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Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

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Most consumers hate shopping for cars. They love to BUY cars. They WANT new cars. It’s just like shopping at the mall, just way more expensive, which is why they should enjoy it much more. If you were to go into any retail store and tell them you wanted to spend $20,000+, they would treat you like royalty, yet, when people go into car dealerships, all they get are headaches and wasted time. Many dealers are recognizing this and consciously making changes to their processes that streamline the buying experience and make it easier, and more enjoyable, for people to buy cars but, sadly, many dealers are still playing games.

Has something like this happened to you at a dealership or have you seen this happen at your dealership?

Until dealers can break through the stereotype they earned, consumers will distrust them. That’s why it’s such a refreshing experience to consumers when they find a dealership that doesn’t play games. Until they experience it personally, however, they won’t believe you no matter how hard you try and convince them that your dealership is different. Treat every customer like royalty and you’ll be well on your way to referrals and word-of-mouth marketing that you could never buy.

(P.S. This video was from a series of videos shot by DealerKnows Consulting. It was an honor (and a lot of fun) to be included in these. There are more to come and, in case you missed the first one released, I’ve included it below.)

Is Content Marketing Valuable?

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Last month at BlogWorld LA, I had the privilege to see Jay Baer and Joe Pulizzi’s session about content marketing. Their session focused on the different types of content marketing that companies participate in. It was titled: “How Much Do You Open Your Kimono?”

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Is content marketing worthwhile? How do you tie it to revenue?

They taught that there are six types of content marketing. The six types of “opening the kimono” are:

1. Closed Kimono – There is no online thought leadership. Your content is not for public distribution. This type has the goal of significant repeat and “word of mouth” business. Pro: There is zero time investment. Con: You have limited exposure and a reduced ability to build online influence.

2. What Happens In Vegas – Online thought leadership is distributed and built via micro-platforms. Your company is participating in platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. and leaving blog comments to build your reputation as a thought leader. Pro: Original content is not required. You’re sharing other’s content in an effort to become a community resource. Con: You have no ability to drive the lead source and limited search engine potential. A great quote included in this segment was:

“To be considered a leader in any field, one must build and gain trust within their communities.” – Lisa M. Loeffler, Genuine Media Co.

3. Quid Pro Quo – This type comprises of selling thought leadership via methods such as e-books, how-to articles, and e-newsletters. The essential flow is that you give away free content and include a form asking people to subscribe to receive more free reports, etc. This builds your subscriber base and you then you market to those people with your paid content. Keep in mind that your free content needs to be “best in class” or people won’t pay you for your paid content. Pro: Recurring revenue. Con: Passive income.

4. Give Me Your Number – This is essentially lead-gated thought leadership. In this type, you put your content behind a gate (such as a lead form) and people have to give you some personal information to access the content (such as an e-mail address, etc.). Here you can focus not just on lead generating but lead nurturing. You would promote your content through all of your media channels but not give it to away until someone completes a lead form. Pro: If your content is good, you can generate a river of leads. Con: You have no control over the lead quality.

5. Peekaboo – In this type of content marketing, you give away what you know but not the process. Your content itself becomes your resume of thought leadership. Pro: You will get heavy SEO and PR awareness within your audience Con: This type takes tons of effort. It can also devalue each piece of content. You also risk publishing too much which could lead to you being ignored.

6. The Full Monty – Just like it sounds. You give it all away – what you know and how to do it. You create content for content’s sake. You even create content that is outside your industry. You can still have a lead form but it should not act as a gate to the content. Pro: There is no barrier to the customer. You can go big or small. Con: This type requires serious effort. It also allows others to “steal” your content and diverts attention from your core attributes.

Which one is right for you really depends on your target audience. Through testing, you can determine which one converts the most for you with your audience.

They provided a worksheet with a testing plan that you can use to evaluate each type and see which is the best fit for your company. You can access that worksheet at http://bit.ly/openkimono

It was fun using this “type-guide” to identify which type of content marketing various members of the online automotive community are using.

You can follow both Jay Baer and Joe Pulizzi on Twitter for more valuable information and content.

 

Lessons from BlogWorld – A Social Media Experiment – How to Find a Job by DJ Waldow of Waldow Social

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DJ Waldow of Waldow Social delivered a timely and fascinating presentation at the 2011 BlogWorld LA conference held November 3-5, 2011 in Los Angeles, CA titled “A Social Media Experiment: How to find a job” sharing his thought and experiences while offering timely advice and tips on how job-seekers of today can leverage the power of social media to aid them in finding a job.

DJ Waldow was formerly the Director of Community for Blue Sky Factory and is now the owner of his own business, Waldow Social. In his session, he told his personal story of how he was laid off unexpectedly when his employer was acquired by another company. Because the company’s acquisition was not public, he was not allowed to say anything other than he no longer worked there. So he got creative.

He shared with the audience how he created “Project Awesome“, which included an interactive PDF resume in Slideshare (to date viewed 9,181 times), the aforementioned blog post (which received 5,000+ visits and over 200 comments), and enlisted his friends to give video recommendations(viewed over 1,500 times) for him to use in his job hunt. All of this creative marketing of himself using social media led to “300 e-mails, 44 phone conversations/interviews, 7 in-person interviews, 13 Skype chats, 2 Google+ Hangouts & one Facebook chat – all with people interested in hiring (him) for a full-time position” and all of this occurred within the first 2 weeks of him losing his position.

Of course, being in the business of social media, he had some very high profile friends (which helped), but his approach was not one of soliciting recommendations from everyone he knew, but rather identifying key people in his life that he knew well enough to ask for a personal favor from. He called this “Social Capital”. Your social capital is gained by trust from people that you have earned, friendships that you have built, and relationships that you have grown. Identify key people in your life, both personal and professional, to assist in marketing yourself. Be creative and use social media networks to share that you are in the market and enlist your network in sharing YOU with THEIR network.

He advised that, if you plan to use social media, the first step is to know what’s out there in the world about you, right now. Do a search on the internet and see what others would find should they be looking for information about you. If you find negative items, either delete them or correct the ones that you can.

He challenged job-seekers to ask themselves these four questions:

  1. What are you known for?
  2. What do you want to be known for?
  3. What are you good at?
  4. What do you love?

In the connected world in which we live, traditional job hunting skills and habits will no longer separate you from the rest of the “pile”. You must be different and creative to stand out, but above all be helpful, be kind and always be positive.

Originally published on Yahoo!

Inflatable Gorillas vs. Social Media

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The question I hear asked the most by dealers when talking to them about social media is “What’s the ROI? How do I measure that?” The problem with getting a buy-in from them is that they want to see a straight line between a Facebook post or tweet and a sale. Sometimes that’s possible but most of the time, it isn’t.

gorilla

My rebuttal is, “What’s the ROI on the inflatable gorilla on the roof? How do you measure that? Do you have a source in your CRM for “Gorilla” similar to the infamous “Billboard” one you have?”

Inevitably, they can’t answer that question. Funny thing is that even Google got into the “gorilla” game when they posted an ad for PPC advertising stating that Google Adwords would have “tons of customers headed your way” and implying that the gorilla would not (which they were promptly sued for by the makers of inflatable gorillas).

googlegorilla

The most common thought is that the giant inflatable gorilla gets people’s attention (just like the weekend tradition of “ballooning” the cars. Nobody that I ever know of said that they stopped at a dealership and bought a car because they saw a gorilla on the roof. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I’ve seen many comments by consumers that say inflatable gorillas are insulting to them. Some have even said that they are an indicator of an “old-school” dealership and would avoid these dealers at all cost.

Social media, on the other hand, when done properly, can increase customer loyalty, satisfaction and referrals through engagement with your customers. There are TONS of examples of this result from HUGE companies (Ford, Southwest Airlines, etc.). I’ve NEVER heard a customer say those things about a dealership using social media (with the exception of dealers that spam their customers with inventory).

Let’s assume that you can’t track ROI on social media (which is incorrect) and that you can’t track it on an inflatable gorilla, which end of the spectrum would you rather be on?

There’s only one way I could see an inflatable gorilla actually working and that’s if it can do this:

….jump off the roof and physically drag customers in.

So, if you’re willing to put an inflatable gorilla on your roof, balloon-up your lot every weekend, have a “hot-dog food fest” or any of the other things that surely have people (presumably) slamming on their brakes on the freeway to come to your dealership and buy a car, then why wouldn’t you have a presence on social media whether you can measure it’s ROI or not?

What do you think of giant inflatable gorillas on car dealerships?

Buffer: What It Is and Why You Want It

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When I went to BlogWorld LA, I met up with a friend of mine, James Stayton. As I’m walking around googly-eyed at the likes of Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, etc., he jumps when he sees this one guy with a “Buffer” shirt on. We go over and James starts telling this guy how much he loves Buffer and about how much he likes the new features, etc. I had never heard of Buffer so I asked the guy (who turned out to be a co-founder, Leo Wid) to show me how it worked. I signed up (as it’s free) and told him I’d check it out. At the time, the Facebook posting was still in beta, (he let me in on the very tail of that) but now, I believe, it’s live for anyone who signs up.

So, what is Buffer?

Buffer is an easy service that allows you to share information without overwhelming your networks (the networks in this article I’m referring to are Twitter and Facebook). How it does this is that they use an algorithm that determines what the best times of the day (ie. most trafficked and used) are and it schedules them for those times automatically. It also “buffers” your posts so that you aren’t sending a ton out at once and overwhelming your followers/friends. It will determine how many you should be posting and automatically schedule them for when they are most likely to be read or clicked through and it will space them out in time for you also. There is also a “Post Now” button if you don’t want to send it later.

I’ve been (and I am) a Hootsuite Pro user for a long time. I love Hootsuite but it is a pain to schedule tweets with any kind of strategy involved. I still use Hootsuite but now I use Buffer as a compliment to it so that I can share great content without having to even THINK about when I should tweet or post something and how much is too much, etc.

…and one of my FAVORITE parts of Buffer is that it allows me to use my custom URL shortener automatically! You just plug in your shortener information (in this case, I use bit.ly for my shortener –  arni.es) and it automatically uses YOUR shortener for any websites you add to your buffer. Hootsuite charges $50 per month if you want this feature!

Anyways, I don’t get this excited about a new service (God knows there are plenty of them popping up all the time.) but this one has me pumped. I’ve been using it now for a couple of weeks and I love it.

A dealership (or any business) could use this to pre-load a week’s worth of content very easily then sit back and sell some cars!

Check it out , sign up and send your first tweet by clicking HERE!

Can Your Dealership Be Too Social?

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I hope dealerships realize that a social media presence is necessary these days. Hopefully, there is someone at your dealership handling this. More likely than not, this task has been assigned to someone which this is NOT their primary responsibility.

That being said, is there a thing as being “too social”?

There are many social networks out there and new ones popping up everyday. In a perfect world, dealers would have a dedicated person that could keep up with and manage them all by posting new content (preferably original) via blogs and all the social networks with their listening ears on. Most dealers, however, don’t have the budget for this type of person. It’s hard enough for ME to keep up with them all much less to ask a dealer to.

Would it be better if a dealer picked a few and concentrated on being really good at those instead of spreading themselves so thin that they aren’t managing or maintaining an active presence on them all? It’s not enough just to have a Facebook page or G+ page or Twitter account, you have to engage and keep fresh content on it.. nurture it.

Right now we have Facebook, Twitter, G+, Google Places, LinkedIn, YouTube, … and the list goes on. Now Microsoft is about to enter the game with Microsoft Socl.. yet another social network to maintain. Right now, there are 205 websites listed on Wikipedia as “social networking sites” (Yes, I counted them). You can’t effectively manage all of them (and most of them wouldn’t apply either) but you do still have to figure in managing your online reputation through sites like Yelp, DealerRater, etc as well as the location-based services out there like Foursquare.. Oh, and don’t forget about blogging!

It’s exhausting to think about, isn’t it? I promise it’s just as exhausting to actually do.

My advice: If you don’t have (or can’t afford, or don’t want to afford) a person that can actually manage this full-time, pick a few sites mixing up social, reputation management, location-based and a blog… and be good at them.

Bacon + Klout = Winning!

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Wait, bacon? What does yummy bacon have to do with Klout?

For those who don’t know, Klout is a service which supposedly measure a person’s influence on social media. Some have equated it to a social media “credit score”, if you will. Klout has this super-secret, if-we-told-you-we’d-have-to-kill-you algorithm which they use to monitor a person’s connected social media accounts (or public one’s if they don’t have any connected, but we’ll get to that in a minute.) Klout seems to be an increasingly polarizing topic amongst both people I know and blog articles I read.

Take for example, this one which was re-published by CNNMoney and written by John Scalzi who asserts why “Klout scores are possibly evil”, in which he states that “Klout exists to turn the entire Internet into a high school cafeteria, in which everyone is defined by the table at which they sit. And there you are, standing in the middle of the room with your lunch tray, looking for a seat, hoping to ingratiate yourself with the cool kids, trying desperately not to get funneled to the table in the corner where the kids with scoliosis braces and D&D manuals sit.” (It really is a hilarious read.)

Or this one, by Sharon Hayes, titles “10 Reasons Why I Opted Out of Klout”, In which she lists out the many reasons she chose to opt-out of their database…

I have friends who obsess about their Klout scores and I have friends who think Klout is a crock and a complete waste of time.

Here’s my take. I look at, and use Klout in 3 ways. Two of the ways are simple amusement and one is a business tool.

1. The primary way in which I use Klout is as a game, of sorts. When you give someone a +K on a topic (which is saying they influence you on that topic), it gives you the opportunity to tweet out the gift. The fun part comes in where you can alter the tweet so that instead of saying, “I gave @arnoldtijerina a +K about the Auto Industry on @klout..”, you can modify it to say “I gave @arnoldtijerina a +K about being the super-awesome guy that he is on @klout..” (which I am, thank you). I use this “modifying tweets” in 2 ways. The first is acknowledging people in a positive, reinforcing way (as shown above) and then there is a group of us that like to modify them in a…well, more fun way.. like “I gave @arnoldtijerina a +K for knowing when to hold them and when to fold them on @klout..” Either way, it’s fun and funny.

2. Klout Perks. This is a program in which Klout teams up with companies to offer freebies to influencers. I’ve received some cool freebies through this program so, if for no other reason, free stuff is a good reason in my book to keep your Klout score high.

3. Now, here is where people get polarized. Do I think Klout accurately measures a person’s influence? Sort of. While I know that there are topics in which I am not influential (uh.. like “bacon”.. yes, this is a REAL topic on Klout that I, apparently have some influence in, according to them. The real scoop is that it’s fun to give your friends +K in oddball topics.), I do believe that you can utilize Klout to assist in identifying influencers. Basically, if I were a business and I was looking to leverage my influencers to help spread the word about my service/product and if I were to take all of my Twitter followers and try to figure out which ones are active and influential in social media, it would take 1) time I don’t have and 2) the odds of actually pegging a true influencer would be low. Now, same scenario but I take all my Twitter followers with Klout scores above 50 and target them. While not everyone I target will be an influencer, I have a much higher probability of actually identifying influencers and it took me way less time.

The thing that seems to irk the most people is that Klout is an opt-out service. What that means is that if you have public social media accounts (like Twitter), Klout will have a profile on you whether you’ve signed up for their service or not. If you don’t want one, until recently, you were SOL but now they have created an option in which you can delete your profile. Do I agree with this? Meh. I don’t care. I kind of look at it like if you put it out there publicly, you can’t really get mad when someone monetizes that information. C’mon folks, Klout is a business. They make money by finding and selling lists of influencers to other companies.

However, the one thing that I do know, as Sharon Hayes pointed out in the blog article I referenced earlier in this post, is that as employers give a person’s Klout score more weight and use it in hiring decisions, you better start paying attention. Whether that’s by making sure you have a good score or deleting your profile altogether, you need to act.

As stupid as you may believe it to be I’m fairly confident that you don’t want it to affect your ability to get hired. You may not care what your credit score is either, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t.

Buy Here ‘Cause They Suck

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Most dealerships and businesses in general know that it’s bad practice to bad-mouth your competition. That being said, I know of and have heard plenty of salespeople and managers using their online reviews to help close a deal by comparing them to their competitors online reviews. This practice is similar if not exactly the same. You are leveraging negative comments about your competitor left by other people (who you are representing as real – we all know fake reviews exist) to your positive reviews (you aren’t really showing people any negative reviews about your dealership, are you?) in an effort to “sell” yourself and your dealership. So, while this isn’t talking bad about your competitor directly, it is indirectly, and what you say can now get you in some deep water.

In a precendent setting ruling, an Alabama car dealership has been awarded $7.5 million dollars due to slanderous comments made during a close to consumers by both the salesperson and sales manager. Apparentley, the dealership’s competitor was owned by an Iranian-born but naturalized U.S. citizen. The sales manager told at least one couple while attempting to close a deal that the competitor was “helping fund insurgents there and is also laundering money for them.” The salesperson was also accused of telling the same couple that the dealer was “funneling money back to his family and other terrorists…” and that he has a “brother over there and what you’re doing is helping kill my brother.” It is also reported that the competitor was frequently referred to as “Taliban Toyota”.

The jury awarded the Alabama dealer  $2.5 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages after deliberating for 3 hours.

While this is certainly an extreme example, it bears watching where the “line” is. This had more to do with a leveraging of race, stereotypes and bigotry but there’s no telling what future lawsuits outcomes would be utilizing this ruling as precedent.

I find it astonishing that, it appears, the sales manager, at least, is still employed at the dealership based on the statement that neither of them were available for comment per a “dealership spokesman”.

I think there are now 7.5 million reasons to add prohibiting the “bad-mouthing of your competitor” to your employee handbook. 

Consumers Now Have the Ability to Block Your GoogleAds

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Google announced yesterday via its blog, that it had instituted a feature in Google search and GMail ad transparency. This change will give consumers the ability to see why ads are being delivered (ie. what previous searches triggered the ads) as well as the ability to block ads from a particular company/advertiser. This option is available for all Google Ads delivered to a consumer.

Is it a cause for concern? Probably not as I believe a low percentage of people will actually utilize this feature, but it is certainly something you need to be aware of. I would equate this to “hiding” a company from your News Feed on Facebook, in a sense.

Below is an example of what a consumer would see should they choose to go into the “Ads Preferences Manager”.

Do you think this will have any impact on your ability to target consumers or is this a non-factor?

Consumers Want Video Walk-Arounds. Here’s Proof!

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In my days with HomeNet Automotive, a new feature was released that allowed our customers to upload live video into their inventory for distribution to the third-party websites that would allow it.

Being in sales, I wanted to have a real video in which I could show potential clients the possibilities and an actual example of what one would look like so I enlisted help from a friend of mine who’s a GM at a nearby dealer group to allow me to video one of his employees doing a walk-around.
After filming it, I used it here and there when showing a demo of IOL Pro, HomeNet’s core inventory management software. After I left HomeNet Automotive, I promptly forgot about it.
Recently, I came across it in my YouTube video list and was ASTONISHED to see that it had almost 12,000 views in about 21 months! That’s an average of 570 views per month! This is without ANY exposure or publicity whatsoever. It was not on a blog post or anywhere. I can only guess that these 12,000 people came across this video via keyword searches either within YouTube or via a Google search. I did a quick keyword search and was astonished to see that my non-distributed or promoted video ranked 2nd in Google organic search results!
venza

Imagine if this video had actually been a part of that dealer’s actual inventory on their website as well as all the third-party sites. Given that this was a new vehicle, it could have been added to all of the listings for this model and year vehicle in their inventory. They could DOMINATE Google searches for their brands.

The proof is in the pudding. I highly doubt the people watching these videos decided randomly to watch a video walk-around of a Toyota Venza. It’s more likely that these were consumer’s interested in that vehicle.

This is advertising GOLD and cost them absolutely nothing.

If you want to watch it, here’s the video:

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