Every one of your associates who create a profile has the chance to put in the month and day of their birthday (we are not interested in embarrassing anyone by asking their birth year). Any time someone you'veconnected with has a birthday approaching, you are notified through your messages when you login to the site through the networking section. It's a handy reminder to place a call to that associate and wish them a "

There's a number of ways to check your messages. For one, when you first log in to DrivingSales.com, your "My Home" page displays important network updates, including any new messages you may have. Click the view button to go directly to your message center. Another way to get to the same spot is to click the "My Messages" link on the left hand side of the page. This also takes you to your message center. Here you can see any messages (read or unread) with information including who sent it, their email address, and the time they sent the message. To read the body of the message, click the message title. To the left of the message title is a box to select the message so that if you want to delete it, you can select any or all of the messages and click the "Delete" button at the bottom of the page.

Networking is what we're all about! So, the question is, how do you get connected? There's many ways! The first thing is to make a profile. As we'vesaid before, making a profile allows you to participate in various community features and also acts as your proxy to connect with other professionals. Once you'vemade your profile, there are a number of ways to start networking. One way is to use the search function. This tool allows you to search for individuals if you aren't sure that they are members of DrivingSales.com or not. Your search results will yield all individuals who meet the search criteria. Their names will show up in blue and if you want to view their profile page click their name. There are two ways to invite the individuals you want in your network. Under their name and information, there is an icon with a green person. Click that button to invite them into your network. An invitation page will display that indicates who you are inviting, along with a default message stating you want them in your network. Feel free to modify the message if you wish and click "Send" to officially invite that individual. The next time they log in, they will be notified of your invitation. As soon as they accept the invite, their contact information will be added to your Phone book and your network will have just grown! Another way to invite them after you have searched them out is on their profile page. Click their name in blue, bringing you to their profile where you can click the "Invite" button located underneath the contact information. This will bring you to the invitation you can send to them. One way to invite multiple individuals into your network at once is through the Bulk Invite option. Please see the "How To" on Bulk Invitations for more information on this efficient and resourceful tool. So, now you'veconnected with a number of people, but what do all these One and Two Step Connections mean? Let's explain: Direct connections are the people that you'veinvited into your network or who have invited you into theirs and the invitations have been accepted either way. So what's all this other stuff? One Step connections are people who are directly connected to the people you are directly connected with. However, these people are not directly connected to you (yet). Those are your One Step Connections. Two Step Connections are people who are directly connected to your One Step Connections, but are not connected to the people you are directly connected to. So basically, your direct connections are your friends, your One Step connections are friends of your friends, and Two Step connections are friends of the friends of your friends. Get it? Got it? Good! To see who are connections are, click on the "My Network" link on the left hand side of the page. This will show you all your connections. Clicking the "Direction Connections" tab will show you all of your direct connections and gives you the ability to access their profile but clicking their names. The number in parentheses next to Direction Connections is the number of people you are directly connected to. The same applies for the One Step and Two Step Connections, but contains information specific to the respective categories. It may sound confusing, but there is a way for you to make it less so: Simply invite all your One Step and Two Step connections into your network! Now you won't have to deal with these multiple connections, and even better, you'll grow your network exponentially! This is the exact reason why we included this feature, so make use of it!

Information sharing is our specialty. Because we can't get enough of it, we'vecreated a newsletter all about best practices in the automotive industry. Every other week, we send out a collection of articles written by various experts from around the country on the best practice techniques that can enhance the quality of a dealership. We have no product to sell, just information to share. To subscribe, simply join the site!

We know when you have a great experience with a company or product, you want to tell people about it. We also know when you have a terrible experience, you want to tell even more people about it. So, we'vecreated the very place for you to do that. Our vendor ratings allow you to rate companies and products and describe your experience. You can also contribute to other people's comments about a vendor. This allows the automotive community to see who's worth working with and who's, well, not. You can rate as many vendors as you want as long as you'vehad a bona fide experience with them. We also encourage you to read the Rules and Guidelines on posting vendor ratings. Many restrictions are in place to ensure that ratings are honest. This is just another tool that contributes to our information sharing mission and keeps the automotive industry professional and high quality.

Company and product descriptions on DrivingSales.com are 100% Wiki, which means they are written and edited by members of the DrivingSales community. Wiki is a powerful tool because it streamlines communication sharing and leverages the collective genius of large groups. We'vecreated this community space not as an advertising space to sell products, but so people can access an unbiased library of each vendor company and their products. The community is based on your participation: Describe information about the companies or products; if you see something that is inaccurate, edit it. Anyone can change it or add to it at any time. That's participation, and that's the beauty of how the community knowledge grows and benefits.

strategy ratings are a great way to endorse a strategy you liked, or if you found it to be completely useless—or worse, defeating—you can claim that, too. This deepens our information sharing intention while keeping the strategy posting honest and on target. Maybe a strategy worked really well for a large store in southern California, but didn't do much for a small store in South Dakota. There's always confounding details that add to the strength, or even accuracy, of strategy results. Maybe there's a reasonable explanation for why the strategy didn't work, so post that it. Or maybe you found that if you tweak the strategy, just slightly, it produced even more profitable results than the original. Whatever the case, if you'vetried one of these strategies and have something to say about it, rate away!

Along with networking, information sharing is the primary reason we created DrivingSales. It's an excellent avenue through which you and the other professionals in the industry can share tactical ideas that produced results in the automotive world and, of course, which ones don't. Strategy sharing allows you to upload and find tactical best practices to help you increase revenues, cut costs, better CSI, and improve your stores atmosphere, in all dealership departments and across all dealership disciplines. There's no better way to learn what's working and what's not than from testimonies of people who'vealready tested it. Tried and true. You can also rate the strategies if you'vetried them out. It gives you the opportunity to agree or disagree, or maybe add a bit more to it. So add your productive strategies and check out those that have also been added. Give a little, take a little, it all comes back anyway.

The blog is a collection of thoughts, ideas, comments, and ramblings from industry experts about, well, the industry! They post articles or thoughts on all different aspects of anything that remotely relates to a car in some form or another. This is another great platform on which we can exchange the hottest and most innovative ideas in the business. Some categories of conversation include internet, leadership, manufacturers, dealerships, sales, and spiffs and bonus programs. These bloggers are highly experienced in the automotive industry and, if nothing else, overqualified to give their opinion. So listen up! You can browse posts by author or category, and read the latest information about what's going in the car world. If you want to keep up, start reading.

Endorsements are a great way for you to tell others about great individuals in the industry that you'veworked with and maintain relationships with those individuals you think contribute you our industry. It's also a way for others to say great things about you! If you're searching out individuals to do some work for you, or are looking to refer a customer to someone in another area, but don't know of any one in particular, reading over people's endorsement page can give you a great idea of how others who have previously worked with those individuals feel about them as professionals. It's a great way to recognize the capable, committed, and productive professionals in our industry. And generally speaking, what goes around comes around, so endorsing others might find you some positive endorsements in the future as well!