Complete with geniuses, lackeys, one-hit wonders, and veteran players, the NADA circuit is certainly its own society. Somehow, back in 2002 by chance and with luck I stumbled in to my first NADA expo. It was in New Orleans and it was with 3 of the original “HomeNet Five” – Jesse Biter, Greg Hassler, and Joe McKenzie. It was a memorable experience and I made it back 7 years in a row as HomeNet continued to grow.

The last time I attended NADA however, was 2008 in San Francisco, so I missed 3 consecutive years.

When I attended NADA this year in Las Vegas representing HookLogic, I kept an eye out for vendor booths in the blogging and social media space because I was curious to see how much representation of it there would be.

What I found though was very little and I wrote about it on a post called “The Infant Space of Blogging and Social Media” where I talk about three companies that already have something good and authentic brewing, but not without their challenges ahead.

In addition to this I also produced a video of our time there for HookLogic and in the process of doing so I made this B-side version of the same video. Enjoy and good times to all those I got to chill with.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why is this important?

It’s important because it shows the mentality of the car dealer industry.

How often do you hear from the dealer Principal or GM state that they don’t see the point in social media because they don’t see how it sells cars? Or how often does your supervisor approach you with questions like, “how are things going for us on Facebook? Are we selling any cars from it yet?”

Study after study suggests, and marketers using social media confirm, that the point of social media is not for selling or closing deals, but rather for numerous other purposes such as to:

• Drive traffic to your website
• Build your brand and reputation online
• Add value to the customer experience
• Establish and maintain relationships
• And more…

Fortunately this is becoming a moot point that I think many dealers are getting past, but for those that aren’t, this is a good story to consider.

Now, this isn’t to say that you should not expect results from your efforts using social media, just that matching it to the number of cars you sell as a result is not the right metric to go by. That’s what lead-to-show and show-to-close ratios do. But that is a whole other topic. I just wanted to draw attention to this important example you can refer to when put under the gun at your dealership for your efforts on the social web.

What are some things you can share from your experience with people at your dealership who are not embracing social media as a viable means for branding your dealership?

I don’t know how much buzz this is getting but I do think it is an exciting time for the automotive marketing business. Dealer.com, or DDC, develops fine auto dealer marketing software and the new SRM tool addresses an important undeveloped territory for car dealers – Content Syndication.

What is Content Syndication?

Content syndication is not a new practice. It has been going on in print media and in radio for more than 150 yeas with the Associated Press. It is the practice of re-distributing content across numerous destinations. In terms of the new SRM software by Dealer.com, the content syndication features are meant for the web, thus blogs and social media sites.

Is Content Syndication Good for Car Dealers?

Content syndication is a tricky beast for car dealers. From 2007-2009, we implemented aggressive content syndication initiatives with our dealer blogs using a practice called RSS Marketing. This was effective for SEO purposes by promoting a dealership’s website, but it did nothing to foster community and engagement on on the blog itself.

As social media evolved, search engines began looking for conversations to serve up in the SERPs, and that form of RSS marketing grew less effective for SEO, to the point where we shifted gears towards other types of content, content that builds on the dealership-customer relationship as opposed to products and services. Doing this has made it possible for us to build long-term engagement with dealership customers by collecting permission-based email or mobile opt-in subscribers. The SEO benefits however are less impacting, but still there.

What Can Dealers do with Content Syndication?

If you want the SEO benefits of content syndication, you have some options. To name a couple there is the Automotive Advertising Network (AAN), which generates thousands of syndicated pages of commodity-based content in a way that produces an impacting SEO benefit for car dealer websites. This network can be good for generating website traffic and leads.

There also is AutoConverse.com, which permits dealers and marketers to create unlimited free SEO micro sites to promote products and services. This system is good for connecting with in-market buyers and loyal customers, engaging people and managing relationships over long periods of time while building permission subscribers…the best kind.

Dealers and merchants with these free automotive SEO micro sites, otherwise known as Merchant “Smart” Sites on AutoConverse.com can take advantage of two forms of content syndication:

a.) You can publish blogs to your merchant site which are automatically syndicated on AutoConverse.com.
b.) You an hook up your blog RSS feed to your merchant site so that recent posts can appear

Both of these options are completely free and offer good SEO juice for your blog or website.

AutoConverse.com is powered by AutoConversion, our parent company. For more information on this please feel free to get in touch.

How Do Content Syndication and Reputation Management Relate?

With the new Social Relationship Manager from Dealer.com, dealers will be able to experiment with content syndication to give their content more exposure, and have a good way to keep a radar on things using the reputation management tools it offers. I think it was smart for DDC to make this product available stand-alone but I would not be surprised if dealers struggle for a while to make it truly beneficial. There is certainly no lack of tools out there to do these things already, some of which are free as you saw a moment ago, and syndication is only useful if the content is effective.

Producing effective content is not something I see a mass of dealers catching on to, but that is ok. It makes space for guys like us, who specialize in producing engaging and interactive content that has an automotive SEO backbone. As Pasch stated towards the end of his review on ADM…

“SRM is one of those groundbreaking products that energizes the automotive community and provides the momentum to build innovative, time saving, products in the years ahead.”

Here is Dealer.com’s video for it…

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can see it in form on sites such as Carfolks.com and AutoConverse.com and also with providers such as dealerMouth which strives to be a complete online operating system for sales professionals. The idea is that people buy cars from people, not dealerships.

Dealership websites today are effective at converting in-market buyers into leads, however they are not conversational and there is little ability to establish rapport which seems to be a growing demand in the car business. This explains why networks such as Facebook have become so readily adopted by dealers.

The problem with sites such as Facebook is that it was not designed for people to do business with car dealers, rather it was designed for people to connect, engage, and share their lives with other friends, however close or distant they might be. Therefore, it has limited use for car dealers who must be conscientious of getting a good return on their time investment.

Enter websites for sales professionals. On Carfolks.com an automotive sales professional gets his own page which is associated with his or her dealership and all other staff from that dealership that are on the site. Customers can rate individual sales people and entire dealerships. Sales staff can use their page as a communication point with customers entering the buying funnel. On AutoConverse.com, members have a profile and can create unlimited merchant sites which they can use to cherry-pick potential customers from forum discussions.

Now while this idea might appear new in automotive internet marketing, the perpetuating need for it over the past many years has been apparent. I recall back in 2003 working with a dealer who wanted us to build him this capability, but the timing for it was just not right. Today, with social media in its hey day and automotive sales professionals bumping head on into its limitations as a sales tool, the timing for technology designed specifically for dealership personnel to conduct business in an online social environment is ripe.

Which leads us to how and why new tools such as this are important. It boils down to a couple things…

a.) Brand building and online reputation management, or word-of-mouth advertising
b.) Transaction-equipped interfaces that give dealers and customers an even playing field

In the video below, Carfolks.com founder Mark Dubis dives into the idea of word-of-mouth advertising by looking at how the review capability accessible to people on Google and Yahoo!, and DealerRater do not create a level playing field for dealerships, plus how by offering space for dealers to truly manage their own online reputation as it pertains to their role at a dealership, more accurate depictions of positive customers experiences can be recorded and incentify customers to share these experiences with others.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Not until dealers have and use tools such as this, designed specifically for staff members at auto dealerships to connect with and engage customers through time, will the process of selling cars be any different from a decade ago. It’s time to think outside the box to gain a true competitive edge in today’s automotive digital marketplace.