Video, video, everywhere vehicle video.

Yes, this is another rant about how your dealership needs video of every vehicle on your website but it may not take the traditional spin. Stay with me, I've got a new idea for vehicle video that you may not have thought about.

As a car dealership you have a handful of vendors knocking at your door delivering vehicle video products complete with human voice overs, flashy graphics and a few other bells and whistles. These videos of your vehicles are sent to your website vendor (hopefully Dealer HD) daily where they automatically add these videos to the correct vehicle in your inventory. All of this is great but what if you don't need all the bells and whistles? What if you're looking to cut costs at your dealership? Either way, you still need vehicle video.

You've got amazing (free) video options.

Whether you're looking for cost-effective video production, an alternative method to create vehicle videos or looking to s

Information travels fast. As soon as news happens CNN.com has it on their home page, RSS news aggregators have delivered the content to subscribers, hundreds have written blog posts, it has a Facebook group, the footage is on YouTube, people are having a conversation about it on Twitter and Google, MSN and Yahoo! have indexed it for the world to discover. All of this happened while you were designing you newsletter and everything you were going to say has already been around the world. The simple fact is, Web 2.0 moves much faster than you. Today's information is instant. Social Media helps connect us and distribute information faster and in new ways. If you're thinking about sending out a newsletter, consider the following alternatives:

Create a Facebook Group: By creating a Facebook group you allow people that are interested in your dealership to join your group. Facebook groups are great places to add photos, introduce new staff members, upload video of new vehicles and answer qu...

We've all received one. It's that email that arrives in record time after I've forgotten my password or when I've ordered something online that assures me that my purchase will be here soon. The Auto-response has become viewed as a modern day receipt, instantly delivered and dynamically generated. In most cases, the response is originated from your CRM or website provider when a action is performed but that doesn't mean it has to sound like it was generated by a computer.
We should be looking at Auto-responders as the first step to building a long-standing relationship with our customers. After all, this is the first message you are sending from your dealership. It is possible to create an auto-responder that is dynamic and "feels" like it's a hand typed response. By creating custom Auto-responses for each type of lead, you can produce well written, meaningful responses that your customer is expecting.

Make it personal. You are sending an Auto-responder to a person who has willingl...

The page view on your analytic reports is useless.
There seems to be a trend on the rise among Internet Managers at dealerships and other web professionals that look to the Page View number on their analytic reports as a measurement of success or the health of a website. All that number means is that someone viewed a page on your website.
When you really stop to think about it, web pages get viewed for all sorts of reasons. Pages on your website could have been reached on accident. They could have meant to click the Parts link and accidentally clicked Service. Your report shows that page was viewed, but the visitor made a mistake. Maybe someone visited the Service area of your website and was looking for your hours of operation but didn't find it, so they clicked and clicked a few more pages until they found the information they were looking for. The visitor viewed many pages to get to the information they were looking for. Your page view report indicates this as well. Because a page...

With instant messaging, social networking, and blogging more popular than ever, now is the time your dealership needs to start looking to social media and start attracting customers to your online inventory with Social Bookmarking.
Social Bookmarking is a system that allows visitors to your website to save web pages they want to remember or share. This concept is very similar to using the Bookmark feature in your favorite browser except the bookmarked pages in a social system can be public and shared with an entire online community.
So why should your dealership care? Imagine this:

Scenario One: A visitor to your website is browsing your online inventory at work and found a vehicle that they may like more information about so they save the page in their bookmarks of their default work browser. That night when they come home they have a few minutes and would like to follow up and possibly send you a lead letting you know they would like to come in to see the vehicle. They go back t...