Who put that there?

Using social media to promote your business and products you sell is the craze today.  Everybody is talking about it and a few are doing really well with it in the auto industry today.

I had to laugh when I saw the video and press release put out by Dealer.com announcing their version of “Share This” on dealer websites.  Not that it is a bad idea to give shoppers the opportunity to share a vehicle they are looking at with their friends on sites like Facebook, Myspace or Twitter, but some of the sites they included in this shiny new button do not make sense and could actually cause a dealers website and web presence more harm than good.

Hmm.. This may be ok

LinkedIn – Is a professional network where people come together to establish business relationships and to network in a business setting.   People on the ground at a store should use this site to establish connections with their customers and build an online brag book, but potential customers probably are not going to post links to the new Chevy Silverado they are considering buying to their professional network.

Delicious – Is a bookmarking site where people store urls for future reference and has been the target of spammers for quite sometime.  Links to cars will expire and if enough expired links from a domain name are discovered there the domain could fall victim to a silent ban, meaning that it will not show in the search results at delicious.

Digging Cars??

Digg is a news sharing site, but that is not the only type of content that goes “popular” there.  Digg is also habitually spammed.  Adding cars to digg.com is pure webspam and true users of digg.com would not do it.   It provides nothing relevant to the users of the site and could actually place a dealers website rankings in jeopardy.

Want see a dealers website banned from digg.com and possibly deindexed by google.com?

• Wait for some goofball ISM to digg all of their inventory because they thought that is how they should use those nifty new buttons on their website.
• Give them a bump and digg up some of their submissions so the “diggs” index in the search engines.
• Wait for the dealers inventory to turn so the links that were “dugg” have expired.  Thus reducing the quality of the index at digg.com and at google.com
• Report the domain and profile to digg.com via their contact form.
• Report the broken links and digg results to google.

Want to get a website providers name servers?

Wait til the phenomenon of 15 or 20 ISMs to digg all of their inventory with the shinny new buttons and use the reporting mechanisms above pointing out all of the spammers domains are on the same nameservers and reference the press release by the provider.

Link to list of urls that may have the new shiny button..

http://www.ismintraining.com/dealerswithbuttons.htm

This is not the first time that website providers have done things which could hurt their credibility or the credibility of their clients.  Izmocars got called out by Spinn.com for spam submissions.

Now dealer.com has made it easy for an overzealous dealership employee to destroy their and the dealer’s online credibility.  The new dealer.com buttons did not even have proper Q&A done on their fuctionality and could possibly fustrate a user who tried to use these buttons, so for now dealers may not have much to worry about and some of the locations in the shinny new button may be spared from spam in the near term.

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