So...  I was scrolling past my News Feed in Facebook and noticed a Suggested Post that looked interesting. The post was from a company called “Automatic” and the text of the ad was:

I had to click.

The ad took me to http://www.automatic.com. After watching the video, I was excited. Not excited enough to shell out $100 but excited nonetheless.

“Someone finally found a useful application for the car’s data port!” I said.

Automatic touts, “Your Car and Smartphone, Connected”. By connecting the Automatic Link to your cars data port and downloading the iPhone app (Android coming soon), your phone becomes an “auto assistant” which provides a slew of useful features such as:

• Learning your driving style to optimize fuel economy.

• Provides audible feedback when you accelerate too quickly.

• Tracks fill-ups & local gas prices

• Displays actual MPG for all trips.

Each of these contribute to your “Drive Score” which helps you improve your driving habits and optimize for fuel efficiency. It even remembers where you parked automatically (in case you forget).

What’s even more interesting, is that Automatic is starting to encroach on the OEM space with features such as Crash Alert being an alternative to the lack-luster OnStar-like services. Automatic also helps decode the service miner codes by providing possible solutions and a link to find nearby mechanics. Even better, you can reset the codes right from your smartphone. Additionally, Automatic being it's own platform that plugs into existing OEM frameworks, they could level features that otherwise might be brand-dependent.

Now the question is, why the hell are OEM’s ignoring these advancements? To be perfectly honest, I’m glad it was a 3rd party. Small companies are the ones that innovate. The auto industry needs fresh, young companies to keep moving forward.

The features Automatic brings to the table are nice but I think this is just the start of something great. I hope to see more exciting things from them in the future (maybe even an API to give 3rd party add-ons).

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 supplement existing vehicle videos on your dealership's website I've got a little secret for you... Animoto. Animoto's tag line is "the end of slideshows" and once you see a sample, you'll agree with them. Animoto takes the photos of your vehicle and produces amazing high-quality movies. I'm convinced that it doesn't matter what content you throw at Animoto, the end result will be a high-end video that you'll be proud to showcase on your dealership website. Check out a few samples at the Animoto showcase.

The process is extremely simple.

1. Create a FREE account.
2. Upload your vehicle photos.
3. Choose your music.
4. Title your video and give it a description.
5. Render your video.

Animoto will start rendering your vehicle video and send you an email when it's ready. The process takes about 10 minutes or so depending on the amount of photos you used to create your masterpiece. Once completed your vehicle video will be available on the Animoto website where you can view, invite friends, share (on facebook, twitter and upload to youTube) or download a web quality version. The download link makes it all worth the price... wait, let's talk about that for a minute.

You pay for what you get.

For Personal use, Aminoto allows you to create an unlimited number 30 second videos for free. If you're looking for videos a bit longer than 30 seconds you'll want to opt for the $30 per year, All-Access Pass.

What you're dealership really needs to do is purchase the Pro package for $249.00 (per year). This gives you a business license and allows you to create an unlimited number of videos of any length for your dealer website. These vehicle videos can also be white-labeled, which strips the Animoto logo off of each video and replaces it with your dealership's logo. All of the packages include use of royalty-free music and the Professional package allows even more music to choose from. All of the pricing details can be found at Animoto pricing.

Is Animoto too good to be true?

To illustrate what a vehicle video may look like with Animoto I created a quick video from our EVOX stills for a BMW 650i Convertible. I chose one of Animoto's royalty free songs for the background but your dealership could upload a jingle instead. For an even more personalized touch, your dealership could produce a voice over track of the vehicle options and upload it. The platform is very flexible.

There is one obvious drawback to all of this. Someone at your dealership has to create each of these vehicle videos so don't go and cancel your contract with your vehicle video provider just yet. If you pride yourself in your dealership's DIY nature then go ahead and give Animoto a try but at this point I'd recommend it as a supplement to your existing vehicle video setup. The creation process is not all that bad. I have a great time creating videos. I use this often to put together photos that I take of personal events and everyone (and I mean everyone) loves the final product.

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 questions. It is one of the largest social networking sites on the web. There is no reason not to create one.
• Create a YouTube Channel: Creating a YouTube Channel is simple. In fact, if you have a Gmail account you're already on your way. Upload videos to your YouTube account and be sure to tag them with relative keywords to help people discover your content. People interested in your videos can subscribe to your channel (something YouTube sets up automatically) and be notified when you upload new content as soon as it is available.
• Create a Twitter Account: I absolutely love Twitter. Once you sign up for a Twitter account, you're on your way to connecting with your customers in a very unique way. Twitter allows you to send messages under 140 characters to the "twitterverse". Your message is placed on the public timeline where it can be viewed by millions of other users. These users can follow your messages and every time you post a message ("tweet"), the people who follow you receive your message instantly. Other Twitter users can send you messages, comment, ask questions and even direct message you, for a more private conversation.

These are all viable alternatives to delivering the same content that you would normally put in a newsletter and send to your subscribers. The services listed above will have a profound impact on the way we communicate. Email is becoming less frequent, Cell phone minutes are being used less, text messages are being sent more and mobile Internet usage is on the rise. People want instant and the web is listening.

I do not recommend stopping your newsletter all together but do think you can safely start shifting the direction a bit. Start using your newsletter as a vessel to drive people to these "instant" marketing avenues. For example:

• Month One: Create a Facebook Group, YouTube Account and a Twitter Account and announce it in your newsletter. Explain briefly what each outlet is for and provide a link for your subscribers to visit each. Be sure feature this content in the newsletter to ensure people see it.
• Month Two: Move the Facebook Group, YouTube and Twitter information to an area in your newsletter that will be permanent. The placement of these links should not change from now on. Continue with your newsletter content as you normally would. Be sure to dedicate a few short paragraphs each month to each of these new areas. A brief summary of what happened, such as "We received 200 new members of our Facebook Group. Click here to keep up with our Dealership".

Remember, persistence is key. People may not join or use these services at first, but as other companies and people start talking about it more they will use these new mediums to connect with you. Everything I mentioned is free and you can set all three accounts up in less than 10 minutes. Following these three recommendations will provide your dealership a way to connect to your customers in real time and can be used in conjunction or as alternatives to your monthly newsletter.

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.

1. Make it personal. You are sending an Auto-responder to a person who has willingly shared some information with your dealership, make sure you use it. Use every bit of information that you have to personalize your response to the reason that person sent you their information in the first place.
2. Make a great first impression. The Auto-response is the first message a customer receives from your dealership, make sure that it's a good one. This person is excited about the vehicle they just emailed you about to schedule a test drive, or may have a question about their service plan and what is covered. Your response to them should be positive and let them know that you understand their needs and are working to ensure they are met. "Thank you for your interest in our dealership. Your message has been received and we will contact you shortly" is the absolute worst thing you could send someone looking for some sort of resolution and is a huge disappointment.
3. Provide the details. The Auto-response should always provide additional instructions to contact your business. Include the the dealership street address so your customer can get driving directions. Include your phone number with instructions to call with questions. Include items that they may need to bring with them to assist in getting the financing process started. Providing additional helpful instructions for your customer will help everyone know what to expect. You've got someone interested in your business, now it's time to relax and start building the relationship.

Contact your CRM and/or website provider and ask if it is possible to create separate auto-responses based off lead source, most major CRM's support this. Use the above guidelines to assist in the creation of more meaningful automatically generated responses to your customers. Improving the content of these messages will help create relationships and better first impressions.

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 was viewed does not mean that there was any sort of engagement or that the visitor met their objective while visiting your website.

Page views are just viewed pages. You have no performance indicators in this statistic. The only situation I can see page view's valid is if you were tracking a thank you page or some other page that could only be reached after an order was processed or information was given. By reviewing the page views on these types of pages you could use page views as a measurement tool but setting up a goal in your Analytics tool would be a much more efficient way to track success.

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 to your website and have to remember what search they performed, what the stock number was, etc. Because this information is saved on their work computer bookmarks they choose to start researching other dealership's inventory and will come back to send you that lead tomorrow... maybe.
• Scenario Two: A visitor to your website is browsing your online inventory at work and found a vehicle that they may like more information about. They have a Social Bookmarking account so they save the page in their Delicious account, add a few tags about the bookmark and a note to help them remember why they bookmarked this vehicle. 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 open their browser to their Delicious Bookmarks and click the link to the vehicle, review the information and send you a lead that they are interested. You get the lead, follow up and sell the vehicle. Everyone wins.

Some of you might may be thinking that the person illustrated in both scenario's could have just emailed themselves the link or some other method for getting the information home. Sure they could have, but this post is about Social Bookmarking and by promoting the Social Bookmarking system on your dealership website you gain enormous value.

5 Reasons to support Social Bookmarking on your website:

1. Social Bookmarking helps your website create high quality back links. Back links are links to your website that exist on other websites on the Internet. In the world of SEO that translates to popularity.
2. Sites that are bookmarked socially can be viewed by anyone which exposes your inventory and brand to a variety of sources, including search engines.
3. Social Bookmarking helps your content travel. By giving your content the ability to travel you allow your information to be distributed quicker online which makes your site available to other streams of traffic.
4. Social Bookmarking allows users to add tags and notes to their links to help them remember why they bookmarked the page. These user defined tags appear on the public listing and assist in promoting those tags as keywords. These tags are also used in search results on their respective pages.
5. Social Bookmark links promote accessibility. Links that are bookmarked can be viewed from any device (including mobile phones) that are connected to the Internet. If your inventory is bookmarked a visitor can return to their place no matter where they are and what computer they are using.

If you need extra traffic, you should focus on adding Social Bookmarking tools to your automotive website. Adding a Social Bookmarking tool set to your website allows your content to travel, assists visitor research and lets the Social Bookmarking community know that you support and understand their needs.