1) Go to a site that has the most vehicles … like ronsmap.com (how’s that for a shameless pitch) seriously start there and look for ALL the vehicles that you’re interested in around you. That’s step 1: know exactly the size of the market and available options – just makes sense right?

2) Compare vehicles side-by-side. Compare like makes/models or dissimilar makes and models. That way you’re fully informed about the haves and have nots relative to features. Step 2: Compare!

3) Research along the way. (There’s detail in ronsmap along with FastFact tabs that give you clear overviews of your vehicle.)

4) ASK YOUR FRIENDS (and family, co-workers, etc). It’s just smart to consult your crowd – it’s called crowdsourcing. It’ll make you smarter, it’ll give you questions and ideas before engaging sellers. Really it’s just a smart thing to do. Step 3. Share!

5) Engage sellers simultaneously (easy to do with the ronsmap “Start Driving” option). The reason for this is that it’s critical to your success and communication with sellers that you show sellers that you are aware of your top 3, 4, or 5 options. It’s important that you show them that you’ve done your research on features and price etc. They too will appreciate the info and you’ll benefit because they’ll be able to address your questions quickly, accurately, and honestly relative to the options that YOU know about. It shortens the entire process and makes it so much more transparent and honest; and really – who doesn’t want a shorter more transparent and honest car buying process?

6) Final touch… consider sharing the responses from sellers with your friends and family. It’s just smart.

7) Once you’ve selected your seller(s) and or vehicle(s)… make an appointment to go drive your car and meet the seller.

Good luck, and keep an eye/ear out for the upcoming how to buy a car series!

Having a current digital marketing plan, knowing and using your tools and resources should be the first topic in every dealerships’ Monday morning management meeting. Any dealership management team that doesn’t take this seriously will find themselves at the end of 2010 (if they’re business survives that long) wishing that they had.

But what – specifically – to do? Direct your marketing company to transition a percentage of your spend to Social Media? Tweet? Blog? Hire internal staff? Hire external consultants? Train in social media competencies. All of that makes great sense and without a doubt will obtain some lift in your marketing strategy. Really, simply putting a facebook page up for your business will draw a few fans, even if they’re just happy customers. “Just Happy Customers” – whoa! “Wait a minute… those ‘happy customers’ telling their friends via facebook, or myspace, or twitter that they’re in fact happy with the car or service that they got from my dealership is powerful isn’t it?” Yes Mr. NewlyFlashingLightBulbGuy you’re right! That is powerful. Those “happy customers” telling their friends, family, co-workers – essentially their digital Sphere-of-Influence (SOI) is the most powerful form of advertising there is. You’ve always known that, marketing 101. Of course it’s Word-of-Mouth and in some fancy-shmancy circles it’s being referred to as digital-word-of-mouth. But getting word-of-mouth (WOM) to take hold has always been difficult… until today! Today it’s possible to leverage the brave new world of social media and it’s power to drive WOM in to hyperdrive.

There’s that word again “leverage.” It’s the word that everyone uses when talking about the internet and social media. “Leverage your website”, “ensure your staff leverages social media tools”, it goes on and on. As I’ve pointed out in a previous article… “where’s the consumer?”, If you want powerful advertising, if you want powerful word-of-mouth, if you want an unbreakable and powerful social media strategy then I’d recommend that you consider leveraging your customers WOM and SOI! Remember Seth Godin’s comment in his wonderful book Permission Marketing: “Acquiring solid, deep permission from targeted customers is an investment?” He pointed out how many great companies like American Express for example, leverage the permission of their customers to increase revenue. Well with regard to your happy customers you’ve already made the appropriate investments, now you simply want to leverage their natural word-of-mouth. You want to leverage their “tell a friend” behaviors. Yes you can leverage their permission, and you can also leverage their satisfaction along with leveraging their communication with their sphere of influence.

In order to “leverage” your customers SOI first they’ll need to want to talk about you. So why would someone want to talk to their friends and family about their experience with your dealership or its personnel? Why would they take the time and their keystrokes to express their digital-word-of-mouth? Well that should be obvious – either they had an extremely positive experience or they had a poor one. When it comes to poor experiences take careful note that I didn’t say extremely poor experience. If your customer has a poor experience you can bet that they’ll be telling their SOI faster than you can say tweet. It’s a reality albeit an unfortunate one for business that customers will more likely share their experiences with their SOI when they have had a negative or poor experience. If they have a positive experience – above what their expectations were – they’ll also share that experience with their SOI. Typically in the case of a positive experience it will have to be an above average positive experience before a consumer shares the experience with their SOI.

Depending upon the medium that consumers elect to use to talk about your dealership – they’re message can be quickly and dramatically amplified, especially in the web 2.0 social sphere. To give you a clear idea of how powerful your consumers’ comments with their SOI are let’s for example take a look at some real tweets from the twitter search “Car Dealership” that I’m running while I write this article:

• “Watching my kids NJB baketball game being played in a local car dealership. Thanks Family Honda. Go Kings! “

• “Waiting at car dealership for Myrna’s car to get fixed. Been waiting a REALLY long time. #bored”

• “Just saw people protesting a car dealership on Scottsdale road. “They sell lemons!””

• “Damn you car dealership! You tell me my car will be ready in 3 hrs, and now you need to keep it all weekend!”

• “I have my changed at the Ford dealership. They do not try to sell me some high mileage oil. Just sayin.”

• “Back at the Ford dealership; Mr. Hath got himself an F-150. Damn what an awesome truck!”

You get the idea, and that’s just in twitter, just live tweets from the past 1 hour! Really there should be no doubt at all that your consumers love to talk about their experiences at your dealership. What’s new is how easily, quickly, and effectively they can share those experiences with their SOI in social media.

Furthermore, customers today more often “ask friends” about decisions that they intend to take especially in large ticket items. This is called “crowd sourcing” their decisions or they leverage their “community intelligence”. They especially do this with ease and confidence online. In a recent survey conducted by Prompt Communications:

“Facebook is now the next most popular communication tool (next to telephone), with 96% of respondents regularly using it to connect with friends, followed by text messaging at 93% and email at 91%.

When asked which method they use most frequently, most participants chose text messaging, at 37%, followed by Facebook and then the phone (28%). Although respondents clearly feel that email is now less important than social media, only 20% said they could live without it entirely.”

For example with a simple tweet “what do you – think Tundra or Titan?” on Twitter or any of the social media platforms, getting input from friends and family is only too easy to do and more consumers are leveraging “community intelligence” when making major purchase decisions.

But before we can leverage your customers’ SOI we need to consider how you get them to talk and where those opportunities in your dealership are. Here are 9 simple rules for driving positive experiences for your business to follow that will go a long way in getting your customers to increase their WOM about your dealership with their sphere of influence.

• Be Honest – always and in every way
  • If the repair is going to take 2 hours tell them “2 hours” or if you don’t have it in red tell them… “I don’t have it in red”

• Seek First to Understand, then to be understood
  • You knowing what they want and need is much more important then they knowing what you can or can’t do for them

• Strive for transparency
  • Showing, explaining, or trying to justify your pricing and negotiating practices after the fact is far too late. Show them early – give them a chance to experience what you’ve said you will do

• Be consistent
  • No excuses here. Always be consistent in everything that you say and do for your customers

• Tell them and show them that you’re working to make them happy
  • Waiting rooms are nice – but sometimes offer to show them what’s happening out at their vehicle, or in sales situations have management discussions about their deal with them or in-front of them, involve them to the extent possible in all that you do for them

• Respond to them quickly and honestly
  • No excuses here. Look at every process that you have for communicating with your customers and see if there is any late, unclear, or less then honest responses. Ask them – “did we respond quickly and honestly?”

• Ask them for their opinion and advice
  • How can me make this process better? Ask honestly and ask often. Remember that your customers are business professionals or more often work for business professionals. They too have an idea about providing exceptional customer service.

• Be there to help first and to sell second
  • Customers need and want your honest help, helping builds trust and trust creates relationships

• Customer Service is an attitude, NOT a department in your dealership

These simple steps are from consumers who have expressed that these behaviors demonstrate a businesses desire to go above and beyond their expectations. While they may seem basic, they may seem commonsensical, let’s keep in mind that Word-of-Mouth is also basic, Word-of-Mouth is also commonsensical but most importantly Word-of-Mouth is the most powerful form of marketing you’ll ever get.

It takes only a few basic principles to drive WOM for your dealership, and the facts are indisputable more and more of your customers and opportunities today are using social media channels to express their opinions of their experiences with your dealership and your staff to their sphere of influence. I’d leverage that if I were you.

But something was missing.

“Bringing the Consumer Back” was the theme and that message (or pleading prayer depending on your perspective) was explored at as many divergent angles as there are avatars in portals. And there I was, sitting amongst all of this great experience and talent, listening to statistic-loaded professionals enthusiastically expounding the current strategies and norms for engaging with consumers today. There were also the usual slide presentations depicting the massive numbers of people in various social media platforms meant to blow you away, there were motivating line graphs and bar charts showing the growing trends of facebook posts and twitter tweets that drove some attendees to calling there office during breaks demanding to have facebook pages setup for their business. There were even videos of people using mobile technology to drive their social tools to drive the supposedly new notion that times are changing in the automotive market.

But something was still missing.

“Listen, listen, and thoughtfully engage.” That was the overall message the dealers and automakers were asked to take back to their businesses. “Listen to your consumer” said the panelists. Excellent advice if you ask me. Yet the message seemed to be suggesting mostly that the listening should be for “mentions” of their product or business. To hear, recognize, and respond to customer service or reputation management opportunities. Again, definitely great advice. The “listen to your consumer online” message continued with an enumeration of strategies, tactics, and tools that the market could use to listen to their consumers online.

But something was still missing!

Then in the dark auditorium lit only with large screen projections of social media frenzy and potential sales growth and opportunity it occurred to me: the CONSUMER was missing! Where was Mrs. Jones answering questions about how she uses social media tools to stay connected with her high school friends? Where was Andy talking about why at 19 years old he prefers texting over talking and why he doesn’t see that changing – ever? Where was Dr. Phillips talking about how she keeps up with new drugs on the web? Where was Singh talking about why he might consider a crossover only if he read enough about it from blogs he trusts? The absence of the consumer was huge! It left all of these industry execs talking to each other for several days about what the stats have to say, about what the quantitative research has to say about what could be done about what the numbers say… all with no real reference to what we the consumers have to say. Not a peep (er, uh tweet). To use a couple metaphors: it was like community leaders in a town hall meeting watching a video of stats and issues of communities that they hope to create instead of inviting their own community members in for live discussions. It was like a football team willfully ignoring the name, details, or video footage of the other team in an upcoming game and looking only at the aggregate statistics of that teams performance over the last 90 days.

I found myself hoping for a panelist of consumers with a banner over their head that read: “Here’s Why & How We’d Come Back!” Can you imagine just how much information all of the dealers and marketers would be able to take back with them then? Can you imagine how actionable and real that messaging would be? Come to think of it considering that the round-table was in Vegas it would’ve been all to easy to offer free buffets, show tickets, or a stacks of chips for anyone in the Vegas area to come on through and sit on a panel for 20 minutes or so. We would most assuredly have heard consumers talking about their real interests and we most likely would have been able to actually watch them text and tweet while they spoke. What a lesson that would’ve been!

The consumers voice is more then just a voice to talk over or to hear as part of a collective voice in your market. The consumer – the person in this case that the automotive market wants back – holds the key to how and why they’ll come back. Believe me it’s not just about market stability and consumer confidence. It’s about engagement. Thoughtful, trustworthy, and relevant engagement. It’s the individual consumer – the person – who can teach just how to do that better then any collection of stats and trends. Don’t get me wrong – of course it is important to understand your market in aggregate. Of course stats and market analysis matters. Today however, it’s most important to understand your consumer in person. Hopefully someday there’ll be an Automotive Round-Table where the consumer who is the focus is fully represented. I can imagine two-days of panelists made up of consumers from all parts of the world representing all types of demographics. You know, after a session like that the automotive market might just have a few solid ideas of what it will take to bring you the consumer back.

If you’re new to us… if you’re curios, say hi! Tell us what you do when you buy a new or used car.

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