Social media marketing becomes an everyday part of car dealers marketing. Companies should dedicate resources and harness social media to find out how to use social channels for the brand.
The communication is different now and should include combination of marketing, public relations, brand and product knowledge. The tone should be personal and you should speak with both authority and enthusiasm. This helps you to break through barriers, become brand ambassadors and personally influence those who are important for your business.
Think about your sales and marketing. How do you reach your target audience (true fans, enthusiasts, owners, prospects and industry watchers). What makes prospects into buyers? What social tools could be used to help people through different stages of consideration, evaluation and purchase decisions. Find out what works best for you building awareness, helping to make a decision, converting people who consider competitors, provide services to owners post-purchase?
Always ask yourself “why” are you doing something before “what”. This way you can concentrate on bottom line and real business value.
Here are some tips, examples and links to articles that will help you to get you social media activities going.
Jeep combines different social media tools to tie together the community of fans. Twitter, Facebook, user images and featured content help users to interact with the brand and share it with their friends.
is a really great example on how a local dealership can use Facebook. This car dealer integrated their entire lot to a Facebook fan page so you can can browse all the cars without leaving Facebook. BMW of Minnetonka have created a visually appealing landing page for people who are not yet fans and they have an active wall interacting with their fans.
During 2008-09 iCrossing UK, a global digital marketing agency, ran a programme of social media activity for Toyota GB to help raise awareness of its iQ city car. This initiative was based on a core blog and a series of activities designed to create word-of-mouth referrals that drove traffic to the blog and generated interest in the car itself. Download the iCrossing case study (PDF).
Not a professional reviewer or a journalist but a real consumer who could give honest reviews and thoughts on Volkswagen’s small compact 4×4 the Tiguan. The reviews were then released online to help people see personal reviews and opinions on how this car performs in real life.
Ford Social Marketing+Auto Industry
Presentations from Scott Monty. He is the head of social media for Ford Motor Company.
If I could pick one type of site that is a “must have” for car dealers wanting to get started in social media, what would it be? My answer, hands down, is a dealership blog. Before Facebook, Twitter, or any of the others, a blog is the best place to get started.
The list of 30 Social Media action items come together to form a sound strategy for most dealerships. These 30 strategy and tactic descriptions were graciously supplied by Inc. Magazine. They were originally prepared as part of a comprehensive social media “cheat sheet” for the time-challenged business owner or entrepreneur. Here is a link to the Inc. Magazine Business Owner Social media Toolkit. I really like what April Joyner put together in the following list because each item listed is described in a way that quickly communicates the strategy, tactical execution requirements and the promised payoff!
This whitepaper will provide a brief description of social media, its importance and insights on how dealerships can integrate social media into their marketing strategies.
Creating Value in Social Media
Create unique content every day
Unique content is what people are looking for and Google knows that. Fresh and original content is more valued and you gain better ran in Google which brings you more visitors. Creating great content every day is not hard. Point to other resources, share your experiences, help and give value to customers. Not everyone knows what to do when you got a flat tire or need to jump star a car.
Share your content
If you create valuable content then other want to use it too. Leverage that! Find other sites that are interested in your content and gain more visitors. Which sites might find your blog posts, images and videos interesting and find out if they are interested on publishing your content. This can bring you free traffic and you gain much valued link power that will boost you Google rankings.
Let others know you are creating content
Post links to your material in relevant online communities, social media channels, forums, Facebook, Twitter and so on. It can make dramatic difference if you spread the word. Others will pick up and pas your links on. Search engines find those links and the authority of your web properties goes up
Open comments
The main goal of the social media efforts is to engage people. This is a must! So, everything you put up in the social web should be open to comments, ratings, and sharing. This will help you to tie people to your site as they feel that their contributions are being valued and responded to. Open interaction will give you many benefits, such as being your online focus group and sounding board, getting expert opinions from other specialists, showing an human face, etc.
Less advertising, more value
Social media is not another channel to spam with your banners and self serving salesy news items.
Here is a great resource. You can use the policies and copy them or just read and get insight into what is considered OK and what’s not in social media interaction.
The following table contains the names of over 100 companies and organization that have published their Employee Social Media Policies or Guidelines online… The left side column is the name of the organization, and it is linked to their organizational or corporate home page. The right side column displays a link to the actual document of policy web page for you to either download or review.
In a hurry? Use The Social media Policy Tool to get your social media policy in minutes. Answer a series of questions and instantly generate a draft policy customized to your business. PolicyTool policies provide a comprehensive and informed framework for your legal counsel to quickly create a binding policy.
But if we approach social design from the perspective of what users are good at, we might be better able to think outside our own box.
Goals and rewards – Consider the kinds of goals you might set within your social application and the rewards that may be earned by users who reach them. These might be personal goals and rewards, like game levels, tasks, challenges, or points. Or social goals and rewards, resulting in status, ranking, visibility, lists, features and spotlighting members.
Moods and feelings – Give expressive users ways in which to communicate their moods and feelings. For example, emoticons and gifts, or icons to be used and exchanged with friends or attached to messages and content. These small gestures, while small, can be curiously compelling.
Knowledge and learning – For users interested in research, information, bookmarking, and more search and browse-related activities, provide ways to share discoveries. Capture those learned moments and make them visible — perhaps surface and validate experts and top contributors.
Giving and receiving – For users who enjoy social transactions provide gifts and a means of passing them around privately and publicly. Gifting is a highly social form of communication, and besides being kind, engages a sense of reciprocity in most of us. So it’s naturally contagious.
Helping and assisting – Some users are just naturally good at paying attention to others, and enjoy helping and assisting those with needs or questions. Design ways to surface these needs and create channels by which helpers can pitch in.
Reviewing, recommending, and rating – Users equipped with opinions and a sense of taste can make valuable reviewers and recommenders. Design ways to capture their contributions as social content. This can be designed then into lists, favorite, trends, news and more.
Asking and answering – In a world of search, there are still many occasions when users want to ask questions and get personal answers. And in a world of search results, there are those who enjoy sharing their knowledge, expertise, and help. But questions disappear if they are not captured and paid attention to.
Announcing and sharing – There are users so on top of news that furnishing them with means to announce their discoveries makes for an easy and effective way to keep social content fresh and interaction active. Topical organization, along with trends, help users sort and filter what’s relevant to them.
10 Best Social Media Case Studies. There are many companies have used social media to promote their brand to improve and some of those companies have achieved remarkable success.
Social Media Optimization Case Studies & Tips. Optimizing social media for search engines, presents a tremendous opportunity to grow social networks and build traffic to content that allows visitors to consumer, engage and share.
The 5 types of social currency. The social web has created a hyper-word-of-mouth platform that has tipped the balance of power away from brands. As a result, brands are now beginning to realise that engagement is the new communications. In order for a brand to achieve engagement with its stakeholders, it needs to consider the value that their content will deliver, or to frame it from the recipients perspective – what’s in it for me.
Social Media Complicates Work-Life Balance. Social media usage has soared not just among the general population but also among at-work Internet users, who are heading to the sites for both personal and professional reasons in greater numbers.
In the closing days of 2009 Pepsi decided against hiring Justin Timberlake, Cindy Crawford or even Britney Spears to speak for them during the 2010 Super Bowl. They would instead take the $20 million budgeted and use it to talk directly — and to listen back — with consumers through the web. It was the final and perhaps the most significant signpost marking 2009 as a year where emerging social media technologies mandated new strategies for anyone who deals with the public.
What’s happening in social meida. The “Who’s Blogging What” ebook brings together the opinions from several bloggers including Ann Handley (MarketingProfs), Mitch Joel (Six Pixels of Separation), Paul Dunay (Buzz Marketing for Technology), and Mike Volpe (HubSpot). Read their thoughts about:
What to expect in social media in 2010?
What benchmarks can marketers use to measure social media ROI?
How do you separate hype from reality in social media marketing?
This weekend I’ve been reading a lot of psychology articles. It’s really amazing how much information is out there that would help us to make our marketing communication and social media strategies more persuasive. Take the title of this post for example. It is based on the innuendo denial effect.
Innuendo and damage to reputations by Daniel H. Wegner, Trinity University. In the series of studies reviewed here, it is found that people are remarkably insensitive to innuendo qualifiers, basing their impressions instead on innuendo statements. The conditions under which this phenomenon can promote damage to the reputations of people, organizations, or products, and the steps that may be effective in avoiding such damage, are the principal concerns of the research.
Frist we believe and then we may start to think critical. You Can’t Not Believe Everything You Read (PDF) by Gilbert D.T., Tafarodi R.W., Malone P.S. Can people comprehend assertions without believing them? Three experiments support the hypothesis that comprehension includes an initial belief in the information comprehended. Test subjects were exposed to false information about a criminal defendant or a college student. Some were exposed to this information while under load or time pressure. Then test subjects were asked to make judgments about the target (sentencing decisions or liking judgments). Results showed that load and time pressure caused people to believe the false information and use it in making consequential decisions about the target.
Can you believe what people say about themselves in a Facebook profile? It seems that a little touching up here and there would be an easy thing to do. Make yourself a little better closer to the ideal self you want to be. The research shows that we are pretty honest about ourselves. Facebook Profiles Reflect Actual Personality, Not Self-Idealization.
Why Do People Watch Scary Movies, Stay in Ice Hotels or Eat Bacon-Flavoured Ice-Cream?. Our minds love consuming concepts almost as much as our bodies crave food. Like our appetite for food, though, our appetite for ideas is only satisfied for a short period before we become hungry again, so hopefully this nugget of conceptual consumption will keep you going until the next click…
Altimeter Webinar: Understanding Your Customers’ Social Behaviors. Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li webinar introducing how we are thinking about how companies can understand their customers through what we are calling “socialgraphics”. Where are your customers online? What are your customers’ social behaviors online? What social information or people do your customers rely on? What is your customers’ social influence? Who trusts them? How do customers use social technologies to learn, make decisions, and support your products and services?
Very nice overview on how to start listening to your customers (PDF). Blast Radius goes over the steps of getting your ducks in a row and see what’s important for your communication to boost the brand.
Listening better by defining what you want to know and choosing the right mix of techniques
Interpreting data through a practical framework
Expressing insight in human terms using personas and story-telling
With this holistic approach, you’ll not only improve the success of your marketing initiatives, but also quickly turn incidents like the Motrin backlash into lessons learned. And ideally, prevent the Motrin mix-ups from happening in the first place.
The PDF also contains a test where you can measure how well are you listening.
7 Key Findings On The Use of Social Media And E-Commerce: New Study. Online retailers have been rushing into using Social Media as the next big marketing thing and yes it is showing some promise. A recent study by Compete which evaluated online shopping trends, unearthed some interesting findings about the use of Social Media and online shopping, especially about Facebook and Twitter.
Case Study: Social Networking Does Work. M+R Strategic Services released their 2010 NonProfit Social Media Benchmark Study: An Analysis of Growth and Social Engagement Metrics for Nonprofit Organizations. The findings in the study are quite re-assuring for some of the best practices we already know.
Paul Gillin’s Guide to Choosing Social Media Tools. Most companies have the same problem: They’ve dabbled in blogs, Twitter and Facebook fan pages but after several months they lack traffic, followers and fans. They’re frustrated and confused. Wasn’t this supposed to be a cheap and easy way to build their brand and bring in sales? Social media demands a strategy, and that’s where businesses usually don’t go far enough.
B2B Case Study: How to Get Started in Social Media. The second in a series of “How To’s” to help you add social media to your integrated marketing communications program. Integrated Marcom Minute interviewed Katherine Watkins, Marketing Communications Manager, Eastman Chemical Company, to learn how she and her marcom team integrated social media into their marcom mix.
Adopting Social Media in the Enterprise. Most enterprises have made attempts at dipping their toe in social media mostly by establishing a presence on what we will call the “free social web” – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. While these social outposts are extremely important for branding and driving traffic to an enterprise’s web site or online community, they are difficult to measure and track and, most importantly, it’s difficult for the brand to own the conversations happening within the broader social web.
Game mechanics are behind the successes of the biggest social networks and online role playing games. But game mechanics is not only for the online, it applies to all interactions between people on-line and off. Today I read Robert Scoble’s post and decided to make a list of resources that have caught my eye in this field. Following these principles can really make a difference. So here we go:
Applying game mechanics to social media. From Peter Kim: If you think games are frivolous, think again – they help us accomplish the simple, like getting an infant to eat, and the complex, like warming up surgeons or disaster response. But as in all things, moderation is key and some people have died when taking games too far.
How Simple Game Mechanics Can Impassion People To Do More Business With You – with Amy Jo Kim. After listening to Amy Jo Kim in this program, you’ll see that there’s more going on under the surface. You’ll understand the levels of activity that you need to build in. And you’ll get a virtual toolbox full of tools that you can use to add game mechanics to your business and build a passionate audience that competes to take more action on your site.
Motivating consumer behavior through game mechanics. Often users of applications need to be encouraged to perform actions for the system to work, or in some cases for it to work better and improve the experience for others. Startups know this all too well – I’ve rarely come across one which doesn’t require some sort of input from their users on some level.
So here you go, start making your own project addictive!
Here is a great resource. You can use the policies and copy them or just read and get insight into what is considered OK and what’s not in social media interaction.
What’s happening in social meida. The “Who’s Blogging What” ebook brings together the opinions from several bloggers including Ann Handley (MarketingProfs), Mitch Joel (Six Pixels of Separation), Paul Dunay (Buzz Marketing for Technology), and Mike Volpe (HubSpot). Read their thoughts about:
This weekend I’ve been reading a lot of psychology articles. It’s really amazing how much information is out there that would help us to make our marketing communication and social media strategies more persuasive. Take the title of this post for example. It is based on the innuendo denial effect.
Very nice overview on 
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