I can imagine Austin Powers dressed in a blue velvet leisure suit saying:

It’s Social Media Baby!

If you haven’t noticed car dealers are being pushed off of Google Page One for the cars that they sell. To throw salt in the wounds, it seems that every month another car dealer “review site” pops up.

This means when consumers type in a car dealership name, more sites are vying to capture and suck the equity out of the brand.

In reality, many of these sites are just Google Adwords and banner advertising sites that are making money from optimizing website pages on a car dealer’s name.

There is nothing illegal about this and over 60% of car dealers are allowing their name to be leveraged for other people to profit from.

In the area of car dealer reviews, have you take a minute to see just how many websites seek to be the “authority” for car dealer reviews?

Here is a quick sample of the sites that I have found that want to be found in Google, Yahoo and Bing search for the phrase “Car Dealer Reviews” or “Auto Dealer Reviews”:

Car Dealer Specific SItes

• www.mydealerreport.com
• www.cardealercheck.com
• www.dealerrater.com
• www.cardealerreviews.org
• www.prestoreviews.com
• www.dealerscene.com
• www.dealershipratings.com
• www.carsdealersreview.com
• www.autodealerreviews.com
• www.dealerreviewer.com
• www.autodealerreviews.com
• www.edmunds.com

General Review Sites

• www.my3cents.com
• www.insiderpages.com
• www.yelp.com
• www.citysearch.com
• www.judysbook.com
• www.merchantcircle.com
• www.yellowbot.com
• www.switchboard.com
• www.superpages.com

Automotive IRM Confusion

The reason I bring this trend up on this blog is because it can be confusing for a car dealer to know where to focus their Automotive Internet Reputation Management strategies.  So let me give you some practical advice:

1. Look at your own Google Maps listing and see which review websites are being summarized on your Google Maps page.  Focus on getting positive reviews posted on these sites first.
2. Of course, getting posts directly on Google Maps should be a car dealers #1 priority because the “star” ratings are directly counted if a consumer posts on Google Maps.
3. Once you have seen which review sites are being summarized on your Maps listing,  focus on getting more reviews on those sites via email, calls and in store coaching.
4. To see if other sites are having an impact on your business, Google your exact business name and see which review sites are showing on Page One and Page Two.
5. Any sites on Page One or Page Two should get some attention to build positive reviews.

If a review website is not on Page One or Page Two, I would hold off investing any labor on these sites  until the steps listed above are complete.  Then, I would add positive reviews to the largest website vendors first and ignore the lesser sites that only have their own self interests in mind.

Summary:  There are hundreds of websites trying to capitalize on your car dealership name.  Don’t get overwhelmed and just focus on the most visible websites that appear for your car dealership name or the cars you sell in your PMA.

If you need help, call 732-450-8200.

Dealers who have a successful Reputation Management (IRM) program in place and that have been able to get their customers to post reviews on DealerRater.com have a new choice on how to display their positive reviews. DealerRater.com now offers dealers that ability to get their reviews via an RSS feed.

The RSS feed will allow you to place the stream of customer reviews on a blog using a RSS widget. Of you prefer a full screen version of the reviews, you can use the DealerRater.com Javascript snippet which can drop into most any blog page. The great thing about these two choices is that they update in real-time as more positive reviews are posted on DealerRater.com.

The DealerRater.com RSS feed can look like on a WordPress Blog:

The DealerRater.com Javascript Snippet can look like on a wider website page:

Auto Dealer Reviews

Keep in mind that this is just one source for reviews posting. You can display great reviews from multiple review websites if you create a compilation of multiple RSS feeds and weed out any negative reviews.

It is very important to leverage your positive reviews on the static pages of your website. Reviews from customers that live in the towns in your PMA can be a fantastic way to create search optimized pages that include your brand and the city names that surround you.

Setup Google Alerts and Google Reader

All dealer principals and members of the senior management team should be using free tools like Google Alerts or Google Reader to track what people are saying about you online.

You can be notified by email as soon as your dealership name or the name of your employees are used in an article that Google indexes. There are paid services that offer a nice interface to view articles that use your name for a fee but until you decide to spend for that convenience, please setup these free tools.

The sooner you know what is being said about your dealership, the sooner you can decide how to respond. One nice advantage to being a DR Certified Dealer is that you have two weeks to resolve any compliant before anything harmful gets permanently posted.