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Social Media Success Video If car dealers thought they needed to worry about getting negative reviews before, now there’s something else to fear - the paid review.
This screenshot was taken from Mechanical Turk, a site that specializes in letting businesses “outsource” mundane activities for pennies.
Worried now? You should be. Here is a respected site that is PAYING people to review your dealership. What are the people going to write? It doesn’t matter. The idea is to get enough unique content on the pages to help them to rank for your dealership name.
This ties in well with next week’s show (9am PST, 12pm EDT every Wednesday) about “Controlling Google Page 1 for your Dealership Name“. More than ever, people are checking businesses, including car dealers, to find out what others are saying about you. They are looking for reviews, social media buzz, and anything that they can use to determine whether or not to call on you for their next purchase.
Is it right that you may lose a potential sale based upon a review that some random person who likely never visited your dealership writes?
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Read more about Car Dealer Internet Marketing on this blog.
Tags: car dealer reviews
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kurt Sedgwick, kman120. kman120 said: RT @tweetmeme People Encouraged to Review Dealers… For Profit « Car Dealer Internet Marketing - DrivingSales http://retwt.me/1hhP9 [...]
Jim,
Starting December 2009, there are new laws that go in effect for people who post reviews. The issue of “policing” comes into question, but the letter of the law states that anyone who is compensation to place a review, must disclose that fact on the review page.
This brings up a good point for car dealers who are actively engaging their own customers to post reviews. DO NOT give them a free oil change, a free car wash or a discount coupon to write a review.
If you do that after December 1st and they don’t disclose that, your competitors can have a field day making your dealership the first case for a FTC lawsuit.
See document: http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf
Brian,
The problem isn’t with the law. It’s against the law to download movies, songs, or software, yet it’s the 4th most performed activity on the Internet.
More importantly, sites like Mechanical Turk are paying $.05-$.15 for the reviews. Their target market is overseas. The damage that can be done between now and December is huge. What happens beyond that behind the scenes will still be damaging.
Indeed….The IRM game will be interesting in the next year.
Good thing I don’t have anything else to worry about…
[...] Conversely the review site ranking strategy would be very easy for your competitors to take advantage of. With just a little bit of link building an aggressive competitor could have negative reviews optimized for your name. Negative review sites have more authority, more people will link to negative information than positive. Links to these negative review can be bought really cheap. Which gives these negative reviews more search engine relevance than hundreds of positive reviews. Some review sites even participate in buying fake reviews so they can optimize for your name. Jim Rucker did an article about it where http://www.lotpro.com is participating in this scheme. [...]