Social Media is nothing new. It has been around since the birth of the Internet. The original BBS services were a very niche targeted social media and the developments of “Web 2.0″ have caused social media sites to pop up all around us.

One of the most critical aspects of marketing your dealership online is being aware of the conversation others are having about you online. In a previous post I talked about “How Much Does Negative Information Cost You” and gave some examples of the real cost of negative information. This factor in my opinion is even more important that website conversion, because it will have a more direct impact on conversion and walk in traffic and affect the bottom line more than conversion metrics.

One of the easiest way to be in control of this online conversation is to encourage it and there are several sites geared towards customer reviews and you can even create your own. While the list here is not exhaustive nor do the examples have a lot of content yet, it will give you some good starting points to encourage consumer feedback.

CarFolks.com - Allow consumers to give individual feedback back on sales people and hopefully dealerships in the future. The seem to have a marketing plan in place to get this site in from of as many consumers as possible. The individual pages will show in the SERPS for employees names and I am sure for dealership names as well. I do know that my profile page at Carfolks.com is showing in Google for search for Paul Rushing. Eventually this will become a valuable marketing tool in addition to an online CSI forum. There are other sites that have evolved around this same type of platform but none that I have found have allowed people to rate their salesperson. They have had some growing pains but it actively managed unlike sites like www.dealerrater.com which just seem to be shells.

I love Squidoo.com it was the brain child of Seth Godin and it allows users to create many pages about their topic. I am using it for various online marketing initiatives not just cars but I have had amazing success with it in the automobile business. I created a Squidwho page that encourages customers to give feed back on my service to them of all the platforms out there you can encourage feedback without the customer having to sign up and be in complete control of the conversation. This is not available on any of the other platforms. Also there is some back end monetization in addition to just customer feedback. You can see my squidwho page just visit Paul Rushing on Squidoo.

Yelp.com - Yelp is positivity one of the coolest sites out there as far as customer reviews go. I am working on building up a personal profile there as well as encouraging customers to leave reviews of the dealership. Not only can this help with keeping less flattering information out of the SERPS for you dealership it can also prove to be a huge networking tool down the road.

I would make sure that you set up a yelp page for each one of the franchises you represent and give the first review with a marketing message for people to contact you if your store(s) are not set up there yet. You can also add images of your store, you, the staff or anything else related to your business. You can see my fledgling yelp profile at http://paulrushing.yelp.com/

You should make sure you store is listed in GoogleMaps and if you are doing your own SEO send it some link love or have your paid SEO firm make sure it is showing in the SERPS properly. I am working on getting the Carl Gregory map indexed now. You can also encourage customers to leave feed back there as well. Google will also pull from other sites like Yelp.com to add to the list of reviews. Another huge benefit of Googlemaps is that it can provide some SEO for your main site as well allow you to see what else is showing up in the SERPS for your dealership and location names.

These are the first of many sites that you can use to help build an online reputation personally and for your company. The time involved to use all of them optimized for proper use may be prohibitive for some and a good launching board for others getting started with their dealership online marketing initiatives.

Are you using any of these initiatives in your dealership online marketing? Successes, Failures?

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