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.

A couple years ago, Carfolks.com was introduced to the industry with a vision to change this, but the response has been slow to pick up. With so much talk about online reputation management, it seems that automotive marketing professionals would want to be more front-and-center with customers and prospects. But this does not appear to be the case.

Facebook and Twitter Do Not Cut It

Facebook gives you the ability to have a dealership face in front of a lot of engaged people, and this is good for your dealership. Problem is that Facebook is not designed to help you sell cars. It is designed to generate revenue for Facebook through data-sharing advertising models. Facebook accomplishes this by giving you and people you know a space to share important information about your “likes”.

Your dealership can take advantage of this by advertising on Facebook using Pages and buying ads. Dealership personnel may be reluctant to co-mingle their personal Facebook experience and their professional experience, but with the right training you can overcome this in some instances. Plus there are alternatives.

In a conversation I had recently with a dealership worker, he was against the idea of being friends on Facebook with people buying cars from him, and I don’t blame him. He is not the only one who feels this way.

One of the consequences with this is that dealership personnel have little potential to develop their own brand equity with auto shoppers, which is of growing importance today. There is no lack of ability to establish brand equity among your peers for your professional persona with all the industry blogs, communities, and magazines, but this has little benefit to potential car buyers. The challenge then becomes how dealership personnel can manage their reputation with customers as a representative of their dealer.

A Different Way to Approach Your Reputation

If you are on board with the idea of establishing brand equity for yourself with auto shoppers, then I would like to invite you to check out the new community we are developing at AutoConverse.com which is large-in-part designed to be an automotive selling tool for Internet-savvy dealership personnel. Unlike much of the technology that is out there today that was either designed originally for automotive retail and is being modified to accommodate social media, or social media that dealers are Jerry-rigging for automotive retail use, AutoConverse.com has been designed from the ground up as an automotive networking tool.

The site is equipped with micro-blogging features that are found on Facebook and Twitter which permit you to promote your products and services, but with far less restriction and to a more welcome audience. It also now has inventory features that let you advertise vehicles in a way that brings leads directly to you as opposed to leaking out to your dealership website. The site utilizes location-based marketing but not via GPS, rather by users associating themselves with markets similar to how is done on Craiglist. The site also has CRM-like features that gives you the ability to communicate with customers and prospects via private messaging.

There is really a lot of neat stuff on this new WordPress-based platform and we are very excited to be introducing it to the industry. Our goal is to develop a community with like-minded automotive professionals that recognize the importance of online reputation management and have the technical know-how to harness these now-common micro-blogging technologies in a way that permits us to cultivate a transparent permission-based auto shopping experience for dealers and customers.

Take a moment now to register your free account and then contact us to schedule a web meeting so we can get you started marketing you and your dealership right away.

For Automotive Digital Marketing Professionals Too

If you are an automotive digital marketing professional then we welcome you as well to utilize the tools and resources this site provides to market your own dealership customers. The site is free to use for everyone and we have incredibly affordable premium merchant services that make it possible for you to tap into the more useful features of the site on behalf of your dealers. Our mission is to provide a space where everyone with like-minded interests and abilities are able to contribute to this growing community of auto shoppers and professionals. Won’t you join us?

Auto retailers are now putting more focus on providing a great customer buying experience and looking for ways to leverage “word of mouth” (WOM) advertising from their many satisfied customers in an online tangible fashion.

Mark has over 26 years in the automotive, leasing, and financial sectors of the transportation industry. As the first full time editor of Digital Dealer magazine, he got to speak first hand with dealer owners, Internet Managers and vendors on the cutting edge of technology and social media.

He got upset when he saw good dealers being “blasted online” and wanted to help dealers paint a more accurate picture for auto shopping consumers. By offering search engine optimized pages for sales professionals he allows them to build their own personal brand, and since their pages are transportable to any dealership they work for, their efforts benefit them as long as they stay in the business.

Carfolks jump starts the WOM process and in less than 18 months a focused sales person could be selling 25 to 30 vehicles per month by leveraging their Carfolks consumer network.

This special webinar kick starts a new series for the AC Webinar program where we will begin featuring companies rather than features and capabilities of software technology solutions. The webinar is being held on Thursday, March 11 at 11:30 am EST. You can register by clicking the button below.

We begin promptly going through a 5-minute orientation before diving into the material itself. Our webinars are typically recorded for edited versions to be published onto our Viddler channel.

We hope to see you there. Since this is the first webinar in this ongoing series, you must register for this event to attend, even if you already are registered with another series. Webinars and registration are handled through GoToWebinar. Upon registering you will receive an email notification from GoToWebinar each week, day, and hour prior to each webinar within that series, about every 6-8 weeks (per series).