Filtering Noise with Social Media

In the past I had often posed the idea of blogging and social networking as part of the automotive internet marketing CRM or BDC process. I saw it as a way to organize and cultivate individual relationships for dealers to sell more cars. Arguments against this suggest that CRM is about marketing to individual needs and that blogging is about appealing to a mass audience. Valid points indeed, but there is an element to online social networking that rubs right up against CRM and business development which I see growing even stronger today.

I look at social media as a noise filter. The Internet exudes a tremendous amount of noise. Your website must filter that noise and convert what it can to leads. Your CRM must then organize and market to those leads and your BDC process must cultivate what it can. But what about the noise your website filtered out that did not convert. Do you wait for it to come back?

This is where your blog and other social media sites come in to play. Look at them like a buffer between the WWW and your website. You and your employees can use your/their social media profiles to develop network contacts and business opportunities much more effectively in some ways than can your CRM system. A CRM requires either a web inquiry or manual entry and you could never input the quantity of personal information that a prospects social LinkedIn or Facebook profile would have. So isn’t it more efficient to reference a customer’s social media profile?

A blog, be it an employee blog or a company blog has a distinct role too. It’s like your public hub for general information and total public awareness. Use your blog as a buffer to gather noisy Internet traffic to your website or to your social media profiles. The website will do its thing and filter leads into your CRM. Then you can use your social media networks to cultivate those relationships into eventual business.

For business owners this is natural and even for most top-level managers and executives. But for those lower on the totem pole in their dealership or workplace who have little or no vested interest to do this, a new paradigm must arise giving incentive to these workers to use these tools in this way. I see sales in the auto industry evolving to a state comparable to the Real Estate industry where automotive sales professionals are building their own brand equity under the roof of a dealership rather than just trying to use social media to sell cars.