SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Digital Air Strike announced Friday it has developed the first comprehensive program to help car dealers adapt to the migration from Google Places business pages to the new Google+ Local pages.

In reaction to general user questions from Google’s changes on May 30, Digital Air Strike created a social media and reputation management program to leverage the new features and will host webinars to help dealers and industry stakeholders adapt to and benefit from these changes.

Within 24 hours of the migration to the new Google+ Local pages, Digital Air Strike had analyzed the changes, audited the impact on their clients, fixed any issues the new Google+ Local Pages caused for clients. It also created a training webinar to help educate the automotive industry.

“Changes like this often occur suddenly, and without prior notice, but the merging of Places with Google+ is not surprising,” said Tom Mohr, co-founder, president and CEO of Digital Air Strike. “Google has been taking incremental steps to integrate local search with social media since Google+ was rolled out last year and these changes are consistent with Google’s strategy to date.”

The migration to Google+ Local from Google Places impacted many areas, including: Moving from rating businesses on an aggregate five-star scale to a 30-point Zagat Ratings system; changing individual review ratings from a five-star scale to new 0 to 3 numerical rating system; requiring consumers to be Google+ users in order to write new reviews; adjustments to features with Google Maps and mobile devices; and significantly increased the integration of social data overall.

“In light of these changes, dealers who have already invested in building a Google+ presence now have a significant advantage and dealers that have not focused on Google+ need to quickly adapt to ensure their lead traffic is not negatively impacted,” said Alexi Venneri, Digital Air Strike co-founder, CMO and COO-Social Media.

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