Yesterday's announcement about Pinterest's new product pages and feature enhancements has me all excited about this platform. This is clearly a sign of a new direction in web design, eCommerce models and especially mobile content creation and consumption. Bottom line, I love Pinterest and you should too. Read post

Penguin 2.0 has been rumored to be on the brink of release for a while now. Well it’s finally confirmed here by none other than Matt Cutts himself. We all know that it’s only a matter of time before all of the fear mongers start posting jargon-filled posts meant to scare you into paying for protection. Well I thought I’d attempt to beat them to the punch. Here’s what you need to know:   Original content is more important than ever. A big part of the original penguin and what’s being revised in 2.0 is how links are being built. Great content builds natural links. Period. If you are building links in any other way you are at risk of this and future spam updates. I know content can seem cumbersome but it’s not as bad as you think… Get signed up with webmaster tools! A great and much less ‘scary’ update will be the enhanced messaging through webmaster tools. If your site gets hacked, hit by this update or if any significant e...Read post

The Truth About Your Data almost always begins with contracts.   I know that dealers are often unaware of the full content and ramifications of vendor and services contracts, and that's why the vendor's sales people make a visit and explain the service delivered by the contract.  To sell you on the value.  And the dealer applies his or her trust of the vendor, weighs the value of the vendor's service, and when he or she buys then makes that decision believing the description matches the service.   The problem can come for the dealer when, in the contract, as I put it, "The Large Print Giveth and The Fine Print Taketh Away".  And that can happen with your data, where it goes, and to what purposes it is put. For example, your vehicle inventory can be syndicated to whatever additional partner websites you allowed in your contracts with any vendor handling your inventory information--and you often don't kno...Read post

by Kaitlyn Bender, Reputation Management Specialist By this point, we all know that the Google+ platform is ever-changing. So last week's updates should come as no surprise. We've done our best to break down the recent changes and highlight the most important features that will affect your dealership's third party business listing.Read post

Pinterest is making some radical changes with regards to how their products are displayed and all of the information consumers need about them as well. They have clearly proven their image based grid layout is a huge favorite with consumers - page views, time spent on site, sharing and conversions leave everyone elese in the dust. Read post

Understanding tomorrow's car buyers and their behaviors is becoming increasingly easier by simply diving into their activities and habits. Smartphone adoption is at an incredible penetration level currently with 25% of teens saying they access the Internet mostly from their phones This penetration will continue to grow. Read post

What is important to your business when using social networks? Is a question many companies should be asking every time they log onto their social sites, such as Facebook or Twitter. Understanding what the purpose is for using these sites is vital in knowing the types of content your business will produce and share on them, as well as, what your company hopes to gain from using them. For most businesses, the answer would be to connect, engage, and build reciprocal relationships with the right people, but finding the right people for your business is not always easy and usually takes a lot of time and effort to accomplish. Many companies have begun using sites that measure social influence, such as, Klout and Kred to discover their best customers and brand evangelists; however, besides a Klout or Kred score there isn’t much else to go on. Little Bird, currently in private Beta, offers much more than the current social influence measuring sites, in that it analyzes data and ...Read post

Take a look at those familiar little icons in the top right corner of the screenshot above. Four of the primary social media sites’ logos adorn a prominent position on the homepage. It’s not an uncommon sight. Some put them at the top. Other put them at the bottom. Some make them large and prominent. Others make them small and subtle. One way or another, most dealerships put them somewhere. They do it for a reason. The reason is presence. We’ve all heard about the potential of social media but few local businesses and car dealers in particular have found the level of success that they would like. Finding that success is not the topic of this particular article (important though it is). Instead, we’re going to gain an understanding of the importance of social media outside of the obvious. We all know that Facebook, Twitter, and the other networks have the potential to drive business when done right. Some would say that the effort and cost are too high, that...Read post