80% of motor vehicle accidents are preceded by 3 seconds of distraction.  3 seconds: that’s less time than it takes to read the last sentence.  Last week Myra Blanco from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute presented some of the break-through safety research they are doing to the Automotive Communication Council in…

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You might not use Instagram, but you’ve probably come across photos that 50 million users of Instagram have taken and put on the web. Also, more than likely you’ve heard the news that Facebook acquired Instagram in April for $1 billion.

What’s so special about Instagram? Its calling card is the photo filter,…

As of 2012 Generation Y accounts for 40% of the car buying public, yet traditional methods of advertising don't reach them. Don't miss out on this growing and often ignored market.

 …

Pinterest is a pretty easy thing to grasp, right? You just pin pictures and hope that someone likes them or comments on them. We all know that Pinterest is quickly becoming the go-to social media site and if you have a Pinterest account and a decent amount of followers/likes, you may be asking yourself, now what? You think you might have mastered the art of the pin, but have you thought about making words pinnable? Let’s say you have a great blog you want to share on Pinterest. Take a simple…

Zuck gets Fancy - PIN THIS!

When Zuckerberg acts, rumors and a mass of people follow.

Recently Zuckerberg "liked" a post on Facebook and the comment went from less then 20 to 20,000 in a matter of minutes. It was a random comment, but the point is that people follow Mark.

So, when Mark recently joined Fancy (thefancy.com), people started asking - what's so Fancy? (…

Having run my own brick and mortar businesses for a number of years I am very familiar with the ebb and flow of customers and their spending habits. I have always tracked sales, customer count, costs and how effective my marketing has been. Whenever I noticed any kind of downturn I immediately looked for answers.



If I were to have had an unexpected downturn in the last month or so I would have been scratching my head wondering why just like many of you may be doing right now. One of…

http://www.automotiveinternetsales.com

Discussing "Pay Plans", Commissions, Bonuses (And WHY) Inside an Automotive Internet Sales 20 Group - Sean V.…

After more than a week of preparation, the day had finally come: I was ready for my first live chat interaction as an ActivEngage VSA. I looked over at Jake, who took off his Phillies cap and scratched his head. Like all of our…

For sure, no dealership manages and maintains its warranty claims process as cleanly and thoroughly as they should, but given the nature of the job, probably the best they can.

Still, because processing warranties correctly requires diligence to warranty claim integrity by so many people in fixed operations, the devil can too easily hide in the details. When this particular devil’s left unchecked, the result can be costly to the dealership.

According to a new…

http://dealeretraining.com/

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As automotive dealerships start to accept internet marketing and even working with a…

Have you ever attended a workshop and had questions that you did not want to ask publically?  Did a workshop presentor spark your interests but there was not enough time to dig into specific questions you had?  You are not alone.  We have modified AutoCon to meet the feedback we received from automotive professionals.  They wanted more, and we delivered.

At the end of each full…

There were ten cars in this years lineup. Tyler and I were the judges. Here they are.…

Well friends, here we are out in the bus for the first time, Saturday, June 9th 2012.  We are parked at the Ursa, Illinois City Park here in West Central Illinois, just a stones throw from the Mississippi River. It's Ursa Park Days, known to the locals as the annual Pork-O-Rama.…

Have you…

Sharing a really interesting article I came across today on Business Week - the high cost of 'rework and redundancy' in the automotive industry. It is important to stay current on the latest innovations, and investing in research to grow the industry is important. But as this article opines, sometimes it can get out of hand, going from innovative to redundant. The infographic is particularly worth checking out.

What do you all think? At what point should automotive researchers stop…

It's official!  Google has finally announced guidelines and recommendations on how to build mobile websites that work best for users and Google.

Google recommends building your mobile site with a responsive design approach.  This means that your mobile site uses the same URL as your main site, and serves the same HTML, but uses CSS to change how the page is…

As our inboxes become inundated with reports from both manufacturers and big-box automotive groups gleefully boasting of double digit gains in sales, one cannot help but hum the song, “Welcome back Kotter,” look up and be thankful that maybe, just maybe our industry is on its way back. We recount 4 years ago, walking past the TV and hearing the talking heads’…