I had the great pleasure of being part of the AutoCON team this year for the first annual event. It was held at the Aria hotel and casino in Las Vegas earlier this September. During the conference, I was able to see all my automotive heroes speak and they all inspired me to become even better. Some of them…

On August tenth of 2012, we wrote about the movement to Boycott Clay Nissan (you can read that article here.) As a quick refresher, a woman–named Jill Colter–was fired from her position as a service writer at Clay Nissan of Norwood. Jill has stage 4…

I recently read an article published by Forbes titled …

You might want to re-think the ask

You want to increase the number of reviews written about your dealership on online consumer and automotive review sites, right? The first step in any review-building initiative is developing a system or process for consistently asking satisfied customers to write reviews. But if you want to accelerate your results, maybe it’s time to take another look at how you are positioning the…

Social media represents a new dawn for the marketing industry. The level of interaction it enables between business and consumer is nothing short of revolutionary. Most would agree that this is a step forward; more communication is always preferable to less. However, it is not an avenue of communication that businesses can control, or even truly mediate.…

We all know it's impossible to make every customer happy. There are often confusions in the automotive industry that consumers simply do not understand. They can do unreasonable things to try to get back at the dealership when they perceive that they were not treated properly.

This was a challenge a decade ago and before when word-of-mouth was arguably the most important factor in the success of a dealership.…

Dear Google:

You amaze and confound us daily.  You have created an infrastructure, tools and resources for accessing and organizing information that the majority of people and businesses all over the world rely on every day.  That is truly awe-inspiring.  You are pulling search, social and reviews together in envelope-pushing ways.

Nevertheless, change and innovation are rarely universally embraced as you have experienced first hand.   As the old saying goes – you can…

Thank You Dealer Elite Members

First of all I would like to thank Dealer Elite Members and others for taking the time to View my last Blog Post, I appreciate it. I was advised at had been viewed over 700 times so far, my sincere thanks to everyone.......

Now we all know the automotive industry needs to move into the 22st century as quickly as possible. Some of you may ask why, when some of the tactics still work.

Well let me give you some examples from…

Automotive Internet Sales and Google’s ZMOT for Car Dealerships

By now, nearly everyone has heard of ZMOT and how it might possibly be relevant for the automotive…

I have a different perspective about online reputation and ratings for car dealers.  It comes from my days working the line, selling cars, and from eventually managing stores that were consistently #1 in our market.  Our team always knew they were a vital part of delivering an outstanding experience.  The success…

The world is getting smaller everyday and today's consumers have access to more information about your company with just a few clicks or taps on their computer.

To highlight the importance of all this check out the Zero Moment of Truth website with videos and an ebook to help you get the message out.  http://bit.ly/nIM72o 

Our company, Carfolks.com has been getting…

The Great Confession by St Peter was in response to a question ask by Jesus to his disciples. His question was "Who do they say I am?"

The responses varied, some say He was John the Baptist back from the dead, some said he was the prophet. But then Jesus asked "Who do YOU say I am?"

Now of course we know that is when Peter made the Great Confession stating "You are the Son of the God"

The reason that I bring this up is not only because of this being one of the…

Google continues to amaze me with a tsunami of changes to search and new products this summer.  The team at Google is not taking any vacation time this year.



Google announced today Google Related, a free toolbar that is available for Google Chrome and…

As I reported yesterday, Google has stopped including 3rd Party Review counts into their yellow stars.  There was some disagreement if this change was permanent, and today we see that it is.

The product manager for Google Local had this to say in an article posted on…

Change once again is rocking the automotive digital marketing world as Google today drops the third party review counts from its yellow stars. ONLY reviews directly posted on Google Places are showing. This screen shot of BMW of Scherville showed all the DealerRater reviews last week in their star counts but not today.

This is what their Google Places account…

Don’t be afraid of bad reviews.  More and more consumers are going online and posting reviews, and other consumers are reading these reviews and using them in their purchase decision process.  With the growth of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, mylife, Friendster (and the list goes on and on)  these reviews are getting shared with larger and larger audiences. According to a recent study, 70% of online consumers consult ratings or reviews before purchasing, and that same…