One of the biggest cool aide fueled concoctions to come along is dealer specific rating sites.  These sites provide an industry specific sounding board for consumers to vent frustrations and give praises of their sales and service experiences.  However they never give an accurate benchmark that consumers can rely on nor provide the marketing leverage they claim to deliver.

A few of these sites are www.dealerrater.com, www.carfolks.com and www.edmunds.com

Generally you have two extremes based on reviews given by consumers at these types of sites.  One is an exceptional number of positive experiences with more ratings than any other dealer in a specific market area or the only reviews the dealership have are negative.  Almost always these reviews are given anonymously or are crafted by dealers referring consumers to these locations to post reviews or even worse paying a marketing company to send consumers to these controlled environments.

Generally these sites steal traffic from the dealer from consumers who are already looking for them and used against dealers to validate their cost to encourage them, dealers, to pay for moderation and marketing perks.  They do this by stealing spots in the search engine results pages when consumers are searching for a dealer by name to deliver the consumer to a site where they see the dealerships ratings and encouraged to look at other dealers in their market area and be exposed, most of the time, to advertising not related to the dealer in question.

Much more reliable reviews can be found at sites like Yelp.com, Google Reviews, Yahoo Local and even Ripoffreport.com and are not subject by outside influences, as much, as auto industry specific review sites.  Also these industry neutral sites provide a platform for dealers and their employees to interact with consumers who have expressed a problem.  A dealer will have more credibility handling a problem in the open and having their consumers give freely of their opinion.

The reason dealers are suckered into the dealer review phenomenon is they are given a false sense of security in knowing that they have the ability to cut off a negative review before it is published.  Where as a true web savvy consumer realizes these review sites are more of a facade and a cash grab by their operators.

From www.automotivedigitalmarketing.com ……. And, since anything negative gets held back for 5 days and the store notified (the benefits of being certified!), there is plenty of time to respond to anything not so pretty before it shows up on the community site.  (Demonstrates why the reviews given are not reliable, a better way to handle it is let the negative review to stand and solve it in the open.  Much more transparency)

Consumers also do not give much weight to opinions given online, both negative and positive, published by unidentified people anywhere near the way they would if the consumer were willing to come forth with their face and name like could be done on a dealer owned testimonials page on the dealers site or blog.  Unless the negative reviews are overwhelming and demonstrate a common problem they really do not prevent consumers from engaging a dealership.  Where as unidentified individuals giving positive reviews do not give the consumer a way to identify with the consumer and look like a fabrication by the dealer or site operator and may do more harm than good as far as the individual dealer credibility.

Dealers, by encouraging consumers to review them at these sites, are giving away valuable web content that they could use to leverage on their own supporting properties thus not increasing search engine competition for their own name.  This is truly a waste of marketing budget and effort for the dealer.  However dealers are used to paying others to build up the authority of their sites as can be witnessed by cars.com and autotrader.com.

From Tactical Technique – If the primary goal is to rank well on page one, where is the logic in helping someone else’s website work towards that same goal?

When dealers have review sites poll their database of customers to solicit reviews they are also exposing their most important asset to compromise.  No amount of assurances by these companies can really guarantee that the dealers customer list is secure, nor does it show any consideration for the consumer.  Big companies have data breeches and dealerships are already prone to litigation by consumers, placing sensitive customer information in the hands of others to built their site with is like playing Russian Roulette.

While industry experts are stating that 81% of consumers use rating sites before buying a car from a dealership it would probably be safe to assume they are looking for ratings on the vehicles.  Dealer rating sites are not transparent enough for consumers to put any real faith in.

Consumers can see past the dealer rating sites, can the dealers?

Technorati Tags: car dealer ratings, carfolks.com, Consumer Reviews, dealerrater.com

There are many places people will go to review their dealership experience. If it was good usually you will have to show them the way , if bad and they want to let the world know. Consumers will even go as far as buying domains targeting your brand name, creating youtube videos and filing rip off reports, just to name a few. There are plenty of places that they can rate their experience outside of these venues as well. Yelp.com, Google Maps, Yahoo Reviews etc..

In todays online world people are also blogging about their experiences. These types of reviews often carry more weight than any of the review aggregation services. These blogs may cater to very small audiences to 100 of thousands of hits per day. It is these types of consumer reviews that are worth their weight both in a PR sense as well as learning the real deal in how your customers feel about their experiences.

In a recent blog search I found several post where people were talking about their car buying experience. Here is a sampling of some that really stuck out.

• CJ, talked about his/her? whole process including research. Also the disappointment on how the whole transaction went down. He did not name the dealership but it does give some good insight into the consumer process.
• Arlo Midgett, talked about buying a used Jeep from Atlantic Dodge in St Augustine, FL while on vacation and described the frustration in how they were treated when they arrived at the dealership and the finalization of the transaction.
• Adam Dilip Mutum, Talked about his research process and buying from Station Garage.

None of these stories are totally unflattering but at the same time not completely positive either. All of these stories cumulated in the authors buying a car and describing their experiences. That is the kind of dialog that will have more weight in the eyes of consumers than any rating site can deliver.

Chances are where the dealerships were named no one even has a clue that their customers are talking about them, however the readers of those blogs do; family, coworkers and search engine users. No matter how obscure these references to these business are people will notice. If enough people talk about them there is no doubt it can increase or decrease their online reputation.

One way to monitor what people are saying about you or your business is to set up notifications. Here is a link to a guide on setting up Google Alerts. It may surprise you to find out what customers are really saying in their online world.

Technorati Tags: Adam Dilip Mutum Talked, Arlo Midgett, Atlantic Dodge, buying, Chances, CJ, Consumers, dealerships, Google Alerts, Google Maps Yahoo Reviews, Jeep, None, people, PR, reviews, Sites, St Augustine FL, Station Garage, talk, Yelp