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One observation from the NADA Convention was the number of website vendors that were integrating social media monitoring and reputation management tracking tools into their client dashboard.  Two such companies I had a demo with were @utoRevenue and Dealer.com.

The shift  to integrate social media tracking and reputation management alerts will eventually limit the business upside of stand alone reputation management software companies and social media syndication tools.  I predict that these stand alone tools will be seen as a silo applications in the near future.  These companies will be either purchased by larger website providers or they will fade away.

Dealer.com Social Relationship Manager

The Dealer.com Social Relationship Manager which was unveiled at the  2011 NADA Convention was impressive. Customers of Dealer.com that are engaging in social media and use third party reputation management tools should get a demonstration.  This is one slick application!

After seeing the integration of social media signals as well as content aggregation, dealers on the Dealer.com platform will be pleased with this timely feature set.  I would say that car dealers are finally waking up to the fact that consumers are influenced by the reviews that they find online.

@utoRevenue Reputation Management Tools

@utoRevenue which focuses on client retention processes for the automotive industry has added an IRM dashboard into their product line.

According to their press release: “The 360-degree reputation management solution provides dealers with an innovative approach to tracking, managing, and influencing their online reputation. Going beyond the traditional solicitation techniques employed by most in the industry, customers engage at key points in the retention cycle, when positive experiences are most likely to be captured and negative experiences can be quickly addressed.”

It makes sense to me that the service provider that is already responsible to email clients, produce newsletters, and keep client’s engaged with the dealership via coupons, offers, and education should leverage that same channel for reputation management.  I know that consumers do NOT want extra calls and email from car dealers.

If you are a current customer of @utoRevenue, I would call and get a demo of this new product offering.

Check With Your Platform Provider

Other major website vendors will be rolling out integrated reputation management alerts, escalation processes, and review progress monitoring in the upcoming months.  So before you go out an purchase a stand alone product, talk to your website vendor and see what they have in the pipeline.

Data integration will become increasing important in the years ahead, Integrating your IRM data and social engagement stream into your main CRM system will be a wise choice.  The opportunities for data mining will only increase when all contact data and outside content are combined in one data warehouse.

Over the past two months I have been watching the ratings and review counts on DrivingSales.com for their 2010 Vendor Awards. Each year car dealers have the opportunity to voice their opinion on the best vendors that serve the automotive industry.

The Driving Sales Vendor Awards have become a benchmark for peer review.  All votes are carefully validated to ensure that the person voting is actually a dealership employee.

This year my company was listed in the categories for which we offer products and services and each year we make sure that we ask our customers to take a minute and posted their rating for our services. We make these requests on the phone and also via email.

We have friendly “battles” with our industry competitors but it’s all good for keep the competitive spirit alive.  Now that the voting for the 2010 Driving Sales Vendor Awards is closed, I wanted to share an observation.

The Review Process

I’m sure you know that getting YOUR customers to post reviews on Google Places is hard.  After someone purchases their car and gets home, it is hard to motivate them to take action remotely and post a review from their home IP address.

What is even harder is to get OUR car dealer clients to rate their vendors (us) on the DrivingSales Vendor Awards. Our automotive clients put off the task just like your car buyers…its ironic.

For example, for Internet Trainer, I have trained hundreds of car dealership employees at conference, workshops, and through webinars. Many of these automotive professionals have joined one of the PCG managed online communities or they are in our email database. Only a small percentage have taken the time to read my email advising them of the voting process and visited DrivingSales to vote.

In another category, only clients of PCG can vote in the Automotive SEO Vendor category.  What is ironic is that we help hundreds of rooftops with their SEO and most indicate that they are satisfied when we ask them (Does this sound familiar?) Most all have committed to voting online. (Does this sound familiar?) Yet the review counts are very low! (Does this sound familiar?)

I’m not complaining.  Many of our great supporters voted this year but it did not come without a tremendous investment in time and resources.  Verbal phone commitments produce low online voting results.

We Need a Better Approach

So this process has really educated me that we need to think of new ways to motivate our customers to take the time to click and post a review online once they leave the dealership. If car dealers are coming to realize that Internet Reputation Management is important, what call to action could I have created to make our car dealer clients vote?

The answers are there….automotive retailers who are part of this community just have to ask why they didn’t take time to vote for their favorite vendors?  If you did vote, what motivated you to take time to vote?  We need to start discussing the psychology behind voting online.

For the record, I understand that everyone is busy. I also understand that the dealer/vendor relationship can be strong or weak. But if car dealers are to move the needle with their own Online Reputation Management program in 2011 and increase their Google “Star Counts” on Google Places, we need to discuss what is working best.

Car dealers who are having great success getting their clients to post directly on Google Places, please speak up.  I have some ideas to share but that will be in a follow-up article this month.

What ways can car dealers increase the success rate of getting their customers to vote on Google Places, DealerRater, PrestoReviews, Yelp, etc. from home?

I would like to invite all car dealers and vendors that serve car dealers to add your business to www.CarDealerWiki.org a new project that I have started.

There is no cost to add your dealership or company to CarDealerWiki.  On the flip side,  adding your company information to the website has many benefits.

As CarDealerWiki.org  increases in popularity,  it will provide car dealers with additional Google Page One assets that will protect the dealers most important search phrase; their dealership name.  As more car dealers participate in the website, it will become an important website for car dealers who want to keep Google Page One filled with brand enhancing listings they control.

Membership Requests Require Approval

CarDealerWiki.org requires your account to be approved before you post and the good news is that all employees of car dealerships and employees of automotive vendors should qualify! Please complete the user profile with accurate information about what dealership or company you work for.  I am trying to keep spammers off the site and grow the content with real dealership data.  This will also keep the website content quality high.

Once you create your dealership profile page, you can also create optimize Wiki pages for service, parts, used cars all identified with your brand and town.  I have provided a few examples of car dealerships that are taking their opportunity in CarDealerWiki seriously.

When you create any page on the website, I am recommending your write 400-700 words on each page as a target.  You can upload photos, YouTube Videos, DealerRater reviews, and if you are in the Automotive Advertising Network, you can load live inventory.  The site has the ability to input RSS feeds so you can also add the latest posts from your car dealership or personal blog.

Toyota of Wallingford

Toyota of Wallingford has taken their CarDealerWiki profile page to another level by creating content pages for the models they sell as well as integrating a YouTube video.  You will see that he created sub-pages for specific Toyota Brands with a geo-target of New Haven. Take a look at the page and the powerful URL it created: http://cardealerwiki.org/Toyota_Camry_New_Haven

Lexus of Portland

Lexus of Portland created a page at  http://cardealerwiki.org/Lexus_Of_Portland and added their streaming DealerRater.com reviews.  This is a cool way to keep your CarDealerWiki page updated with the latest reviews.  The great things about CarDealerWiki is that these reviews appear to Google as text on the page.  This helps to fill out the Wiki page with real content.

Marlboro Nissan Example

Marlboro Nissan created a CarDealerWiki page on this URL:  http://cardealerwiki.org/Marlboro_Nissan. Notice that the URL in the Wiki is your dealership name which is great for SEO purposes.  When you visit their page,  you can see that they created sub-pages for each model Nissan used cars that they sell, here is one page example: http://cardealerwiki.org/Used_Nissan_Altima_Marlboro .

Notice that the URL is “Used Nissan Altima Marlboro” and this is important to call out because you want sub-pages on CarDealerWiki to be geo-targeted.  The review process will not allow one dealer to create a Wiki page called “Used Nissan Altima”.   What this means is that members of CarDealerWiki can create geo-targeted pages for user cars, sales, parts and service.  The key is to add good content on these pages.

Capital Ford Lincoln in Canada

Canadian car dealers are also welcome to join CarDealerWiki and Capital Ford Lincoln in Regina has done a great job building out their car dealer profile page.  They have added a block of car dealer testimonial from YouTube.  They have also started to create pages for the cars that they sell, so take a look at their creativity: http://cardealerwiki.org/Capital_Ford_Lincoln

Why You Should Get Started

Since this is my personal project, I have been involved with building links and relevance for this site.  This means in the coming months this will grow to a high PageRank website. Trust me on that promise.

The links that are part of these profile pages ARE even now being picked up by Yahoo and Google.   This means CarDealerWiki.org will be great for Google Page One Management as well as building powerful links to internal pages on your website.

So visit www.CarDealerWiki.org today and create an account.  In the upper right-hand corner, there is a login hyperlink.  Click that and request an account.  It will normally be approved with 24 hours.  When you register check your junk email folder since your password, which is emailed to you, normally ends up there.

Once your account has been approved, please watch the tutorial video on the home page to show you how to use CarDealerWiki’s dealer profile template.  It will save you time with the syntax of creating an attractive profile page.  I hope to see you join and experience the benefits of membership!