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Car Dealer Employees: Should You Have a Business "Profile" on Facebook?

Posted by JD Rucker on November 1, 2010 at 1:00am
Just to be clear, there are Facebook profiles, groups, and pages. These are 3 different things. A "Page" is what your dealership can have. It is designed for entities, whether it's a business, charity, or even the branding for an individual. A "Profile" is supposed to be for humans - real people only.

I'm often asked whether or not dealership employees such as Internet managers, sales managers, and salespeople should have a separate individual profile through which they do business.

To me, it's yes, and here's why: Car Dealer Facebook Tip 4


This is only one example of the engagement that is possible from a profile and not from a page. My more complete explanation is available on Soshable under Business Facebook Profiles, but really this video here should be compelling enough to at least consider it.
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Mixed Signals?

Posted by Jeremy Brown on October 29, 2010 at 1:00pm

I posted this picture a while ago because I think its funny. One sign says "No Loitering" which means no hanging around right? Then not 2 feet in front of it is another sign telling me That I have to wait here in this line for 20 minutes. Which one am I supposed to listen too? Then it got me thinking. Uh oh right?

If a simple sign at a gas station carwash can trip me up; what do my customers think? I mean a car purchase is the second largest purchase maybe even largest purchase some people make. What am I doing to confuse things? Well in the car business we doALOT of things to make it harder on ourselves. We advertise payments with "No MoneyDown" and then in the small print we put something like does not include taxes and tags or destination or some BS like that. All in an effort to beat our competitors and still hold gross. Now I am not saying holding gross is bad. I will never say that,as a commission paid manager I need gross. (5% of nothing pays nothing) All I am saying is that we need to be a little more clearer in the way we do things.

I have been a manager at my store for a little over a year and have never used those tactics. The first time I went out to buy a car the car dealership did that to me and it pissed me off. All I remember saying is why cant you give me what you said you would? Ihad no idea that 15 years later I would be a sales manager at a car dealership, at that time was delivering furniture for a living.

With social media we can not afford to practice these ways of doing business. They will and do call us on every deceptive practice we use. This is a great time to be in car sales. I really believe (and if you have read any of my previous blogs you will agree) that social media will help the honest dealer and punish the bad ones. A dealership cannot control what other people broadcast about them. You need to take this very seriously. This is not all bad news though. I have personally changed an angry customer into an advocate just by tweeting them! You can use it to help your image too.

It all goes back to the golden rule. Any time I think of a way to sell a car, I ask myself if Iwould do this to/for my little sister. If the answer is yes I know I have something if not it gets scrapped. I am fortunate to work at a dealership with a great owner who shares those same principles.

Mixed signals? If you have them get rid of them. Be clear, Be consistant, and Be confident that if you dont someone else will.

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Amazing Article from @TheMaria (Maria Ogneva) "Not Down With OPIP (Other People’s Intellectual Property) — Yeah You Know Me!" LOL! I LOVE IT :)

Posted by Sean V. Bradley on October 29, 2010 at 12:57pm
In the spirit of correct attribution, the above title is my cheeky take on Naughty By Nature’s OPP – if you don’t know what this song is, I can’t help you. An unpleasant event happened to me very recently that made this post a necessity. Someone ripped off my content, to pass it off as his own. It wasn’t borrowed or repurposed; it was blatantly copied and pasted, passed off as someone else’s and even shared across Twitter as someone else’s creation. Now don’t get me wrong; this is not the first or the only, or even the last, time this has happened. But this was one of the more offensive examples. Following it, I had several conversations with various folks on Twitter, sharing similar stories. I think there’s a need to talk about proper etiquette when repurposing and attributing, as well as how to protect yourself from stuff like this. I’m going to attack part 1 in this post, and part 2 in a later post. I wrote an article about 12 steps to finding a top-notch social media person, which became a solid hit on the Attensity blog, as well as on SocialMediaToday, where it was syndicated. It was picked as a leading story of the day, and even became the title of the daily content email that it sends to its subscribers (which is not a big deal to some, but I consider it an honor). It is still one of the more commented articles in SocialMediaToday. For a social media content producer, this level of engagement is a compliment of the highest order. While I was on my blogger high, I noticed that there was an article circulated around Twitter, which looked eerily similar. I clicked the link and saw the following (see below): My heart sank. There it was, the article I worked so hard on, lifted word for word, with no commentary, nothing that says: “Hey, I found this great article Maria wrote. I agree with A, B, C, which I’m posting below. I would also like to add X, Y and Z”. With Jeremy’s picture and name prominently featured at the bottom (see below) and with my article starting with the word “I thought,” it basically looked like Jeremy thought what I had written. There was a tiny attribution link at the bottom, which appeared as a meager attempt to cover one’s behind (CYA) in regards to attribution. I just don’t buy that as attribution, and it appears intentionally misleading. On further examination, the site was full of “repurposed” content. To make matters worse, all of this content was duplicated across two sites, both of which has been taken down. The site owner defended himself, saying that that his goal was to “repost gems” found around the Internet. In my opinion, there are enough quality aggregators and syndicates like SocialMediaToday, and they do a pretty bang-up job. So unless that’s your stated purpose, I’ll just assume you are ripping off content. I found it purposefully misleading when Jeremy tweeted this article, retweeted himself, and said nothing when others tweeted it as if it came from him (i.e. “Great article, Jeremy). See below: In my opinion, if you perpetuate wrong attribution, you are complicit in IP theft. Instead, you should correct and say: “Actually this article was written by so-and-so.” This was probably on of the most severe recent example of IP theft; unfortunately, it’s not the only one. I monitor social media for a living, so I have my ear to the ground, and find a lot of my content stolen. Sometimes it’s cut and pasted to look like the author of the blog wrote it, sometimes it’s presented as if I guest posted there, which I didn’t. I’m very deliberate about where I post, and I will always tweet links to such work. I should probably create a page on this blog linking to my work around the WWW. Yes, there are examples like this, of people outright stealing content. But there are also some people who are just bad at social media, or new at it, and clumsily do a bad job of attribution. So I figured I’d write the following 9 steps to ensure that these “mistakes” don’t happen again. First time around they are negligent; second time, they are pre-meditated intellectual property crimes. So here we go; don’t say I didn’t warn you: 1.Ask for permission: Duh! I’m sad to even have to write this point. You should always, always ask someone for permission to repurpose, if you are using more than just a simple quote. You should always link to the original site as well. Creative commons is there to protect creators and consumers of content alike. When deciding whether or not you can repurpose something someone else has written, make sure that it belongs in the category that’s OK to modify and build upon. 2.Add commentary: It’s OK to quote and post passages written by others. We, content creators, want people to use what we create; we want people to find value in it. We want our content to be discussed and debated, so please do use parts of an article, as long as you put your own thoughts around it. Don’t have time to provide your own viewpoint? Don’t have a viewpoint? Hmmm, perhaps blogging isn’t for you. Just sayin’… 3.Clearly quote: You must clearly demark the beginning and the end of the quote and say either before in the text “According to Mr. Smith, [insert quote]”. Remember how we learned to quote correctly in high school; nothing has changed. Plagiarism is still plagiarism. 4.Don’t start with “I” if it’s not you: Never start a quote with “I” or “Mine”, unless you clearly mark who is talking before the quote. Otherwise, it makes it appear that you did something and not the original blogger. Always put a lead in before a sentence that starts with “I” or “Mine”. 5.Use passages, not the whole thing: You should never post the whole post word for word. Borrow a section and put your own commentary around it (see #1). 6.Unless I wrote it for you, it’s not a guest post: It’s not OK to introduce the cut and pasted content as if this author guest-posted on your site. Unless you had a formal arrangement that this person was guest posting, it is NOT a guest post. 7.Give credit in your tweet: If you tweet or share an article that’s inspired by someone else, you should always mark it in a tweet (ht @name is a good approach; “ht” stands for “hat tip”). If someone retweets or shares an article you repurposed and credits you entirely, it your responsibility to point out that it was inspired or based on someone else’s. If someone tweets “hey check out this great article by @xyz”, and you are @xyz you should say “Hey, it was actually @abc’s”. 8.Attribute at the top: Always attribute at the top of the post, most people don’t read to the bottom. Having a little hidden link at the bottom doesn’t count as attribution; it counts as “CYA”. 9.Recognize the purpose of blogging: The purpose of blogging, is to share your unique viewpoint, synthesize the world through your own lens of experience. The purpose is not to collect keywords to drive traffic to your site, so that you can sell your social media “guru” services. By practicing best practices of attribution and preserving others’ intellectual property, you will come across as a thoughtful person. Instead of making bloggers mad, you will build relationships and alliances. In the end, this is what social media is about.
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Getting Ready for NADA—Get Ready for Social Marketing / Brett Stevenson- Dealer Marketing Magazine

Posted by Sean V. Bradley on October 27, 2010 at 1:33pm
Despite the ups and downs of the last year, it appears the auto business is slowly moving upward on the activity meter. If this trend holds, 2011 should be a pretty good year for the auto business, but you need to start you planning now. Since we’re in October, it’s time to make plans to attend the NADA Convention in San Francisco February 5-7, 2011. To get the best hotel rooms and flights, you might consider booking now to save yourself the scramble later. This promises to be an innovative year on the exhibition floor. As in past years, there will probably be one, stronger theme throughout the hall. My prediction is Social Marketing. I think we can look forward to half the booth holders adding some form of social marketing to their offerings. This prediction is based on the trends we are seeing in the larger product businesses like Proctor & Gamble. Big business has discovered that you can reach a half million eyeballs using Facebook and engage the customer with the product for a lot less money than it costs to reach that same number of people using traditional media. Watch for auto dealers to ramp up their engagement with social media sources like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. To the skeptics that say, “Consumers don’t want to communicate with an auto dealership on Facebook,” you are wrong. What consumers don’t want is to be hit with sales messages on Facebook. The secret to Facebook and all social marketing is the concept of “giving.” This is hard concept for us in the car business to grasp. The value of Facebook to an auto dealer is to make friends with people who will eventually need to buy a car. You don’t make friends by saying, “Hey we have cars on sale!” You make friends by saying, “Acme Ford is participating in the March for Breast Cancer. We will donate additional cash to the March for every person that signs up to be on our team.” Or, another “giving” form of social marketing would be to say, “If you’re a Mustang fan, check out the Mustang Club that Acme Ford has formed. Sign up today and receive our free book, The Ford Mustang: American Classic, just for joining the club.” Do you see the difference between trying to push people with sales messages instead of pulling them with “giving” messages? A good way to learn more about using social marketing for your dealership is to go on Facebook and see how other businesses are engaging customers. The ones with the most friends are probably doing it correctly. Once you have earned the trust of a lot of “friends” on Facebook, you can communicate with a ton of potential customers without spending anything in the way of media dollars. Zero is a really nice price for marketing. If you are not savvy at Facebook, find someone who is to handle your Facebook site. Just make sure they understand “giving” vs. pushing.
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Re: AutoSuccess October Article on Internet Sales 20 Group from - Dave Walsh

Posted by Sean V. Bradley on October 25, 2010 at 4:30pm

Sean:

I believe in the thought process but the variables of market size, ethnicity, income level, and educational background taint those numbers more than anything else. We have been involved in 20 groups for the past 5 years and I know dealers that print multiple statements (phony financials) to exceed group performance averages. I also know that Dealers need more training and input from the Manufacturers to get a handle on internet marketing and sales.
We need you to work with GM, Chrysler, and Ford to get us caught up and moving forward.
There are no easy answers and thanks for listening,
Dave Walsh

Re:

Dave,

Thank you for your email in response to my article in AutoSuccess Magazine.

I too have sen fictional numbers from dealers but that is what an Internet Sales 20 Group Moderator can filter through... Plus, not everyone is going to be allowed into the 20 group. this 20 Group is ONLY for dealers that want to be successful...

I am excited for our November 20 group, there will be a lot of Dealer Principals, GMs and High Level Internet Directors... These people I personally interviewed before I allowed membership. They are ALL focused on Success.

I would love an opportunity to speak to you and brainstorm some ideas with you.

*** Please sign up for www.automotiveinternetsales.com ITS FREE and it is the technology that supports the 20 Group. I would love to hear your opinion on it-

SVB

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Be your brand, or how social media can turn customers into evangelicals

Posted by MacKenzie Garfield on October 19, 2010 at 4:22pm

If your hairstylist told you they were the authority on marketing, would you believe them? If you tried to cut your hairstylist’s hair, would they let you? The answer to both is probably no, and for good reason. I know that if I picked up a pair of shears, it would be more sheepdog than chic for my unfortunate client. I’m not an expert on haircutting, and my wonderful stylist is not an expert on marketing. We stick to what we know, which is exactly what you should do in social media.

A common social media pitfall is dabbling in the unknown, or what I like to call forgetting your brand. A car dealer should talk cars. A real estate agent should talk houses. Here at TaCito, we talk marketing. But anyway, back to my salon analogy. Whenever I get my haircut, I ask my stylist for her opinion. She references popular culture, shows me pictures, tells me anecdotes. I’m always sold on her opinion, and I let her do whatever she wants to my hair (no small feat for a woman, as most of you know). In other words, I listen to her because she is both authentic and an authority; those traits have changed me from her client to her evangelist.

Social media can have the same application. Why does this matter? Because customers are fickle, but evangelicals are passionate, loyal, and provide powerful word-of-mouth advertising. Somehow, people see you on social media because something has peaked their interest. Take the next step and engage your customer as an authority. People need to know that you know what’s going on in the world (not the whole world, your world. The car world, the real estate world, the marketing world.) They want to see pictures, they want to hear stories, and they want to believe that you are the expert on whatever you are selling. This does not mean sell yourself constantly. Much like I would be annoyed if my hairdresser only talked about how great she is at cutting hair, your customer does not want to hear about how you are the best dealership/agent/marketer. Plus, that’s dull. Show your customers how good you are at what you do, and then allow them to draw their own conclusions. If you’re as good as you say, they’ll be your evangelist, too. Here are some suggestions for being your brand’s authority:

  1. Be external. Do not incessantly talk about yourself; talk about things that represent your brand. Share photos, links, stories, videos, etc.
  2. Be conversational. No one likes a know-it-all but they do like new information. Share accordingly.
  3. Be polite. This means responding to people even if they are criticizing you. 24/7 feedback has its risks, so keep customer service in mind when dealing with someone that is displeased.
  4. Be interesting. Like I said, it’s not all about you. 85% of information you put online should be external and sharable (see point 1).

For a great example on a company that is an online authority on their brand, check out Anthropologie. Over 200,000 like them on Facebook and they have seamlessly been able to transition the familiar “best-closet-ever” feel of their stores into an online community. http://www.facebook.com/Anthropologie Or, check out To Write Love on Her Arms, a non-profit about supporting people who are at-risk to self-hurt. Almost 800,000 people like them on Facebook, encouraged by not only the wonderful cause but the integration of music, blogs, testimonials, and other media.http://www.facebook.com/towriteloveonherarms?v=wall

Ps- If you’re in the Dallas area and want to be as blissfully happy with your hairstylist as I am, go to Pure Salon in Las Colinas and ask for Ashley. 972.717.9200.

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You being you, or how to launch your social media strategy

Posted by MacKenzie Garfield on October 18, 2010 at 3:57pm
Every time I see a certain friend of mine, she ends up singing this song from AutoTune the news. She's downloaded the iPhone app, bought the song on iTunes, and consistently quotes it in normal conversation. It's funny. It's controversial. It's a little bit ridiculous. It's also been viewed over 32 million times on YouTube, was a Billboard Top100 hit, was performed at the BET Awards, and is still an iTunes top download.[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMtZfW2z9dw]I also have my own viral video addiction, which is just under 18 million YouTube views, and has it's own song (also by AutoTune the News). The creator has been on Jimmy Kimmel, is featured in a Microsoft WindowsLive Commercial, and is starting a non-profit healing center from funds raised through the video.[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI&feature=channel]What is it about these videos that sticks with us? And more important, what do Antoine Dodson and a double rainbow have to do with your business's social media strategy? The answer is simple: authenticity.Both of these videos epitomize real, human reactions and emotions; these videos are honest. Authenticity creates results, so don't be afraid to let loose and lose a little control over your message and your brand. Encourage discussion. Address criticism. Engage in conversation. People will respect your honesty, and in turn, respect your brand. Focus on these goals to get your social media strategy started right.Next time, I'll build on this to explain how respect can turn into evangelism. Stay tuned!Ps- right now, proceeds from the Bed Intruder song and iPhone app are going to Antoine Dodson and his family so they can buy a home in a safer neighborhood. Learn more here: http://www.antoinedodson.net/Pps- you can buy official double rainbow tshirts here: http://www.yosemitebear.net/
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