Matt Watson of VinSolutions

“Web 2.0” is a buzzword used all over the place these days. So what does it mean? Web 2.0 actually means a lot of different things and it means different things to different people. This is the first of a multi-part series attempting to define Web 2.0. Follow my blog at
http://www.drivingsales.com/blog/mwatson/ for future posts.

Part 1 - “We’re Talking Back”

One definition of Web 2.0 is the ability for everyday people to change the Internet.

A few years ago the Internet was mostly created by businesses for shopping, news, travel, research, forums and other important things. The Internet was largely a “read only” collection of information where everyday people had no input.

Today, a very large percentage of the content on the Internet was created by everyday people. Wikipedia, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and dozens of other websites are all based on content created by every day people. We now have the ability to create our own web pages (ex. MySpace & blogs) and make our mark on the Internet. You could say that Web 2.0 gave us our freedom of speech online.

So how did we get here? Well… it didn’t happen over night.

In 1996 web communities like Geocities became common. They allowed users to create their own websites. By the end of 1997 Geocities had 1 million users and was the 5th most popular website on the Internet. Geocities was eventually purchased by Yahoo and still lives on today as a simply way to create your own website, including a blog.

Blogs aren’t really that new either. A web blog, as a concept of online commentary or online diaries started in 1993. Although the term “blog” didn’t come around until 1999. However, blogging didn’t become mainstream until 2004. I created my first blog in 2003… and it still exists today.

Web 2.0 can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To me, one of the things it means is we have the ability to create the content of the Internet.

We’re Talking Back.

Matt Watson

Chief Technical Officer

http://www.VinSolutions.com

Anyone who uses a CRM system that prints on plain paper via a laser printer can probably already create digital documents today. Most people probably just don’t know how to.

If you’re using pre-printed forms, then you can’t create digital docs from those of course. (As a side note, you might consider switching to forms printed via a laser printer to save yourself some money.)

So how do you use your current CRM to create "digital documents" you can email to a customer?

Easily! If you can print the form, you can create a digital copy. If your CRM exports the forms to a PDF to print, well then simply click the save button and email the files. If not, then you can install a utility like Adobe (not reader edition) or dopdf (there are other products like this) to print to a PDF that can then be saved and emailed.

So the key is… any document that can be printed on a laser printer can be printed to a PDF and emailed, even if it isn’t a PDF (using programs like Adobe, MS Office, dopdf and others). Now of course that involves more steps than maybe just a "email to customer" button.

Of course there are some CRM vendors that have the nifty "email to customer" functionality built in. I have also seen some companies that tout "digital documents" as a product. To me it just seems like a basic ILM/CRM/Desking function, not really a product in itself… maybe I’m wrong on that point?

You could also use the email functionality to email the documents to someone within the dealership or to a 3rd party vendor. Like emailing a book out sheet to the bank, or a desk manager emailing a salesperson a purchase proposal.

Matt Watson
VinSolutions

Technorati Tags: automotive, crm, documents

The problem with most software in the automotive industry is the lack of integration between products. Products that if used together, could do very intelligent things.

Dealers purchase what I call “singular” solutions from vendors that only do one thing and doesn’t integrate with anything else.

I hear it from managers and salespeople all the time. “We have all these different passwords to get into different systems just so we can sell a car. Don’t get me wrong, we need all of these systems, we just wish it could be easier. We login to the CRM to add a customer, than login to our trade appraisal system, then login to another system to desk a deal, then another to pull credit, it just doesn’t stop.”

Think about your website and CRM for a second. Every dealer wants the pictures of their salespeople and managers on their website. Well, most dealers put those pictures in their CRM to email in the signature of their emails.

Wouldn’t it be nice to add salespeople to your CRM and have them instantly show up on your website? What is one of the first things you do when you hire a new salesperson? Give them a login to the CRM so they can start adding customers. Wouldn’t it be nice if they would then show up on the website as soon as you did that? And what is one of the first things you do when a salesperson leaves? Transfer the customer and take them out of the CRM. Wouldn’t it be great if once you did that, they didn’t show up on your website?

Now you could hire and fire people and your website is always up to date. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen dealer websites with names and phone numbers on them of people who don’t work there anymore…

Are you using a separate ILM and CRM system?

What happens when your showroom lead goes home and submits an Internet lead? What happens when your Internet lead decides to drive up to the lot without scheduling an appointment? Are your salespeople always fighting over skating? If you were using one good system, the Internet and showroom salespeople could be guarded from skating each other.

Don’t even get me started on how much harder it is to do proper reporting and management across separate ILM/CRM systems.

Let’s think about your inventory integration

Do you have all the pictures, vehicle options, and comments for your vehicles in your CRM? Sure would make it easier to sell and email vehicle details to your customers.

If your inventory management system was integrated with your CRM and website, you could know how many leads and website hits you’ve received on every vehicle in inventory.

OK, so maybe you’re not getting a lot of interest on a specific vehicle?

Well, if the same system had an integrated market pricing tool, you could quickly see how your price compares to vehicles exactly like yours available for sale in your area. You could also book out your vehicle with NADA, KBB, or Black book. You could quickly fix the pricing problem.

Think about that for a second… Instantly you could jump from seeing the vehicle isn’t getting any interest to fixing the problem in the same program.

Here are some questions to think about

1. What other unique functionality could you gain by having more integrated solutions?

2. How much easier would your life be if you had fewer vendors to deal with?

3. How much money could you save by having fewer vendors to deal with?

Matt Watson
Chief Technical Officer
VinSolutions

Technorati Tags: dealership software

Users can now customize their own search results on Google. Select what they think was most relevant and remove listings they thought weren’t useful. I can only imagine how google will track and use this in their ranking algorithms. If more people vote your listing up then down and that ratio is more positive compared to other listings, you may find your listing above everyone else in the near future.

Copied from Google’s blog post:

Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? Maybe you’re an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it’s not there at all and you’d like to add it. Or maybe you’d like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. Starting today you can do all this and tailor Google search results to best meet your needs.

Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.

The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link.

View the full article from Google here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html

Since 1954, American automobile manufacturers have used a vehicle identification number (V.I.N.) to describe and identify motor vehicles. The early VINs came in a wide array of configurations and variations, depending on the individual manufacturer. Beginning with model year (MY)1981, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration required that all over-the-road-vehicles sold must contain a 17-character VIN. This standard established a fixed VIN format.

So let’s dissect a VIN

The first 3 digits define the manufacturer. The first of these digits is usually the country of origin. For example, all VINs that start with J are producted in Japan and those that stat with W are Germany. Characters 4 through 8 are specific to that manufacturer’s model for a given model year. The 9th digit is a check digit. VINs can actually be validated through a mathematical formula to ensure they are valid. The 10th digit is a year. For example, an 8 is for 2008, 7 is for 2007 The 11th digit is for the plant that manufactured the vehicle, in coordination with the manufacturer The remaining 12th through 17th digits are more or less the serial number of that particular vehicle for the specified make/model as defined by the VIN.

So how does it work?

VIN decoding works based off "VIN prefixes" or "Squish VINs" which are basically the first 11 digits of the VIN less the 9th digit which is a check digit. VIN Decoding providers have large databases of all the VIN Prefixes available and the vehicle data that links to them, thus providing a "VIN Decoder" or "VIN Exploder". There are about tens of thousands of unique combinations of VIN prefixes from 1981 to today.

So what can be decoded?

The year, make, model, engine, vehicle type and vehicle bodystyle can be decoded about 99% of the time. In some rare instances the year has been half model years or other goofy things. For example, the 2009 Kia Borrego actually has an 8 (2008) for the year digit but it is a 2009 model!

Can you decode the trim level?

Yes, but only about 30% of the time.

Can you decode the Transmission?

Yes, but only about 25% of the time

Can you decode the Drive Line Type? (4WD, AWD, etc)

Yes, about 80% of the time

Can you decode colors?

Nope, unless it is an Econoline van and everyone of them is probably white…

For new cars a lot of dealers input the manufacturers model code and paint/option color codes in the DMS. These codes can be used in combinationo with VIN decoding to decode trim levels more often and lookup the manufacturer color names.

For some reason people always think VinSolutions is a VIN decoding company… we aren’t.

See http://vinpower.com/VINInformation.aspx for more information and contact ESP Data Solutions about VINPOWER if you need a VIN Decoder for your automotive software.

At VinSolutions we use two VIN decoders. VINPOWER for basic VIN decoding since they also cover motorcycles, heavy trucks and other vehicles, and AutoData for our extended vehicle data and as a backup to VINPOWER. We actually apply a lot of custom rules to the data to perfect it for our dealers.

What is Video SEO?
Google ranks video content from YouTube, AOL and others very high in their rankings. By posting videos on YouTube, you can easily gain additional exposure for your dealership, at NO COST!

How about some examples?
Search Google for "2009 Buick LaCrosse Roxboro". The top 6 rankings are all from a video posted on YouTube that was the re-published to additional websites by YouTube as well.
Search Google for "2004 Dodge Durango Indianapolis". Top ranking is a YouTube video on Aol Autos.
You can use your pre-owned inventory to compete for dozens of keywords that you would normally not be able to compete for.

So how do I do it?
Sign up for a free Youtube account and start uploading videos. The trick though comes with the proper titles, descriptions, and keywords of your videos. (VinSolutions software will automatically optimize that for you.). You can record digital video with most any snapshot or video camera these days.

What is the easiest way to take videos of vehicles?
VinSolutions VinCamera is the only solution available to easily capture videos and upload them to the Internet. Simple select the stock # within the camera’s software and take your video. Connect it to your PC and let our software take care of the tedious resizing & uploading.

What else can I do with videos?
VinSolutions can also help you send your videos to your website, Cars.com, AutoTrader.com and more. Upload videos of your staff, dealership, TV commercials and more. Via our ILM and CRM, you can also easily email these videos to your prospects.

Technorati Tags: inventory, seo, video

Microsoft announced today (October 13th) that Silverlight 2.0 would be officially released to the world tomorrow (October 14th).

Take a minute tomorrow and visit http://www.silverlight.net to install it!

Fore more information check out my last post:

http://www.drivingsales.com/blog/mwatson/2008/10/10/silverlight-the-next-generation-of-automotive-software/

In the next 60 days we will be releasing major enhanacements to our automotive CRM system that were developed in Silverlight from the ground up to take advantage of what it can do.

Technorati Tags: automotive, crm, silverlight

For those of you who have never heard of Silverlight, you should consider taking a few minutes to learn a little about it. Silverlight will be on websites everywhere in the near future.

Silverlight is a new technology from Microsoft. Silverlight is a next generation enterprise platform for creating "rich internet applications". In many ways, Silverlight is similar to Adobe Flash which is used on a lot of websites today. The big difference between Silverlight and Flash is the underlying development tools and technology used to develop the software. Silverlight has superior development tools for creating enterprise applications. Silverlight is a small browser plug-in that has be installed on your computer like Flash. 

So will Silverlight replace Flash? In the long run it could, but in the short term Silverlight will find its home primarily in online software applications. Over time Silverlight will make its way to more universal consumer uses once it becomes more common place for the average consumer to have it installed on their computer. Silverlight does work with Internet Explorer, FireFox, and Safari. It also works on both Windows PCs and Macs! You can probably expect Silverlight to be bundled with Internet Explorer 8 and the next version of Microsoft Windows. It is also showing up as an optional install in windows updates.

How about some examples?

Kelley Blue Book has a cool tool on their website that uses Silverlight:
http://www.kbb.com/kbb/PerfectCarFinder/PhotoEdition.aspx

There are a lot of cool Silverlight examples on this website:
http://silverlight.net/showcase/

So where can you learn more?

http://www.silverlight.net
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlight

VinSolutions is actively creating software with Silverlight as we continue to push the envelope for automotive software.

Technorati Tags: automotive software, silverlight

Digital Dealer in Dallas was yet again another huge success for VinSolutions

.
We heard a lot of positive feedback from dealers about the diverse training sessions they attended. Many of the dealers we met with had been to previous Digital Dealer shows. A testimate to the value the dealers find in attending the shows.

It is great to have the opportunity to meet with a large group of our existings customers twice a year at the Digital Dealer shows. It gives us a chance to talk to them about what they love about our software, and things they would like to see us improve in the future. Heck, a lot of our customers came by and got some free training at the show on our products!

Digital Dealer provides us a great opportunity to showcase our Automotive CRM, inventory management, and custom dealer websites to dealerships from all over the country. VinSolutions has attended all 5 of the Digital Dealer shows and plans on attending #6 in Las Vegas next spring.

Technorati Tags: automotive, crm, vinsolutions

I think dealers and website companies seem to put too much focus on optimizing only the dealer’s home page and not the rest of the pages on their website.

Some dealers load up their home page and make it sort of ugly just to add keywords and content to it. What about just putting all that content on an "About Us" page that says what you do? That page will get indexed as well.

For example, search "deery brothers" on Google and you’ll notice their home page is #1, but #2 is their "About Us" page which is full of great content, along with their home page.
http://www.deerybrothers.com/AboutUs-MasterPage.aspx

For a non dealer website example, search google for "dealer crm" and http://www.VinSolutions.com/crm.aspx comes up #2. Notice it doesn’t link to our home page… Actually, our home page has no text at all on it! It doesn’t need to… our website isn’t a ONE PAGE website.

I guess my only point is, don’t be stuck in the mindset that your home page is your only web page. You should optimize your home page, but your entire website should be full of optimized content. I would recommend creating as many custom pages as you can to add additional content. Also be sure to customize your page titles and meta tags on all your pages, not just your home page.