What are you doing to build
your online reputation?

 

Over the last few months dealers have been challenged in many new ways and on top of all the economic issues dealers need to protect their reputations in these hard times. I was just reading Greg Goebel's article in Auto Dealer Monthly, and he indicates we will all get through this, but we need to focus on protecting our assets, and one of our main assets are our people.

He urges dealers to protect their A-players, that is their best sales people as they are not easily replaced.  I agree with his thoughts and feel now is the time to show your sales team you care about their welfare and that they are part of your family.

One way to leverage your sales force is to have them more visible on the Internet, where your prospects are shopping. Carfolks.com offers sales people a free microsite to build their referral base. Dealerships have all their sales folks build pages and then invite their past customers to logon and post a review of the salesperson. Positive reviews boost their standings in the rankings.

Also by allowing your customers to rate the salesperson who worked with them, you put the responsibility for the customer relationship back on the shoulders of the folks handling the customers. If you want more information on how the program works I invite you to read or download the Carfolks PDF overview.

I teach and preach a process that holds excellence in performance as the end goal, and it personally frustrates me when I see dealers, managers, Internet directors as well as sales consultants making excuses for mediocre results. I hear all kinds of excuses such as it's the election; it has to do with gas prices, the mortgage crisis, the weather, their franchise, and their dealership. In truth is it has nothing to do with Barack Obama, John McCain, gas prices, the mortgage crisis or the weather. Believe it or not, there are automotive professionals making great money right now in this economic climate.  I see sales consultants making $100,000 a year, managers earning $250,000, GSMs and GMs making $400,000, and dealers making millions of dollars right now.

 

Over the last few months I have heard from more dealers about negative comments posted online about their dealership. They want to know what can they do to remove or counter these postings which often times are inaccurate; and do not share all the facts with the public. And, if you think this couldn't happen to you read what an industry publication just wrote about two dealerships that bore the brunt of upset customers.

One customer posted a note on a blog saying a Mid-West dealership wouldn't sell him a car for the winning bid price on eBay Motors. Before the dealer could respond to accommodate the customer there were over one hundred pages of blog posts and most of them were directed against the dealership.

In New Jersey the daughter of a customer stormed into the store with her video camera rolling and lambasted the manager for delivering a vehicle to her mother and then asking for the car back since the mother was not approved for the loan. She posted the video on YouTube and it was viewed over 122,000 times.  This dealer didn't do anything wrong. He spotted the car and when no lender could approve the transaction, he asked the customer to bring back the vehicle. In both cases damage was done to the dealer's reputation.

Additionally I have seen websites set up by unhappy customers specifically to attack dealerships.  The barriers to setting up one of these sites are very low. For less than $30 you can register a domain name and host a website.  That makes it much to easy to attack the hard earned reputation of good dealerships. More websites are posting negative experiences online and often times there is no way for the dealer to respond or defend themselves.

To monitor what is being said about you just go to Google.com and set up an alerts notification. Set up a free account and in the product offerings you will see their "alert" feature.  Here you enter your dealerships name along with the names of your competitors, and anytime your name is mentioned on a website, blog or forum you get an email notification. This allows you to see what is being said and then you can respond to the issue when possible.

Keep a calm, non-threatening tone and be helpful whenever possible. Also you should take a pro-active stance and sign-up on dealer advocate sites like Carfolks.com.  These will help you promote the good things you are doing and gain visibility for your dealership in the search engines too.