Social Media is not about hugging people. Some people are just jerks.

So goes one of the most famous quotes from the Social Fresh Conference, and those of us who tweet for food know exactly what it means. There’s a myth in social media that being a maven is like being sort of a glorified online flight attendant. You roam the corridors with your cheery cart of auto-responses, address grouchy customer complaints with a perky smile, and try not to bump anyone in the knee. This is wrong.

Social media has traditionally been pure brand management; but it can be more if you make it more. It can be sales. It should be sales.

Relational. Educational. Soft. But still sales.

The way to change your social media game from a sideline cheer show to a strategic conversion machine is to start where all sound sales processes start: set up a funnel. In this case, a content marketing funnel. Here’s an example of an automotive content marketing funnel in action:

Monday: Run a “Car Wash Flash Sale” on Twitter. From 1 p.m. to 2 p.m., anyone who clicks through your Twitter link and subscribes to your blog on the accompanying landing page gets a $2 car wash. (Bonus points for getting some buzz going by reaching out to your local bloggers and press to let them know about your new all-new Twitter Flash Sales)

Tuesday:  Send your first piece of content marketing to your new subscribers. I’d suggest a humorous blog post to break the ice like: “Polyester is Itchy: Top Myths about Car Salesmen.” You can then list the top concerns about the car-buying experience and how your dealership specifically combats them. Wherever possible, support your content with hard facts i.e. “Every member of our dealership has X certification and Y training to ensure our sales process is as respectful and efficient as possible,” and/or humor, i.e. “Plus, we shoot hard-sellers on sight.”

Wednesday: Take a Break; Overkill is a Turn-off.

Thursday: Send your second piece of content.  This time try a podcast, i.e.: “You had us at Hello: What to Expect When You Walk into Our Dealership.” In this round, outline the steps of buying a car at your dealership from A-Z. Be sure to address top fears around uncomfortable subjects like pricing, credit etc. as well as frequently asked questions like how long the process usually takes, what you need to bring with you, etc.  Not only will provide reassuring answers to their burning questions; hearing your voice will help them get a better sense of who you and feel comfortable interacting with you.

Friday:  Lighten up! Send a fun video with a tour of your dealership. Have each of your salespeople make a cameo, giving a short intro and personally invite the prospect into the dealership.

Saturday: Send them a one-day-only coupon, like free CD player installation on a car or a free gas card just for coming in. Make it seem fun, casual, and URGENT that they get in right now.

This is just one example of a social media content funnel; there are endless varieties to try. The point is to move beyond "rah rah" tactics and focus on driving real ROI.

In conclusion, ask more from your social media strategy. In the future of social media, a Facebook like is not a conversion. A Twitter retweet is not a conversion. A conversion is a conversion. Make it your goal over the next six months to create a trackable conent funnel. Once this becomes the norm,  we can definitively prove the truth that we mavens have known all along: Facebook likes are the true source of all car sales. Go team! 

One of the hottest topics in social media right now is how to integrate social media efforts into the larger marketing strategy for maximum ROI oomph. This was a sizzling topic at industry conference Social Fresh East, as well as a lively issue here at Cobalt where we are attempting to bring our social media efforts under the marketing fold.

There are many reasons why this “integration revelation” needs to happen:  

1. Don’t Feed the Mavens. People tend to treat social media as an exotic animal, but at the end of the day, social media is just marketing, and all the same tenets apply. As Jay Baer, Social Fresh Speaker and Founder of Convince and Convert brilliantly put it:

“Email Subscribes equal Facebook likes. Email Unsubscribes equal Facebook Hides. Email Forwards equal Facebook shares.”

True, true, and true. Once we start to understand that social media fits into the same maxims we use to define marketing, we see why integrating social media into marketing makes inevitable sense.  In other words, stop keeping the mavens in a separate cage and add social to your marketing menagerie today!

2. The Single Moment of Communication. To bastardize the Google buzzphrase, most of your users are checking their email, reading their Twitter stream, and checking their Facebook in a single “moment” the time it takes to chug their morning coffee, for example, or the time it takes to scarf down their sub sandwich at lunch. I have this “communication moment” down to an art, seamlessly checking my email, Facebook, Twitter and text messages in a single 30 second span throughout the day.  

The moral of the story? Since you now know that your social properties and your marketing channels share a common set of users, this common set of user behavior that be used as a goldmine of transferrable insights that can be used to inform your overall marketing on a grand scale. Since you can pull different metrics from each channel, you can use your social media insights to inform your general marketing, and vice versa. For example, if you know how to track the time of day that you get the most retweets, it stands to reason this is also a great time to send emails. Conversely, if you know you get crazy-good email open rates Saturday morning, set your Tweets and Facebook status updates to post then too.  

3. The Hershey’s Kiss Effect.  Just like a shiny candy can melt in your hands, the next buzzy social media property that’s hot today may go the way of the dodo (cough, MySpace, cough) tomorrow. We hope they won’t, we think they won’t, but if your Facebook page disappeared tomorrow, what recourse would you really have? No matter how shiny and new, you don’t want to put all your marketing communications in a single social basket. As Baer put it, “Making Facebook your (sole) communication strategy is buying a house on rented land.” This is an excellent point, so resist the urge to place your bets on shiny objects, and diversify your content distribution to include stable owned assets like your email house list, direct mail, your website copy, etc.

Once you have your “integration revelation,” (and trust me, to be a forward-thinking organization in 2012, you must) there are absolutely endless opportunities for maximizing your marketing efforts through social media integration. From adding an email subscribe tab to your Facebook page to repurposing a hot Twitter topic as an email blast, to allowing social logins for your next whitepaper, there are tons of ways to make your marketing work harder by using your channels to the fullest.  

A Maverick (VJ) Says, Maven (Jade) Says Edition

Maverick Says: Customer service has been around since the lemonade stand, but many business innovators are elevating the definition to all-out rockstar levels. We approve!

 From DSES Keynote Speaker Gary Vaynerchuk’s “thank you economy” to Bob Burg’s and John David Mann’s“The Go Giver,” today’s hot and  up-to-date  thought leaders are reexamining customer service and thinking “outside the ballpoint pen” on how to really  rock their customer’s world. The cool thing about this trend is that it is completely accessible to the automotive digital marketing community. Anyone can take an innovative approach to treating customers like royalty and give them a unique Red Carpet Event (and no, I am not referring to Ford and Lincoln’s Red Carpet Lease event). Let’s get you on the A-List and provide you with a peek behind the velvet rope to see how it’s done.

Cultivate Your Big Players with Bananas Customer Service

For example, Vaynerchuk shared a rockstar customer service story during his keynote speech at DSES. The customer in question was a true “VIP,” having just placed a $1000 wine order from Vaynerchuk’s business WineLibrary.com. The savvy entrepreneur realized that such an elaborate purchase deserved more than the standard old thank you note with a 15% off coupon and a branded pen. (We all know such canned displays of “gratitude” hardly make a dent into today’s relationship-driven business economy.) Instead, Vaynerchuk went above and beyond, doing his homework to find out more about what could turn this casual customer into a die-hard fan. His tool of execution: Twitter!

Vaynerchuk learned that the customer was a die-hard Chicago Bears fan, posting rave after rave about his beloved Bears and rants after rants for his so hated Packers. From these “traces of evidence” Vaynerchuk saw what made this new valued customer of his “tick.” He realized “This guy just loves his Bears, possibly more than his family.” Vee’s plan of action was clear. He sent “Mr. $1000” an autographed Bears Jersey – of his all-time favorite player Jay Cutler.

Now before you choke on your coffee at the thought of spending close to $300 on a fancy sports jersey for a single customer, keep in mind that the story doesn’t there: The perplexed and dazzled customer called Vaynerchuk up, dying to know how the wine CEO could have possibly known that the autographed Bears jersey was the perfect gift. The customer then went on to say how over the past few years he had ordered over $100,000 worth of wine from one of Vaynerchuk’s competitors and had not once received the rockstar treatment that Vaynerchuk had so generously shown. He is now (and trust me I am right on this) a customer – or let me call him “a converted Vaynerchuk Evangelist” for life.  And YES, the jersey cost around $300 – but the marketing message and impact among the clients social circle of influence is considered “priceless.” Rock on.

Maven Says: I agree with VJ that delivering rockstar experiences to your inner posse is totally hot right now, but I think it spans beyond just customers to your entire entourage. Just as rockstars have fans, journalists, and music critics to satisfy, we in the digital automotive industry have our own “posterazzi”: bloggers, journalists, thought leaders, and customers.

For example, I noticed many Digital Dealer 2011 speakers touching not just on the concept of rewarding top purchasers, but also top social influencers. The reasons why are obvious: when it comes to today’s rock stars, the Klout score has replaced the sports car, your number of Twitter followers matters more than the number of zeroes on your balance sheet, and  Radian 6 has replaced Bungalow 8 as the hip name to drop. Schmoozing takes place in retweets, not restaurants, and industry power has taken on a whole new digital gleam. Moreover, the public is catching on. I’ve heard of several forward-thinking companies (some hotel chains in particular) who are now strategically checking their customer’s Klout Scores when they check in. They then reward this customer with white glove VIP service. This practice is known as “Klout Comping” and I expect it to absolutely explode over the next year or so. Bottoms up, power users!

A "Maven Says, Maverick Says" Edition

Maven says: Throughout automotive conference season, one message rang clear: the days of having a single person to handle your company’s social media are over.  When you think about it, this makes sense. After all, social media is just brand management with better icons, and brand management is and always has been a company-wide job. After all, a single person cannot possibly know the in’s and out’s of every department, and to expect them to act as a single liaison creates an operational bottleneck that won’t do in the social media real-time world. Instead, the future of social media will be about cultivating an A-team of “brand advocates” across all departments, each of whom is trained to engage in social media interaction.

For those of you dealers who are shaking your heads because you’ve heard so much about the importance of a dedicated social media specialist; don’t get me wrong. The social media maven role is still critical. It’s just that the role needs to evolve from solo act into operational linchpin: training content contributors, checking for quality, and spreading the love to make sure brand citizens are able to contribute meaningfully to social media while still keeping their day jobs.  

Maverick says: Long live the Brand Advocate. As I had preached throughout my career as e-Commerce Director, we as dealers need to look out for our internal champions in our departments– or as I have dubbed them, the Brand Advocates. As Jade had mentioned prior, it is indeed essential to involve representatives from your profit centers in your Social Marketing approach. Once you’ve identified your team, set up a weekly meeting to discuss the latest Customer Delight Campaign or Dealership Charity Initiative – these are the stories your “Social Media Maven” needs to retrieve via social team meetings to use in the blogosphere. Because the majority of the dealerships in the U.S still do not employ the idea of a pure “Digital & Social Media Marketing” the workload to create context for one person alone is too heavy. By engaging your employees and offering them an active role in the dealership brand, they will obtain pride of ownership. These designated Brand Advocates will then be on point to win over new Dealer Evangelists (fans rather than just customers.) It is time to embed this idea now-utilizing all the necessary social channels where you know your “fans” are – and then begin broadening your footprint through your Brand Advocates. Do not forget, people still buy from people, and the more Brand Advocates you have, the more customer evangelists you will have raving about your dealership!

Cobalt One of Elite Automotive Marketing Vendors Selected for Google Distinction

Today, Google announced that Cobalt has been selected as a Google AdWords Premier SMB Partner. Cobalt is one of the few automotive marketing providers to receive this distinction.

“We are excited to launch the Google AdWords Premier SMB Partner program with hand-picked, highly qualified companies like Cobalt/ADP,” said Ben Wood, Head of Google’s Americas channel sales partnership in a press announcement, “Automotive dealers will not only benefit from Cobalt’s in-depth training, but from their years of relationship in the local market.”

The Google partnership is the latest testament to Cobalt’s sophisticated digital advertising capabilities. Cobalt’s unique automotive paid search program is driven by a Bid Optimization System (BOS) which drives the very best monthly performance for an individual dealer or across a network of dealerships. It is the only system on the market, in any vertical, that manages budgets on pre and post-click performance across multiple channels (i.e. Paid Search and Display).

“We are honored that Google has again recognized the value created by Cobalt’s innovative and unique digital advertising platform,” said Max Steckler, Vice President of Advertising Solutions. “This recognition is further evidence that Cobalt Digital Advertising Solutions are industry-leading in their ability to provide a seamless, integrated experience for consumers throughout their buying journey resulting in qualified buyers to dealers and their manufacturer partners.”

“We are proud to be recognized for our  full spectrum online advertising program,” said Charles Tilton, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Advertising. “Our integrated solution enables us to optimize across channels, deliver dynamic content based on consumer behavior, and gives us access to media that would otherwise be unavailable to the average dealership.”

Learn more  about Cobalt’s Premier SMB Partner Status.

By Volker Jaeckel, Cobalt/ADP Digital Marketing Ambassador and Jade Makana, Cobalt/ADP Digital Marketing Social Media Maven

1) “What we upload about ourselves is our digital footprint. What other people upload about us is our digital shadow. What do you want your digital legacy to be? ” Erik Qualman, Digital Dealer 2011 Keynote Speaker and Founder of Socialnomics

2) “The first time that Tier I, Tier II and Tier III joined forces in their marketing message and broke through the noise; that is why Chevy and dealers were so successful with the Cruze launch,” John Holt, Driving Sales Executive Summit 2011 Special Panelist and CEO of ADP Digital Marketing/Cobalt.

3) “Twitter is like my Speedos I wear….if you don’t like it, don’t look at it,” Dennis Galbraith, Driving Sales Executive Summit 2011 Breakout Speaker and Owner of Revenue Guru.

4) “Buying a car should be fun.” Rich Rikess, Performance Improvement Consultant for ADP Digital Marketing/Cobalt

5) “Why are you still buying outdoor media today….everybody is on the phone and texting during driving.  They don’t look at your signs…they do not even look at the road!” Gary Vaynerchuck, Driving Sales Executive Summit  2011 Keynote Speaker and Co-Founder of VaynerMedia

6) “There are just 3 things a CEO wants to know from you: Did we make money? How much money could we save? Are our customers happy?”  Jason Falls, Driving Sales Executive Summit 2011 Keynote Speaker CEO, Exploring Social Media & Social Media Explorer LLC

7) “Clear relationships between Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 are essential.” Matt Murray, Director of Digital Marketing at Dealer.com

8) “Successful companies know how to give customers a Beyond the Moment experience.” Jim Carrillo, Digital Dealer 2011 Speaker and Customer Loyalty Manager at Zappos

9) “Social media has taken over pornography as the most popular online activity.” Erik Qualman

10) “When researching a vehicle, prospects look at the top three resources:  independent sites, search engines, and dealer websites. You have no control over independent sites.  You have limited control over search engines. You have complete control over your dealer websites.” Rich Rikess, Performance Improvement Consultant for ADP Digital Marketing/Cobalt

11) It’s not a sin to be on Facebook.”-The Pope (via Erik Qualman)

12) “The magic pill in social media is hard work.” Erik Qualman, Founder of Socialnomics

13) “Dealerships must execute Marketing and not wait for technology to do the job. Marketing is a verb – not a noun,” Jared Hamilton, Driving Sales Executive Summit 2011 Keynote Speaker and Founder of DrivingSales.co

14)“What happens in Vegas…never happened.”-Rich Rikess, Performance Improvement Consultant for ADP Digital Marketing/Cobalt (and Known Sin City Lothario)

15) YOU CHOOSE! Help us complete our list by posting your favorite conference quote in the comments below!