January 2011 - Cover Story
Your Online Reputation
Word of mouth has always been the dealer’s best marketing tool, but the Internet age has changed the rules. Find out what dealers are doing to regain control of their reputations.
By Justina Ly
Some dealerships, like Chacon, choose to manage their online reviews in house, while others have turned to third-party vendors. Hamilton offers a bit of caution to dealers who have opted to outsource their online efforts. “Social media didn’t exist at this scale three years ago,” he says. “These solutions are just being invented.”
ADP Dealer Services and Reynolds and Reynolds both offer online reputation management solutions. Aside from monitoring social media sites, both companies’ solutions include consultation services that teach dealers how to handle negative commentary. They even offer recommendations for attracting positive brand awareness among consumers.
Another company offering similar services is Riverside, Calif.-based eXteresAUTO. It offers a solution that aggregates reviews and complaints, tracks social media sites and sorts reviews based on keywords. The company’s trainers then go one step further, helping dealers organize the reviews and use customizable e-mail templates to send responses. Like anything that goes on at the dealership, Merla Turner, director of dealer training for eXteresAUTO, says success with services like hers needs to start from the top.
“We know we’re dead in the water if we don’t get the owner or GM buying in,” she says. “It really does require a culture change at the dealership.”
After a year of soliciting customers to post favorable reviews online, George Grubbs Infiniti’s George Grubbs III turned to a third-party marketing company.
Finding the Right Vendor
When it comes to selecting an online reputation management company, DrivingSales.com’s Hamilton says dealers should be wary of companies offering to “improve” or “fix” their dealership’s reputation. They may not be able to deliver on that promise or, even worse, may provide unexpected and unwanted results.
BMW of San Antonio learned that lesson the hard way. The store was caught with fake online reviews after an investigation by San Antonio’s ABC News affiliate, KSAT 12, revealed they came from a paid service. When reporters contacted the dealership’s general manager, John Bruns, he confirmed that the dealership hired a company called Review Boost to contact customers and generate actual reviews. He said the dealership also questioned the authenticity of the reviews after viewing them online, and had since canceled the service.
However, Hamilton says instances like that will do little to curb the online marketing race. “People are social beings. Whether they talk face to face or online … they’ll always be talking about the industry,” he says.
Three years ago, Randy Powell was tasked with creating a positive conversation about his dealership. Powell is the general manager of RBM Atlanta-North, a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Alpharetta, Ga., 22 miles north of Atlanta.
The dealership opened in late 2007 — at the start of the recession — and faced an undeveloped market and stiff competition from other local high-line stores. “The first year we opened was a challenge,” he recalls. “[We had] no client base. We knew we needed a strong online presence.”
After a few false starts, the dealership partnered with eXteresAuto. Powell says he made it clear to the company that he wanted authentic and genuine survey results, not just perfect fives across the board. He adds that he now has a firm grasp of how to handle negative comments.
“We generally don’t try to rebut it, because it gives the comment a lot of prominence,” he says. “We also will adjust our templates to surround it with love and a lot of good reviews to make sure it’s not the most prominent.”
So far, the approach has led to some positive results. “We have the most reviews and better placement than other stores,” says Powell, who adds that the dealership has managed to capture 20 percent of Alpharetta’s new-vehicle market and 35 percent of its used-vehicle market. Powell now has his sights set on fixed operations and is employing eXteresAuto’s tools to create e-mail campaigns he hopes will boost business for RBM’s service department.
George Grubbs III, executive manager of Grubbs Infiniti in Euless, Texas, managed his dealership’s online reviews before he outsourced the work to a third-party company. It was hard work: At the end of each month, he would compile a list of customers who returned favorable manufacturer surveys and contact them by e-mail. He would include hyperlinks to several highly trafficked Websites and ask the customers to post a review.
“I did this for a year, and the result was very few [customers] taking me up on my request,” he says. “Instead, we got almost no good reviews and most bad [reviews were] from upset customers wanting to rant. There was no balance.”
After doing some research, Grubbs turned to Advantix Marketing, a Dallas-based Web marketing company. “They take the same list I compile at the end of the month and call the customers to get permission to post a review on their behalf using their initials,” he says. “Only those customers they make contact with and get permission from get reviews posted. … It really is a clean process, one we could do in house if we had the manpower.”