Lack of flexibility – You cannot use plugins that help your blog become truly SEO friendly.  No custom title tags or Google sitemaps.
2. Siphoning traffic is against their TOS – If your blog at wordpress.com is only designed to send traffic to your website and not to provide real information to the visitor it will get DELETED.
3. Unprofessional – A blog hosted on a free hosting site says to your visitors that you are not serious enough about what you are doing to be a person they should trust to spend money with.
4. No real customizations – You can add a few custom headers to blogs at wordpress.com but you cannot use a completely customized wordpress theme there.
5. No custom html or .js – You can only use their stats and cannot add form tables or other useful html.
6. “Hey go see my blog at www.imanidiotdealer.wordpress.com” – Get your own domain.
7. Advertising – WordPress.com displays ads on your blog to certian types of visitors.  You may never see them, they code it that way, but your vistors may.
8. Space – The limits at wordpress.com are generous on their free blogs but if you need more space you gotta pay for it.  Which you should be doing anyway.
9. You are placing your content in someone other peoples hands.  You are already doing it with your dealership website, you should own something that belongs to you in your virtual space.
10. By the time you pay to remove adds, add a domain and the extra space you are still subject to their TOS and you can do it yourself and have complete control of your content.

Bonus – WordPress.com does not index your individual post just your home page all keyword indexing is via tag clouds which can be shared by your competiton.

Domain at godaddy – $7.55 a year for .com

Your own hosting account $4.95 a month

Owning your content and not having to appease others: Priceless

If you need help setting up a blog using the software from wordpress.org subscribe to my feed or email subscribe as I am preparing some tutorials to help you learn to set up Car Dealer Blogs.

Technorati Tags: automotive blogging, car dealer blogs, cheap car dealer blogs, wordpress.com dealer blogs

Every time your cell phone rings from friends in the industry you are trying to guess who is closing next or what other bad news they are delivering.  You may even have some pools running on it.  Your marketing expenses are cut to the bone because people are not buying cars and you are wondering how much longer you will even hang on.

You have two dozen deals sitting in finance that you would of spotted six moths ago.  Paralysis is starting to kick in and all you can think about is what can we do to attract more customers TODAY!!  You have the team in place and the inventory just no tire kickers or leads.

The facts are you have two types of buyer in a market like this.  Need buyers, the projects in F&I, and people who really don’t care how bad things are economically, decent income retirees, civil servants and rich people.  The big fat middle is not buying anything….

If you are reading this it should not matter to you!!!

You can easily capture today’s in market car buyers and the buyers who will be in the market when things start recovering, like they always do, by building your Internet presence today.  Chances are you found this page because you are looking for way to improve your business today and in market car buyers will find you if you put it out there for them to notice you.  If you have read this far you have noticed me,  did I do a decent marketing job?

While your competition is sitting back worrying and your staff is pissing and moaning about how bad things are what are you doing to generate traffic to your inventory and your unique selling proposition, if you don’t have one why not?

Cars are widgets, customers know that, they don’t believe the adds 40% off MSRP and below invoice.  Employee pricing means nothing to them if they are 8 K buried in a SUV that gets 14 MPG.  You are not solving their problems and creating yourself one.

You can win in this down market!!

Make the web your marketing friend not a nemesis you do not understand.  Process and used car descriptions is not Internet marketing.  That is sales.  The Internet is a marketing tool that creates sales.  To win in the Internet game with any widget you need:

Traffic > Leads > Follow Up> in car lingo Tire Kickers > Interested in Buying > Chase ‘em ’til they buy or die.

Massive traffic gets massive leads which give you warm bodies to follow up with.  The ends of the equation are the only two you have control over.  You can create traffic and manage the follow up, if you get enough traffic the leads will be there.

Create traffic where none existed before

Become a problem solver, today’s buyers have problems solve them and make it easy for them to find your solution.  While your competition is worrying about all of the crap this post started with, you will worry about how to attract more traffic.

You can generate traffic on your competitions makes and brands, competing market areas, perfect conversion tools and brand yourself online with people not in the market today or you sit back and create processes with without leads to run through them.

Internet marketing is not setting up a BDC and having a website, they are just a part of the equation.  It is not about launching dozens of dealer micro sites, with no real purpose,  shady video search engine optimization, creating blogs with keyword stuffed content, buying leads, spamming social networks and email databases.

It is finding customers who want what you have, want to do business with you and you solving their problems.  You can do that faster, with less expense and more effectively with a well planned Internet marketing plan that you can any day by using spaghetti marketing through traditional media.  (Traditional Media is a bad term to use.  The web is today’s traditional media)

Execute this now and reap the benefits today and create a base that your competition will never catch when cycles do as they always do, turn for the better….

Paul Rushing
912-266-1629
www.drivingsales.com
projects@parushing.com
www.ismintraining.com

Contact Me: LinkedinTwitter

Technorati Tags: automotive internet marekting, automotive marketing, automotive online marketing, car dealer online marketing

• A good friend who I met either here or at another network that deals in Automotive Digital Marketing was announced as the winner of the DrivingSales.com automotive marketing strategy contest.  Eric Miltsch, the winner, is the IT director for Auction Direct USA and a runs a Used Car Blog, by sharing with others how he is leveraging twitter and other properties to sell more cars.
• We had the most post ever at the leading auto industry blog in the world today.
• A magazine that told me that they were publishing one of my articles I submitted to them did not.
• Read the post at http://dealerrefresh.com about the two upcoming conferences in a few weeks.  I will be attending Digital Dealer, to bad I wont finally get to shake Jeff’s hand and imbibe beverages with him.  I do look forward to the other networking that will take place though.
• Caught a website vendor stealing content.  No link.  They are not the first ones to catch doing it.  They were the first to respond properly.  I have caught other individuals doing it before, they just took their whole site down and scattered like a cockroach when you turn the lights on.
• Finally the never ending emails stopped over a squidoo lens that ranks well for Special Auto Financing in a certain metro market ended.
• No phone calls from people pitching me to review their product or asking “How do I ___  ___  ___?” unless you count another friend who is trying to get streaming audio up on his website as his Radio Show about MMA is about to go into syndication.  At least he did not want a handout.
• Had a sudden awakening.  I really don’t care who emails what to who.  The old school is fading fast and I was surprised see who was partnering with who with real dated material and calling it training.  I saw the video “testimonials” of the last one and they resembled an interrogation, not to mention some of the “key points” that are taken back to a dealership were last century.  Fool’s and their money are soon parted.
• Finally learned to communicate with eastern Indian programmers.  I have to learn to talk to them like they are three.  Not that they are not intelligent, but a lot gets lost in interpretation on both sides.
• For every task I strike off my to do list five more show up.

How was your day?

Technorati Tags: automotive digital marketing, in the trenches, used car blogs

Sites like these and responses show up quite well in the SERPS because it is fresh content and Universal Search may give consumer reviews some precedent over other types of web properties.  Dealers have three options when their customers vent.

Try to turn it into a positive -

Bill Heard Chevrolet in Sanford Flordia did a good job in doing this in their response to a consumer after they felt lied to after a spot delivery went bad.  Nowhere did the representative replying to the entry at ripoffreports.com get caustic, they apologized to the consumer and made the consumer whole.

Attack the Consumer and Situation-

A representative at Jim Glover Chevrolet, attacked the consumer and claimed she had anger issues because they cashed a check that was supposed to be returned to her.  They lashed out at the consumer and used the customers last name in the response.  Instead of trying to turn it into a positive they used the board as a way to show justification, consumers don’t want that, they want to be treated like humans not numbers and entries on the P&L.  You cash anybodies check after telling them it will be returned you get justified anger issues targeted at you.  It is how you respond that makes the difference.

Do Nothing -

There are plenty of examples of this.  No need to show examples of that here.  However if someone takes a full court press on putting as much negative information out there as possible, you may have to work on getting those things buried in the SERPS.

Of the three types of responses a dealership can give only one of them is the right thing not to do.  Sometimes doing nothing may actually be the right thing to do on a level of Search Engine Reputation Management for car dealers and for piece of mind.  Sometimes a consumer will never be happy with your responses even if you take the path of helping and a response in that situation may even cause them to become more diligent in getting negative information out about your company.

Choices on managing your dealership’s online reputation -

1. Be proactive get in there and engage consumers and try to turn negatives into positives.
2. Build online brag books at the different review platforms and use them as a way to promote your brand in interactions with potential consumers.  Good Example Here.
3. Own the SERPS for all of your “money terms” especially your stores name.
4. All of the above.

I would chose #4, thoughts and opinions?

Technorati Tags: car dealer search enginge reputation management, online branding, social networking

Some Numbers -

• Around 175,000 blogs are created EACH DAY.
• Technorati claimed that on July 31, 2006 that they started tracking their 50 Millionth blog.

It is tough to claim your space in the blogoshpere but not impossible. The reason you see so many blogs being created daily is because most are just pure marketing pieces not designed to build a brand or encourage dialog. They are aberrations of the logical purpose for creating blogs.

Automation is not the key. That is splogging and does nothing to really build a brand. People want to be able to connect with you and a blog is probably the easiest way to do it. It allows you to get your message across in a non confrontational way and give individuals a connection with you and your brand.

Technology has enabled customers to dramatically change their attitude towards marketing. As a result, they are tuning out in increasing numbers and talking back. Customers are shifting massively their entertainment and information consumption away from traditional media to the new web space.

Marketers are responding by shifting their advertising to web properties, but online advertising is struggling to gain trust. According to a recent Forrester survey of US households, only 6% trust search engine ads and 2% online banner ads. Customers trust themselves and each other in influencing their perception of a brand. Yet few marketers have embraced blogging, although it supposedly enables a more personal and two-way interaction with the brand. Logic+Emotion

Traditional media is dying. Our one sided messages are being ignored and those that take the time to differentiate themselves will capture more of the shrinking market share. Blogs can be uses as PR tools, to influence, advertise, build conversations and expand your creativity.

Personal and corporate blogs can widen your reach and tap into other online conversations, that is how you build a brand. If you can establish yourself as a hub for information to those that you are wanting to attract to your business then you have tapped into the power of blogging as a marketing tool.

You can build calls to action in your message and here is mine.

Get your feet wet with blogging!!

I am responsible for recruiting bloggers at DrivingSales.com. We are in need of people who wish to blog about their experiences as dealership employees, online automotive marketing, current industry news, new products, training or anything else auto industry related.

This will give you the opportunity to expand your reach in the industry and connect with people at different levels. You can then transfer that experience to building you own brand and applying what you learn directly to your business. We are working on a FREE training for auto industry bloggers that will help you embrace this digital medium and build their brand.

If you wish to get in the game leave a comment below or send me an email at paulr@drivingsales.com or call 912-266-1629

Technorati Tags: automotive blogging, car dealer blogs, permission based marketing

A customer came on the lot today and bought a car.  They would not deal with any of my other staff or sales people and when I asked why they wanted to only deal with me I was blown away.  I am the General Manger at the store so it is not often that people ask for me directly or refuse to allow a sales person to help them.  This is the explanation they gave me. “Tom, you are all over the internet, you are a professional.  You have a lot to lose if you don’t treat us right.”

That says a lot for maintaining your online presence.  I am not talking about sites that pitch you or your product geared to the car business.  The message delivered by these sites are not what consumers will pay attention to if they are looking to find out the real deal about you.  They know that messages received via these venues can be manipulated to be one sided.  While they may have their place more for building your stores brand they don’t help build up you the person.  You need to be genuine in your online presence and not try to deliver a marketing message every step of the way.

What they can look at is your participation in other venues not car related, personal blogs, giving views of other products and anything else you publish online.  There is a lot to be said about spreading you online.

You can do this through a variety of resources and build your story sites such as:

• http://linkedin.com
• http://squidoo.com
• http://blogger.com
• http://wordpress.com
• http://facebook.com
• http://myspace.com (I hear the groan already)
• Your own personal self hosted blog
• and a multitude of other resources such as social media.

While these may not be the end all be all but anywhere you can carry your message can benefit you.  You can talk about anything you like.  Just make sure your content does not alienate potential consumers.  In the past I have had consumers applaud my efforts not car related dealing with fraudulent marketing tactics, activities by big companies that violate privacy issues and on raising a child with a cleft lip and palate.  I like spreading the word when i comes to these things.  If my content can help another with something they are facing it is rewarding in more ways than one.  For people who view this type of content as a negative impact on my character I really do not care if they chose to do business with me or not.  I am not scared to hide behind who I am or what I stand for.  Using this in an effort to discredit me only places them in disdain and removes my objectivity of what they offer the marketplace.  Even if on the surface it appears to be a good idea.

There are many people in our industry that do not get it.  They try to hold onto the old ways of doing business in our ever changing marketplace.  I have even heard statements such as “everybody does it this way”.  That is why they keep getting the same or less results for their efforts.  You have to decide on what will separate you from everyone else and tell your story.  It does not have to be cutting edge it just needs to separate you from the pack.

I am proud to call Tom my friend he gets it.  He is part of the ever growing circle of influence that will bring the car business into this century leaving the old school in the dust looking at each other blankly in the eye  wondering what happened.  It is a new age it is time to get in the game.

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