There is an old saying in marketing fish where the fish are biting. Currently Facebook gets about 100 Million plus unique visitors each month, that is over 1/3 the US population. With the rising price of Google ad words it makes sense to add Facebook advertising to your marketing mix. I recently read an article “How to advertise on Facebook” was interesting but basic. The following is my version. On Facebook your competition isn’t other business owners it’s the litany of status updates, party photos and comments that are pouring in…millions per hour. Here are 4 tips that will help you when advertising on Facebook…some pretty obvious. 1. Target your audience Duh, I’m sure you say… but keep in mind that Facebook users divulge a lot of information about themselves here in their profiles, more and better information than trying to use demographics or rating from traditional advertising means. Facebook allows you to groups you want to reach, you can target users based on profile info: age, gender, location, college, relationship status and interests. This is FAR more accurate data than demographics; in fact you could call this the U.S. real time census. More importantly you can use Facebook for behavioral targeting. You can choose to target users that are fans of your company or avoid your fans if you are looking to broaden you prospect base. Facebook also allows you to target customers based on key words that are mentioned in their profile or status updates. Keep in mind behavioral targeting doesn’t just mean users who see you ad and ones who don't more often behavioral targeting is best suited for targeting content. Changing content to fit the users’ behavior is incredibly powerful and will mean a big boost in clicks and conversions. 2. Test, test, test … Strategically, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Facebook ads are auctioned as they are on Google Ad Words, however you can pay by the impression or by the click. Most advertisers choose by the click and I am a fan of this method as well, impressions are almost impossible to track ROI or activity from. Testing ads in Facebook as with all online marketing is twofold:  Testing for click volume  Testing for conversion rate The later of these to is obviously the most important. While clicks are good and there are those that will argue that with clicks and impression you are branding you business, I will argue that if the respondent was interested and would remember your brand they would have converted. People are no longer on the internet to find things they are on the internet to do things (Platforms over Pages). Testing conversion is about the customer behavior and experience when they get to the landing experience your click directed them to. It is in the landing experience where you can test strategically. By combining Facebook’s behavioral targeting for the click with a landing experience behavioral targeting can gain large boosts in your Facebook advertising conversion rate. 3. Track everything Facebook allow you to track the number of clicks and times your ad is shown, but it doesn't track Post-Click. This is a huge drawback to any online marketing. Using a landing experience platform in combination with Google Analytics you can quickly and easily build, test and track your traffic from Facebook and other online marketing mediums. 4.  Don't miss the message Message miss match is the number one cause of page abandonment and low conversion. If you plan on advertising on Facebook then dumping these respondents on to your main random access website…do yourself a favor and save the money.  This is the most important tip I can give to any marketer advertising on Facebook or anywhere else on the web. Your message must match what got the click in the first place. On face book your ad space is limited, typically a short head line 135 charters or fewer and a small image. You are competing with status updates friends photos ect. so it is tough to get noticed. Usually three ads from different advertisers run next to each other so this increases the challenge, “If you put up a traditional ad you're just going to get pushed aside”. Facebook is social so your ad should be social, be irreverent and don't write in traditional copyspeak, be Transparent, Authentic and Genuine (TAG) in your ad “Spring has sprung… time for that convertible!” Because you have so little space to capture the respondents’ attention it is so imperative that your landing experience engage the customer and match your message. This is a great place for a conversion path: “Spring is in the air and can ABC motors help you drive and breath the fresh air? With our spring convertible collection of coarse….” Choice 1. See our lineup of great new convertibles Choice 2. Today’s convertible special Choice 3. See our lineup of great pre-owned convertible deals Content isn’t King, the respondent is and the King wants choice so give your respondent kings choices you’ll be rewarded for it with the conversion. Hope this helps, Larry Bruce (@pcmguy) www.pcmguy.com

Those who follow me on twitter (@pcmguy) have seen me tweet this probably multiple times. “Google commodities everything” this is a quote from @jeffjarvis book “What Would Google Do?” for those of you that haven’t read it you should do so as soon as possible. Along these same lines I recently heard a great analogy about search marketing that will I hope will set your mind for the rest of this post. “Great Search Marketing is 1% about the click and 99% about what you do next.” In an earlier post “Get Outside Your Random Access Website” I talk about why your main website is not the place for your search marketing respondents to end up. We also discuss why single landing pages and deeplinks don't optimize conversion as well as a well constructed conversion path. As we begin 2010 I believe we will find that conversion optimization is the new SEO. Now SEO isn’t dead, it is still evolving and you need to pay close attention to SEO when you build out any kind of online marketing, but there is a growing movement within our industry to get beyond the click to the conversion. After all if you don't what's the point? SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin recently said that conversion optimization is the most underused and highest ROI activity in the marketing department. Predicting that 2010 is the Year of Conversion Rate Optimization, he wrote, “Online businesses can generate so much revenue from this… 2010 is the year, simply because it’s an inflection point for companies to assess their spend and where they derive value.” SEO and conversion optimization (CRO) are in many ways technically alike, but with different goals. Conversion optimization and SEO live and breathe where the customer meets technology. SEO professionals are experts at the technical landscape of the click. They are search engineers & strategists.  The same talent applies in CRO only now we go deeper into the funnel taking many of the same principal strategies and applying them to customer behavior post-click. Conversion optimization, like SEO is an ongoing integral part of your marketing practice. There is no “Silver Bullet” for SEO or CRO. To get the most out of your online and search marketing you will need to go beyond just optimizing your website and putting up a few single landing pages. Conversion optimization will need to be ingrained into the culture and principal of your online marketing efforts. Shortcuts aren’t the answer, anyone can “optimize” a single page or deeplink page for conversion by eliminating all the choices and beating customers over the head with crazy offers or promises. You can increase conversions somewhat this way, but at what cost? A depredated brand, bad reputation and an overall terrible customer experience. These short term gains ultimately aren’t worth the price of destroying good legitimate business. Like all online marketing conversion optimization is data driven. Data & web analytics are your best friend. To get the most from Post-Click-Marketing (I use this term to define the process of maximizing conversion by focusing efforts on the customer experience after the click.) you have to go deeper into the funnel and analyze respondent behavior not just clicks. Here segmentation is crucial, ultimately the Respondent is King and the content is the Queen that entices the King. What do all King’s want?...Choice. All Google ads look the same what you do Post-click is Conversion Rate Optimization and makes all the difference. Segmentation will yield good behaviorally scored leads that produce sales.  Pages VS Platforms Don’t let SEO technicalities get in the way of what the purpose of your online marketing: compelling value propositions and meaningful brand experiences. In SEO, this wins you links (great if you’re a blogger); in conversion optimization, it wins you customers, something we all have too few of. SEO optimizes pages that people can find, hopefully get information from then hopefully act. Unfortunately “Hope is not a strategy” In this case I use the term Platform do describe a landing experience that helps people do things. This ultimately saves respondents time and saving time is the reason they are online in the first place. So we are back to the title of this post “Begin With the End in Mind” I have heard this term before but forgotten it I have to give props to @meganleap for reminding me of it in a tweet a few days ago. Also have to give props to Scott Brinker who’s post “SEO to CRO: link building to dream building” is the inspiration behind this post, these two are heroes of Post-Click-Marketing. Ask yourself this question “What does the respondent want to do when they click?” the ultimate in CRO then is… “How can you help them do that fast?” Build a platform that helps the respondent do what they want to do even if that involves pointing them to your competitors ie: the progressive.com model “We’ll show you our price as wells as the price of our competitors.” In the end if you help me do what I want to do I will be more likely to want to do with you! To coin a phrase from my good friend Chris Brogan “The best way to compete is to help” The differences between SEO & CRO There are those who have you believe that SEO should greatly diminish or even eliminate the need for search ads. A fine goal to be sure, however difficult and time consuming to achieve and even harder to sustain, conversion optimization maximizes paid search and works to boost SEO at the same time. Conversion optimization working with your PPC campaigns will allow for very controlled spit testing, testing multiple variations of a landing experience or completely separate value propositions, combined with different keyword sets and even different geography. You can do this over matter of hours and react quickly to iterate non-performing landing experiences and/or redirect to those experiences that perform well. The mantra here test, test, test then iterate and test some more. Sure you can and we encourage you to optimize SEO traffic for conversion; however PPC offers some great control and can and should take advantage of that. PPC is like turning on and off a fire hose you just need to be sure that where the water lands its putting out the fire. Also by linking your landing experience network back you your main website you are creating good organic SEO for your main website while at the same time drive directed traffic to sites that instantly match the message of your PPC campaign. There a number of standard Microsites a dealership should keep up and can be SEO optimized along with conversion optimized, a service Microsite, a Microsite for each new car model (with actual pictures of the vehicles not stock photos) just to name a couple. We have indentified all together 32. By linking these 32 sites together and to your main website then also linking them to your social media sites you get a virtuous circle of links that make for great organic SEO. One of the best ways to test SEO is with a blog post; with CRO testing involves ad words and a landing page. While it has become relatively easy to put up a blog post, quickly and easily producing landing pages and microsites have been a bit more challenging never mind iterating those experiences on the fly. Conversion optimization most effective beyond a single page, while SEO usually avoids breaking up content into multiple steps, with PPC we find a multiple step conversion process to be the most effective. These multi-step experiences engage respondents allowing them to easily get to the content that interests them most. Where SEO works best by indexing with search engines and open content, something I would certainly encourage this with the standard group of microsites your dealership should have. Conversion optimization combined with PPC campaigns are usually shorter offer expirations and really shouldn’t be indexed by search engines at all, you will want to change them on the fly based on the respondent feedback or turn them off all together. For these shorter term promotions the meta tags you will want to use is probably “follow, noindex” you wouldn’t want the vehicle you have already sold or an expired incentive hanging around the net for someone to stumble on. Why a landing experience network? For a dealership this is the number one way customers are looking for your product and your store. The best analogy I can give you is, “if you were buying billboards you would buy just one and you would want to strategically place them…right?” Landing experiences are like billboards on the information superhighway, key words are the streets and highways you place your billboards on and now you have the ability to change out the message of those billboards at will, test who drives by them and why they did so, changing message and offers accordingly. Finally these billboards can help your customers do stuff not just find stuff. So why do you have just one or two right now, and how do you think just one website can handle the needs of the thousands of customers searching the net for a vehicle today? Hope this helps, Larry Bruce (@pcmguy) www.pcmguy.com

Web 3.0 is all about recommendations, free services, intelligent (semantic) searches, and information that’s no longer random data, but tailored, highly intuitive and delivered in real time. Identifying some broad trends that dominate the new crop of Web tools and services which are in tune with the next generation of the web - Web 3.0 site and how these applications may impact your business. Mobile applications have long been aimed at giving subscribers information specific to their whereabouts, but now we’re seeing even more intelligent ideas. Loopt.com is a new one this year that blends our love of social networking with location-based services. It’s has been described as a ‘social compass’ as it detects not only where you are on the map, but also pinpoints your mobile friends in the vicinity. Loopt is US-centric at present, but the company says it working on looping up Europe. I personally have become a fan of FourSquare and I've gotten many associates addict to it. Now imagine a time when your dealerships departments start to make offers and services based on the number of people in area and their location to the store. “Have 5 dinner and a test drive openings on the new Cadillac CTS until 7pm who wants em’” “4 service openings oil & filter change $9.95 and a free wash in less than an hour” “Loopt special free oil change before 10am on Saturday” Now imagine these customers telling their Loopt and FourSquare friends where they are and what they're doing, basically sharing the offer, growing your dealerships network and customer base. Maps: Google street map hit the news early this year with its controversial drive-by views of people’s front doors and people themselves. But, Google doesn’t have a monopoly on innovative mapping. Openstreetmap.org is about people mapping everything from great hiking routes to off-piste ski runs or and wine tours, and it’s mapping the world.   Now imagine with listing services like cars.com and AutoTrader start to mash up these mapping services with the listings so I can where the cars are in perspective to the customer and how many each dealership has. Personal organizers: There’s no shortage of web services aimed at helping us organize our lives. However digital our way of living, a lot of us still print out paper when we travel, particularly on business. Tripit.com & Dopplr.com solves your travel paper trail by being your ‘personal, full-service travel assistant’. They compiles your itinerary, from transport modes to dinner dates, and adds in weather reports, suggested local attractions and more. They are worth a glance if you travel and have a busy agenda; useful too for family holiday plans. Now imagine integrating one of these into your website  Planning a trip? “click here” route, mark interesting stops, share your adventure through our Loopt or FourSquare mash-up. “Oh by the way for that distance trip here is a suggested vehicle check up list. We have available times to take care of this for you so you trip is all it can be”  Collaboration: Slideshare.net is a useful resource for anyone in business seeking latest thinking on an area of interest and reading it in succinct, generally well-put-together PowerPoint slideshows that are rated and commented on by users. 280slides.com operates in the same field, but is a ‘Cloud’ computing application at its best. It lets you create, collaborate on, share and store a slidedeck on the Cloud (their remote server), so you can access it anywhere in the world. Now imagine setting up a group of slide shows to adjust our clock in your car, connect your Bluetooth phone, use the onboard navigational system, the list goes on a virtual online, easy to use, at your own pace and accessible from  your phone vehicle help file! Audio: Everyone loves audio-visual on the web, so it’s little wonder that this area is seeing new applications each day. Two that seem to fill a market gap are Songkick.com and Blip.fm. Songkick tells you where your favorite group’s next gig is based on your music library. It’s called the world’s biggest concert database, and let you ‘never miss a gig again’. Meanwhile, Blip.fm is billed as a kind of ‘twitter for music’ as it lets you create a social network based on your music choices and recommendations. Now imagine finding good local bands and having them play at your dealership on a Saturday and outdoor concert if you will. Picked up by these services and notifying their network of the event, then mashing that up with Loopt or FourSquare for even more network and now you’ve got a party. BONUS check out MySpace for good local bands that will probably play for little or no money just for the exposure and make sure you Tweet it a good chance it will be picked up by local news.   Social Media Intermediaries: There’s now an ever-growing range of tools to help us make sense of, filter and manage our Twitter world. Tweetag.com, which is billed as a search engine for ‘tweets’. With millions of people adding content each day, the Twittersphere is a morass of information and comment, some useful and some useless. Tweetag helps you search tweets for trends. It also edges towards Web 3.0 semantic search by offering up a tweetag cloud and organizing search results according to whether other Twitterers have ‘re-tweeted’ - in a sense seconded - an idea. Now imagine using this service to pick up on customers that need help with everything from finding a car to roadside service, how far would it go if you caught a tweet from a customer stuck on the side of the road near your dealership and you provided assistance faster than AAA? (this idea from my friend Chris Brogan @ last years DriveingSales in Vegas) Also using Tweetag.com to see keyword trends will help you tweet offers that place high in search ranking as Google and other search engines go real time with links to Twitter and Facebook status updates. These are just a few observations, I am sure there will be much cooler things to come. Larry Bruce (@pcmguy) www.pcmguy.com

It’s late and I am about to go to bed, but I get this tweet “10 Things Social Media Can’t Do”. I have to read it, with all that is being stirred up today in our industry on this topic you would think it is the second coming or something. I am not going to go through all 10. I don't even agree with all 10 only 8, 5 & 10 are suspect. I do think we need to really pay attention to the first 4 however – here we go. 1. Substitute for marketing strategy. A Twitter campaign or a Facebook page that announces your weekly specials is not a marketing strategy.  – Amen! Social Media is a part of your strategy. It will help you with the longtail, it will help you with SEO, it can help you engage your customers where they are, but it is not a strategy. Your Marketing strategy should connect to social media, not through social and certainly not revolve around it. 2. Succeed without top management buy-in. – Oh dear god yes, have we learned nothing from our 10 bout with CRM?  Dealers you need to be involved. Take a lesson from Alan Mually, Scott Monty and @Ford its not a coincidence that is the only OEM not bailed out by government and profitable. If you're going to be in social media you have to be social! Social media requires a way of thinking that includes willingness to listen to customers, make changes based on feedback and trust employees to talk to customers. – How do you do this if you're not listening or engaged Mr. Dealer? The culture of fear (of job loss, of losing message control, of change) is ingrained in corporate cultures. Top management has to want to change. 3. Be viewed as a short-term project. – This is a forever project, wrap your head around that. Social media is not a one-shot deal. It's a long-term commitment to openness, experimentation and change that requires time to bear fruit. – Trust is not bestowed it is earned that takes time. The sooner you get in the sooner it will pay off.  4. Produce meaningful, measurable results quickly. – Nothing worth doing is easy or quick One of the complaints about social media is that it can't be measured. But there are many things that can be measured, including engagement, sentiment and whether increased traffic leads to sales. – Results can be measured but this is about the conversation and listening first then results. Those results can't be produced or measured in the short term. Like PR, social media marketing often produces its best results in the second and third year – as I said it is a forever thing and will be how you connect with your customers over time. So there you have my thoughts on these first 4, what say you? Larry Bruce (@pcmguy) www.pcmguy.com

Wednesday I caught a Tweet from Alex Snyder on CRM “Why hasn’t CRM sold more cars”. I was glad to see someone writing about something other than Social Media and I even email that to Alex. All the hype and I am not using that term in a bad way here, just as a description for the industries obsession with Social Media. Whit all the Social Media hype it was refreshing to see an article on something other than social media. This was an excellent post and made some great points about what is required to make CRM systems and processes work in a dealership. I commented in this post that I was happy to see a post on something other than the Social Media hype and I got a couple of snide, but thought provoking comments from some guys who clearly had not thought their positions all the way through.   Comment one (The names have been left out to protect the not so innocent :)) “Larry, What this post has to do with Social Media I have no idea so why anyone would anyone bring it up? Personal agendas always get in the way.” Comment two “Social Media is an entirely other topic, and it is not “hype” that can be ignored. It’s not 1984, and marketing a dealership or selling cars in the same way will lead to disaster.” I started out just making a comment how refreshing it was to see something other than social media then as I answered comment two it started to become more clear to me how TOTALLY WRONG AND WAY OFF BASE THESE TWO GUYS ARE! In 1984 when I started selling cars the first thing my sales manger asked me to do was compile a friends and family list this was the basis for what we called then “My book of business” – Now, hell Facebook will do this for you connecting you with people you friends and family you don't even remember. Your CRM system will quickly and easily allow you to categorize and reference them with a few mouse clicks. I spent my days pacing up and down the “Point” looking to beat the rest of the sales guys to the ups, cold calling from the white pages and following up on “UP’s” from past “Point” engagements – now I can pull customers from my dealerships database and follow-up on them via phone and email. When I do engage them I can ask them if they would like to become a Fan of the dealership on Facebook to get updates on service specials, special fan pricing and updates on good vehicle buys and if they do then I can just post good information in ONE place to talk to hundreds if not thousands of customers!   I used the Clint McGee GO (Get Organized) System. There were Green cards for UP’s, Yellow Cards for Referrals and Pink Cards for Sold Customers. I would follow up with each based on the color but also based on Birthdays, Anniversaries and Spouses and Children’s Birthdays with cards and letters. What would I have given to be able to send an e-card and now even better than that post a Happy Birthday on their Facebook wall for all their friends to see, I would have killed for that! Instead of spending countless hours cold calling on the telephone, what I wouldn’t have given to sit in front of a computer and update my Facebook customers the great things going on at the dealership and be able to help them with question there where others might have the same questions and can learn from others questions. To be able to Tweet when a great trade came in to a group of possibly interested customers that asked to be notified! Now for 3 things that were very hard to do in 1984 that CRM and Social Media have made a snap and have tremendous value for customers and salespeople. 1. I always tried to help my customers with a ride to wherever they needed to go if they were dropping of their vehicle in service – now I would post my ride schedule on my Facebook page and ask customers to go there to notify me if they are going to need a ride or use of my demo. My god this would show the value of doing business with me and allow me to be of so much more service to my customers. 2. I would have posted several videos of basic vehicle operations, setting the clock, using the Bluetooth feature ect. So that my customers would have a video reference for basic operations. 3. I would email e-cards to my UP’s and Internet leads to be different from all the other salespeople they have talked to I would also search Facebook to see if anyone in my network knows them and ask for some referral help. My god the more you go through this the more you realize that CRM IS Social Media, come on, you guys on Dealerrefresh that think these thing aren’t related you could not be more wrong. I also recall a blogger on DrivingSales making the comment about someone calling in SocialCRM “That makes me want to barf”… Please wake up, there will be a convergence of CRM and Social Media far before marketing will make any kina mark there. CRM and Social Media…totally separate topics! Have you lost your mind? Everything I have discussed here we did in 1984 just nowhere near as efficient as it can be done now, but clearly not a disaster. Hope this helps, Larry Bruce (@pcmguy) www.pcmguy.com

Yesterday I read a Ward article by Steve Finley, ‘Biggest Crock I Ever Heard’. This was follow up article containing rebuttal comments from disgruntled internet mangers taking offense to an earlier article “Are Dealership Internet Departments Obsolete?”. This is so ironic I had to laugh, the very people that stuck their noses up in the air in and said “You just don't get it” 8 years ago now… just don't get it.   On Kain Automotive Idea Exchange I made a comment that the lines between the floor and the Internet Department are blurring, the fact is they are gone. The internet customer has changed, really I shouldn’t say they have changed it’s just that the internet customer now is not just an elite group of tech savvy engineers who are playin around on their new fangled computer to find the cheapest car possible. It’s now Joe Everyday Customer who, while price is a concern it’s not the primary driver or their reason for being on the internet shopping for a car. So what's an Internet Department Manager to do? Well let’s try managing the internet. The days of the internet manager managing a group “Internet Salespeople” are over the fact is if you’re a salesperson in a dealership and you can’t use a computer, answer an email or talk on the phone you shouldn’t be employed by the dealership.   Here are 5 things Internet Mangers should be doing instead of trying to mange salespeople the sales manger should be managing, and yes you're going to have to be a sales manager again NOT A DESK GUY (I HATE THAT TERM) the days of the desk manger are rapidly coming to a close as well, but that’s for another post. 1. Keep your website up-to-date and making sure it is simple easy and useful for you customers. – I can’t tell you how many dealerships websites I go to with out of date content, links that are broken, stupid pop up coupons that have not meaning and the list goes on longer than I can put I this post. 2. LISTENING – social media isn’t about pushing a message it’s about listening to your customers engaging them with Transparent, Authentic and Genuine(TAG) HELP about what they want to accomplish with the brands you sell and your dealership. 3. Blogging…not about how low the dealerships prices are or the specials but useful things like the best day to set a service appointment, how can we improve your experience with our dealership here are our ideas what do you think? This kind of content engages customers and makes them a part of the conversation not the unwitting recipient of a pushed message. 4. Managing Facebook content and posting useful offers and information there. How do you know it’s useful… how many people shared it? 5. Managing the content for the dealership Reactive Marketing Application Stack (see the picture below).   This stack depends heavily on Landing Experience Management it’s why that is at the center. Matching the message to the ad and the customer expectation is the most important thing you can do for conversion, and ultimately no matter how long the tail is or the conversation, it will come down to conversion ratio. Like it or not the “Internet Manager” will start to manage the Internet not the salespeople, that’s what sales managers are going to have to do and salespeople will learn to mange more interaction on the lot, phone and internet the right way or you will parish. In some ways the Internet Foreshadowers of Doom for the car salesperson back in 1999 were right. The internet was going to replace the car salesman… the Traditional Car Salesman, the Traditional Car Dealership and now the internet is even replacing the Traditional Internet Department.     The internet adores inefficiency and middle men so if the Traditionalist above don't get in and add value they will be replaced.  Hope this helps, Larry Bruce (@pcmguy)

I just read a great article on PR and Social Media “Social media mitigates public relations crises”. I have though a lot about what dealership or dealership group will be the first to have an online firestorm erupt around them.  There have been small brush fires here and there. I was involved in one with a client of AIMData 3 years ago before social media got big in this industry. It was quickly put out with a communication. Interestingly enough that seems to be the same tactic that many so called “social media experts” say to do, and I agree having used this tactic before. The good news, if you find yourself being attacked thorough social media you can use social media to fight back. When doing so here are some good points to keep in mind.   1. GET INVOLVED – it is our natural tendency as car dealers to ignore or dismiss those who talk about us, unless they get to the dealer. You cannot afford that anymore. My favorite saying, I don't know who said it, I read it 10 years ago on the wall as I was waiting to get my hair cut. “Goodwill like a war…is won by many battles and lost by one”   If you don't get involved and communicate the conversation will carry on without you and you will not like the outcome.   2. Respond to the issue quickly and honestly – be Transparent, Authentic and Genuine (TAG) in your response and work to resolve the issue. Do not try and defend your position or debate the issue unless you have overwhelming hard evidence you can share online with the community that supports your position. Ford Motor Company recently had the beginnings of a Social Media Firestorm that was quickly squelched by Scott Monty Ford’s Social Media Executive, proof positive that acting early and with transparent, authentic and genuine facts the community will rally around you against the naysayers. 3. Address the heart of the issue – do this first, if you're dealerships is in the wrong, apologize and fix the issue. Do not try and deflect the problem the community will see right through that.    It would be wise for everyone in our industry to read and study how others outside of our industry are dealing with these social media firestorms some dealership somewhere will fall victim to this, you just don't want it to be yours.   If you have any stories of your own social media firestorm battles…please share them here. The point of these blog posts are to learn from each other. The reason I put “quotes” around “Social Media Experts” is I don't believe we have any yet this medium, we can all make each other smarter.   Hope this helps, Larry Bruce http://twitter.com/pcmguy

Just read a post by Adam Singer about a Business Week article “Beware Social Media Snake Oil”. This post was a great break down of all the myths that come up about Social Medias impact on business productivity and intellectual property. I would like to add a dealership spin to this in the hope that dealers look at social media from a different angle. Business Week Article - “As millions of people flock to these online services to chat, flirt, swap photos, and network, companies have the chance to tune in to billions of digital conversations.” Dealers let me put some factual numbers behind this statement along with some of my own comments. Marketing Spend $55 billion - number of dollars marketers will spend on interactive (display, mobile, email, social, search) channels by 2014 21% – percentage of all marketing spends that the 55 billion figure will represent – and the minimum % of your budgets you should be looking to allocate to these mediums. For dealerships that are such a local market focus probably more that 21% of your budget. 7.8 billion - amount marketers will spend on display advertising in 2009 – Affiliate and display marketing should be a bigger (more interactions) part of your marketing than radio or TV $15.3 billion – amount marketers will spend on search marketing in 2009 – I know this has been a pit for dealerships because vendors here are focused on the commodity of this medium TRAFFIC. You have to get into this conversion focused not traffic focused your main random access website is not the vehicle for acquiring new business on the web it is for your existing customers. $716 million – amount marketers will spend on social media marketing in 2009 – not that this will be done wisely as with any new medium we are trying to find out what works and what doesn’t, the only way to do that… get in there and do it! 4% – percentage of budget allocated to social media as compared to search in 2009 – not sure I buy this number, I don't think car dealerships do enough of either of these things. 9% – amount this number will grow to by 2014 – I believe this to be an understatement. Source for the above $585 million amount in 2008 marketers spent on MySpace ads – better opportunity than a TV or Radio ad as a percentage of return to spend and accountability. $210 million amount marketers spent in 2008 on Facebook ads – better opportunity than a TV or Radio ad as a percentage of return to spend and accountability. 9% - amount Facebook’s ad revenue will grow in 2009 – its just going to keep getting more and more crowded 15% – amount MySpace’s ad revenue will fall in 2009 – its just going to keep getting more and more crowded Source for the above Twitter Numbers 21% – number of Twitter accounts that are empty placeholders – people are buying these like domains. Get your dealerships name before you have to pay someone else for it…ITS FREE NOW!  94% – number of Twitter accounts with less than 100 followers – the mass of niches is here too. You don't have to have a large following here just a few people willing to retweet to their 2 friends then they retweet to their 2 friends… and so on and so on… 5% – percentage of users who make up a staggering 3/4 of all Twitter activity (participation inequality) – see above Tuesday – the most popular day on Twitter (not a number but still an interesting fact) – when is the lowest day on your service drive? Tuesday & Wednesday! You think twitter offer in service might be able to help here? 62% – percentage of Twitter users from the US – one of the best way to take you used car sales national…Twitter! Source for the above 6.46 billion – number of Tweets at the time of this posting (source)– 1000 times the number of people that have ever seen or heard all the TV and Radio commercial your dealership has ever done. 23.04 million - umber of unique visitors to Twitter.com in June of 2009 (source) – National used car sales!!! Facebook Numbers   200 million – updated number of active Facebook users – probably a few in your dealerships market too! They will have conversations about your dealership here with or without you I think we would prefer with.  30 million -number of those active users who access Facebook via mobile device – Mobile is the poster child of I want what I want when I want it. They are surfing Facebook just like they're not surfing your dealerships website from a mobile device. They are updating and getting quick info usually through an app. Your mobile strategy is to make the information that customers want from your dealership just as easy to get to. 100 million - number of Facebook users who log in daily – NOW THAT’s A DESTINATION…YOUR WEBSITE IS NOT ONE QUIT TRYING TO MAKE IT THAT WAY. 66% – percentage of Facebook users who are outside of college – It’s not just your kid’s space anymore and hasn’t been for some time. 120 – average number of friends per user – Joe Girard found that the average number of people his customer knew was about 200 and he leveraged that into a sales machine long before it could be done at t he speed of light. 900 million – average number of photos uploaded to the site month – you think some inventory photos might need to be here???? Not all of them but some of the neat stuff with a link to all. 10 million - number of videos uploaded each month – Service Videos, Help Videos (How to used and set up all the new gadgets in my car) Hell I can’t figure them all out and I am a computer guy and a car guy what do you think your customers are going through? 1 billion – number of pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week – about your dealership and everything else. 2.5 million - number of events created monthly – What events does your dealership have that are of value? Why are they not here? 950,000 – number of developers and entrepreneurs leveraging the Facebook platform – We’re one of them   100 – number of applications that have more than 1 million active users – mobile… I want what I want when I want it  the way I want it. 10,000 – number of websites using Facebook connect – why isn’t your website using this? Source for the above Search Numbers   13.104 billion - number of search engine queries in February of 2009 – Cars are the number one searched product 8.293 billion - number of searches which happened in Google-owned sites – Google Blogger why are you not there? 2.696 billion - number of searches on Yahoo! Sites – a distant 2nd but you should still have strategy here. 1.073 billion – number of searches on Microsoft sites – a distant 3rd but you should still have strategy here. 63.3% – percentage share of core searches which happened on Google – Google commoditizes everything it is so easy for your dealership to manage your own search campaigns now, the conversion is where the rubber meets the road and where you need the help. Conversion doesn’t happen on your main random access website. Source for the above Business Week Article “But the same tools carry risks. Employees encouraged to tap social networking sites can fritter away hours, or worse.” Poor salespeople are already wasting hour upon hours in your dealership. I would much rather they be working on updating and engaging customers on Facebook than smoking a cigarette on the point wait’n for an up. Business Week Article “They can spill company secrets or harm corporate relationships by denigrating partners.” They can and have always been able to do this. How many of don't have a story of a moronic salesperson who did, said or email something stupid? Business Week Article “What’s more, with one misstep, one clumsy entrée, companies can quickly find themselves victims of the forces they were trying to master. Thousands of bloggers attacked Motrin last year because of an advertisement from the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) brand they found demeaning to mothers.” Please… if you make a offensive commercial or say something in the wrong context and its going to get to the web, that’s your new reality. Do you really think you can stop it by stopping your people from getting to social media? For that matter do you really think you are stopping your people from getting to social medial or being there… new flash they are already there without you. At the end of the day my fellow dealers your customers are on the web, looking for you, talking about you, rating your service and doing all this with little or no engagement from you. Any way you slice that up…it’s a bad thing. Larry Bruce (@pcmguy)

I must have heard this 100 times at DD7 by many dealers I talked with. I even found myself agreeing…I remember saying sure it does. Today as I was recapping what I was exposed to this year at Digital Dealer I thought about this and it occurred to me…WHY? What exactly does traditional media do for a dealership? I found myself not being able to answer the question. It’s not track-able so we can’t assign that value to it. Tried to fall back on the whole branding thing, but I think we have at least proven that social media does a better job of branding than traditional media could ever do now. SO WHAT IS TRADITIONAL MEDIA GOOD FOR?? Honestly, I can’t say. There are so many other ways customers are getting the information they need I really cannot see why any dealership would still be advertising through Radio, Television or Heaven forbid the Newspaper. The only explanation I could come up with is one that is all too common in the car business… We’re comfortable with traditional media. We are trained from a early start in this business to take control, so much so we sometimes we truly believe we can will things to happen the way they always have been. TIME FOR A WAKE UP CALL… My fellow brethren dealers we can’t will it back to the old days, and we haven’t been in control of the conversation for some time now. It’s time to face reality jump in with both feet make some mistakes learn from them and keep going we can no long afford to sit on the sidelines of online marketing and social media and stick our big toe in to see how warm the water is. I saw a tweet this week, can’t remember who tweeted it, it said “If you can’t do social media right then don't do it.” That’s crap we know more about what not to do with social media than what to do with it. You're going to make some mistakes and that’s ok, don't give up keep working on it. There is no one best way. Just keep 4 things in mind with social media: Listen Engage Educate Entertain Beyond that it’s an open forum, and it’s supposed to be. You will be attacked by intolerant idiots who think they have the keys to social media… just deal don't vent online best to just ignore. Above all we have to jump in stay in and keep our heads down and keep shoveling. Hope that helps.

I read through 4 blogs daily and there are a lot of great posts all with their own spin. From social media to mobile marketing to video, everyone is promoting the next SILVER BULLET and its killing me. Guys get a solid foundation down first, you’re off in web 2.0 and you haven’t even leveraged 20% of web 1.0.

I look through dealer websites that are a complete disaster you got flash widgets jumping out at customers, cars driving around on the page. On many websites you can find everything but a car to buy or make a service appointment. What else do you think customers are coming to your site for? To be your friend on Facebook? Give me a break!

All I am absolutely wore out with all the people pushing things on car dealers when they don't even have a solid basic online foundation. You're confusing dealers you’re making them focus on things that don't matter right now and generally giving good communication channels a bad name when dealers are not ready for them.

Dealers, PLEASE get the basics down before you get into web 2.0 initiatives. They are great things if you have a good solid foundation; they are total distractions if you don't.  

The solid foundation:

1.       A good website simple home landing page easy to search inventory, easy to make an online appointments, you don't need any more than that and the less movement the better. You should go by the soft boiled egg rule; the customer should be able to get in and out of your site with what they want within 3 minutes. Your site is there for information…its not a destination and you can’t make it that way, no matter what you do. 

New and Used inventory searh is easily available, there is nothing moving ad they have customer testomonials right on the home page GREAT! What's missing, online service appointment and their ebay rating with a link to their ebay store (good for SEO and will sell more cars) If you really want to take a lesson on a Customer Optimization take a look at the search guru's web home page Google...it does'nt get any more simple than that.

1.       SEO – here are the 15 core things you should to do.

a.       1. Google Webmaster Registration (sitemap) 2. Install Google Analytics Code 3. Yahoo Webmaster Registration (sitemap and rss) 4. Bing Webmaster Registration (sitemap) 5. Create Yahoo Local Business Listing (free) 6. Create Google Maps Listing - one per physical location (free) 7. Create Merchant Circle Listing and add your first blog post (free) 8. Create Insider Pages Listing (free) 9. Create Yelp Listing (free) 10. Create AboutUs.org Listing (free) 11. Create JudysBook Listing (free) 12. Create Yellowbot Listing (free) 13. Create a StumbleUpon Account and add your website (free) 14. Create a Digg Account and Digg one of your best articles. 15. Put out a free press release that has a link to your website or blog.

2.       Inventory listing – you need to have REAL pictures of each vehicle and not just one or 2 pictures please have one of every angle of the vehicle inside and out there should be a min of 30 pictures up to 60. Don't leave this to 3^rd parties to do IT’S TOO IMPORTANT! This is the single biggest reason a customer will decide to buy your vehicle, you might as well be outsourcing your sales dept. Take real pictures of new cars as well NO ONE WANT TO BUY A STOCK PHOTO.

3.       Service appointments – make it a real service appointment not a request and if you just have to make it a request then you should follow-up on that email with the same sense of urgency as an internet lead. Within minutes but certainly less than an hour. SERVICE IS ABOUT CONVENIENCE NOT PRICE.

4.       Get a Microsite network – sending search customers to your mammoth random access website is a waste of money they will not research long enough to get you the conversion and that is what is about nothing else, It’s not about traffic, traffic with no conversion is YouTube.

a.       Here are the microsites to have up all the time

                                                               i.      One for every model you sell and if you really want to go to the next level have one for each model in each color with real pictures of the vehicles.

                                                             ii.      One on each used car connected to the online listings where they are being displayed you’ll be one of the few that is doing this and you will give the customers the information and access they want to buy your car.

                                                            iii.      Have a social / community Microsite this where the people that do want to be your friends and fans can go to get the information on why they want to do this.

                                                           iv.      Dealerships history Microsite

                                                             v.      Service Dept Microsite – with online service payments

                                                           vi.      Parts and Accessories Microsite – with an online store

If you do the SEO basics along with the back links from multiple microsites your SEO will be as good as it gets and your customers can get WHAT THEY WANT… WHEN THEY WANT IT… THE WAY THEY WANT IT which is the reason they are online in the first place.

 

SEM – this is the number one way to conquest new customers it’s also the most abused channel in the car business followed closely by social media. When done right this can yield many new customers to the dealership but if you're sending these respondents back to your random access main website then you are wasting your money please stop. You are not creating brand awareness as some would have you believe the respondent forgot about you as fast as they clicked the back button to get back to the Google search page.

Deep link landing pages are certainly better that sending a search respondent to your home page but a one page conversion that tries to talk to everyone will actually talk to no one in particular, average people are good at ignoring you.

 

These respondents need to be sent to a conversion path that allows the respondent to choose what they are interested in and follow that to the information they want. when you do this you will see double digit conversion rates then you know you're getting it right.

 

An example of a SEM campaign with a post-click conversion path:

 

·         Landing page – Model introduction

o    3 paths for the respondent

§  Safety – one page bullets on safety

§  Performance - one page bullets on performance

§  Fuel economy - one page bullets on fuel economy

o    Thank you – displayed after the conversion

This is a simple example but you get the idea. With pre-conversion segmentation even if you don't get the conversion 70% plus of respondents with segment and that gives you valuable insight into what your customers are looking for in that model.

 

Get these basics down and you will be well on your way to a solid online foundation. Once you have these in control you can start layering in video, flash objects, widgets and all sorts of advanced online sales tactics that will take you online marketing to new levels.

 

The last thing I will leave you with is this…the automotive sales landscape has changed in the last year right before our eyes. No longer is the internet a department in your dealership it is the sales department of your dealership. If you take nothing from this post please take that. It’s not a sideline the internet is now the game.

 

Hope this helps,