Probably one of the higher caliber posts I’ve read in a long time, called Future of Blogging by ViperChill.

How does one find such remarkable content? One knows it, when one sees it.

It’s not always right on the surface, but when you find something remarkable tell people, it’s your job.

Well, I consider it my job, and so should you. Slackers.

In his post, Glen shares why people are seeking the highest quality content and if you want the attention of people, it’s time to get on it. You gotta dig deep and find stuff you know your audience will love.

Share Remarkable Content – Align Your Brand With Quality

I gotta admit, I keep gems like this to myself sometimes. Sorry, but I don’t like having to play content filter man.

There’s been quite a few times where I have come across something, and I wanted to share it, but I was too greedy and I didn’t. I didn’t want you to find what I found, it took me forever to find it, while you’re just aimlessly tweeting your life into oblivion, I’m onto something.

That’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but the point is I just didn’t share as I came across it. I always wanted to act on the information first.

I know, sounds retarded. Bite me.

I don’t want to be like that. I’m trying to change, to be a better sharer, ya dig?

Forgive my actions, I will find good stuff, and share it with open arms.

See, I’m trying to be good, I’m handing it over to you before I even have a second to reflect on it.

So if you’re ready for this, I’m opening the floodgates of sharing. I’m taking you to the promised land.

You’ll be sitting here reading a 12,000 word blog post, coming up with all kinds of ideas, and then what.

You’re gonna take those ideas, and you’re going to sit on em. Yep, put em on the shelf and you’re going to share that post because that’s what I did. Sucks doesn’t it. That’s called quality. That’s hall of fame right there.

It’s the kind of stuff that’ll make you famous. Maybe just for a bit, but you can do it again, as often as you’d like. Just do quality, that’s it and nothing else. I’m talking mouth watering, home cooked meal, type quality.

So at this point, I feel like we’re on the same page.

You’ll be doing the blogosphere a favor, because that’s what we do for each other. I’m serious. You sit down and write 12,000 words, and put some data into it. Data that makes you wanna stop in the middle of the post and start changing things.

You can spare 30 seconds for this guy, that just spent months creating it so you can piggyback his lifes work. Show some respect.

No more acting like robots. We don’t need Google telling us what to do.

Blog and read, read and comment, comment and read and blog and read and comment. Let’s just take a moment, stop grandstanding all your skills and just say something real.

Go back and just go crazy with it. That’s what it’s for. It’s meant to push you.

We’re here to push each other, to share good information when we see it, not try to be the one cashing in on every possible fragment of information out there.

I see this kind of content to be priceless. It’s a sincere effort to educate other people, to push ourselves, and to become better at what we do.

How To Get Started With Link Building Research

One of the challenges for new and even well-established websites is to rank high enough in search engines to produce a decent amount of relevant traffic.

Drive relevant traffic

Consider someone searching “windshield repair” – they are most likely interested in pricing information, whether they should pay cash or submit a claim, the types of glass used and perhaps warranty information. They might want to know costs for having it done at a shop vs. on-site replacement.

The more comprehensive the content in terms of answering common questions, the more likely the search engines will rank it well, but quality content isn’t enough. You want to have links to your pages so the search engines can evaluate how many other people are vouching for your page.

The competition for some search phrases can be fierce, so outlining a strategy to ensure your site appears for the keywords you want is critical.

Link Building Is an Ongoing Process That Is Constantly Evolving

One of the most important items within that strategy is to acquire links to your site, preferably using the keywords your site is attempting to rank for in the anchor text. For example, if you want to rank well for “windshield repair”, your link building efforts would be to get links using those keywords in the anchor text.

But today, it’s all about quality over quantity. 1000 links from sites without much authority might not send you a fraction of what one link from a very reputable and authoritative site can.

Not All Links Are Considered Equal

You won’t make dramatic improvements in your site’s rankings by going after the easiest sources, such as profile links, or blog comments. So to make it worthwhile, you’ll need to do some research on what sites will bring the most value if you should be able to acquire a link from them.

In this post, we’ll share some tips on how to find the most influential link building opportunities.

Search Traffic Continues To Grow and Become More Competitive

Before jumping into the tips, let’s discuss why spending valuable time, and or hiring an SEO consulting firm to work on this task for you.
The competition between sites to appear on the first page of Google is increasing as more people do their shopping and research online.

You can review data from Google Trends to see if there has been an increase in demand for your most valuable keywords, and it’s a good idea to use the Google Keyword Tool we’ve talked about before to make sure you’re going after keywords that have existing volume.

Why Do People Use Search Engines To Find Information and Make Buying Decisions

The immediate gratification we get when entering as few words as possible to explain what we are looking for is extremely beneficial. It saves us time; it gives us what we want without having to wade through tons of irrelevant information.

With the abundance of information at our fingertips we’ve transformed how we navigate information. Quite simply, we scan pages in seconds looking for what we want.

Google Must Deliver What We Are Looking For Or People Will Use Other Search Engines

The ability for Google to remain the leader in the search industry depends almost entirely on it’s ability to provide us with the quickest and most accurate information as soon as we hit submit.

Google’s algorithm grades sites and determines whether it contains the content that would be useful to someone searching for information. But there is a big difference between having an ad that is on the first page of Google, and showing up on page one of the organic results.

Google can sell a single click for $50 to a business that sells car insurance.

That business can pay $500 a month for 10 clicks or it can earn a position in the organic search results and not pay a dime.
80% of clicks go to results that are in the organic listings. By optimizing, there’s another 40 clicks on the table that won’t cost anything if the site can rank.

Google Analyzes Your Site and The Quality of Information It Provides

The number of links and the quality of each link is part of how Google determines how well your site solves a particular search user’s query. The link represents a vote from another website, and it means the other site has a degree of confidence in the content your site provides.

Of course, the challenge here is how to attract more links and ensure that your site has enough to be considered an authority on the topic.

One way to identify a valuable link opportunity would be to enter the URL into a tool used by many SEO’s called Open Site Explorer.

Take note of the Domain Authority and Page Authority, those will be the two primary numbers you’ll want to be as close to 100 as possible.

The closer to 100, the harder it will be to obtain a link.

Use this tool, as well as other free tools, to analyze the value of a potential link.

As you become familiar with the phrases that send you the most business, you’ll start to see where the good links are available by looking at the websites you are competing with.

Create better content, improve the user experience, become more active in social networks so that your site gets mentioned by influencers in your niche, and study your traffic for indications that could identify more opportunities for traffic.

I keep seeing posts that are titled SEO is Dead. This is however, not the case. SEO is evolving from something heavily based on links to being more content centric in terms of quality.

Bruce Clay offers a great explanation at a conference that brought up the mortality of SEO:

SEO definition is different today than 2000. Google often says they like SEOs because they aim to improve website quality. SEO is a way of measuring do you stack up against the competition. There’s a lot of research and feedback that needs to be done. The SEO of 2000 is probably dead. 10 years from now today’s SEO might be dead. It’s always evolving. How many people here think SEO is dead? (No one raises their hand.)

This is exactly how I think of SEO. It’s not simply a checklist of having links, meta data, and a carefully formatted page with headings that include keywords.

It must consist of those things at the most basic SEO level but without content, the chances of ranking well for any length of time is very low.

Google takes measures to ensure search quality, it’s much more about what is offered in the content than how that content is presented. SEO has evolved, and will continue to evolve, but it will always need one thing and that’s content.

SEO vs. Advertising

What SEO is all about is simply creating the [best and most informative content] that directly targets a specific question, search query, and offers multiple inbound and outbound references to help educate the person searching.

Advertising is good at informing, reminding, and associating. But we still need to know what other people think about a product or service, by reading reviews, both good and bad. That’s really the point where we’ve gathered enough information to make an informed decision.

Advertising without an equal investment in content that results in conversions is money down the drain.

Relationships and Circles

I really dislike companies that run ads, or in any way try to promote becoming a friend, fan or follower. It’s like having to buy friends. Well, that’s exactly what it is.

What’s better is to actually create the content, and or the connections with the people that like you and want to have a connection as opposed to being manipulated into clicking a button.

Social Networks Offers Accountability

We have reached a point online where our identities have become trusted and no longer anonymous. This makes us accountable because our reputation can be summed up in a matter of minutes by doing a search by our name. People that I call influencers are ones who write and have built a reputation and a presence based on what they do for work and for fun. Hopefully, what they do for work is also what they consider fun.

Let people do their own research, but be sure you’re showing up in search while they research.

Car dealers that send people to sites like Edmunds, Motor Trend, or the like are completely missing a tremendous opportunity in my opinion. They need to be the experts, and they need to demonstrate that expertise by producing information that helps buyers feel comfortable making decisions based on someone knowing their product and how it stands up to competitors products.

Being In The Right Place At the Right Time

The more information people can find on their own about us, the more effective we are in leveraging the internet to introduce us to those who may be looking for services we offer or information we’ve collected and studied.

There isn’t any room for advertising because I make decisions largely based on the experiences of others, and the others I am referring to must be actual people and not spammers who write false reviews. This will become much better in the years to come, as profiles with little identity authenticity will become obsolete in terms of their review contributions.

We would rather base our decisions on actual experiences of a particular product, by those who are competent to speak about it based on their backgrounds, and we prefer to reward those we know and are impressed by.

Trust And Value Based Relationships

Trust is inherently embedded in exceptional content. Having written the content yourself, you’re embedding trust as well as identifying yourself as an expert.

Here’s what not to do:

The easiest way to illustrate this one is to use an example of a site riddled with ads. We all know these sites because when we land on them, we find the content to be very thin and perhaps even duplicated or spun. Immediately we sense the interests of the site and it’s owner to be focused primarily on the amount of money they can get with as little content as possible.

Aaron Wall sums it up well::

(G)arbitrage never really goes away, it just becomes more corporate.

One thing you’ll notice that’s blatantly obvious on these sites is that you don’t see any legitimate accountability. Nobody wants their name associated with such sites, they are marginal and soon to be crushed by Google with updates like the latest Panda 3.4 which has been announced via Twitter and effects 1.6% of queries.

We need to be focused on creating value in what we do, leveraging our network of influencers we have built and helped as well, and becoming known for our ability to create as well as identify great content when we see it so the search engines can index and rank it accordingly.

This has been the primary reason behind Google’s shift towards a social platform, because it was clear that great content must have support from real people who are sharing it because of it’s quality and who are willing to put their reputation on the line.

It’s very important to share great content that you know people will gain something from.

Transparency and Behavioral Targeting

This is a difficult one to attempt to explain, primarily the behavioral part. I would definitely focus on transparency before attempting to target people based on behavior.

This is because transparency precedes the attraction component that eventually could lead to trust and building relationships, which then lead to sales.

Transparency can be accomplished through SEO, followed up by behavioral targeting in SEM.

SEO is simply harder to do, but the benefits are longer lasting if done by a reputable SEO firm.

But herein lies the challenge for selling SEO.

SEM is just easier for larger companies to wrap their heads around. It isn’t as abstract, or mythical in nature. It’s very structured in pricing, you pay x amount for each click.

Here’s a great quote from Rand Fishkin’s blog that sort of captures the inherent problems with selling SEO services or products. This may have been the pivotal reason why the VC backed out at the last minute:

The only big concern he brought up from that research was that higher-up marketing executives still lack belief in SEO. One quote that I noted above was a VP who said “I know it’s irrational, but nobody can prove to me that we should spend more.” This lack of investment in SEO and inbound marketing compared to paid channels, despite the higher ROI and lower acquisition cost, is something every inbound professional fights against.

Read the entire post on his Misadventures in VC Funding.

Although Rand’s post is on the topic of fund raising, the amount of transparency Rand offers is staggering, and I truly believe it is very central to the success of SEOmoz.

What’s ironic is that in that post he talks about how effect behavioral targeting is for SEOmoz. But I believe it wouldn’t be nearly as effective without a ton of transparency. I know this to be true because I see the ads, and not offended by them because I know the company and I trust them. The same would NOT be true for every organization.

Reach Your Audience At The Right Time

If you haven’t had a customer ask you online in a public domain such as on your Facebook page, via Twitter, a comment on your blog….. then you’re doing it wrong.

I believe it’s still a bit early for most companies to dedicate a ton of resources to this, but the intention of this post wasn’t to go turn off all your advertising as much as it was to educate you on why it is very wise to start testing ideas on an inbound marketing approach.

That is a decision each company should make after gathering the information, reflecting on the available data online vs. lack thereof from traditional media, and making decisions based on substantial findings.

What Is It Like Selling To People Online

First off, the easiest people to sell to are the ones that have already bought from you in the past. So find them, and determine ways to get in their path online.

For example, in the real world, wouldn’t you think that the people who drive by your business every day on the way to work might be more likely to do business with you than the ones that aren’t in the area?

So think of what you can do that would make their lives easier, perhaps opening the car wash at your dealership a couple hours early to see if that results in people getting their car washed on the drive in? Think about it, because perhaps they get to work and someone compliments them on their clean car. Guess what they might say.

Now Just Translate That To Your Online Efforts

The way you interact with your current, previous or potential customers online in a public facing manner will determine how comfortable people are in their approach to engage in that way themselves.

If you regularly answer questions on your Facebook page, Google+ page, Twitter, or blog then you’ve opened the doors and made others feel welcomed to this type of interaction. But you can’t just “turn it on” today and expect results.

The way to go about it is to carefully outline your ideas and put some operational procedures into practice to respond to people should they decide to engage. Obviously, the more people engage, the better your chances are for increasing this type of engagement so don’t take shortcuts because it will just tarnish your brand and give people the impression that when you do things you do it the fast, cheap and easiest way possible. Not good if you are a luxury brand, or any brand that’s trying to create a good experience in a very public way.

The value in this is you’ll be offering a very open and approachable process that people will utilize when they are ready as opposed to opposite that just gets you ignored and/or blocked.

You’ll also learn more about the indications of those who are in this stage, and you can “attract” them in very indirect, yet effective ways.

Context And Finding The Right Angles To Work

When you look at an advertisement, what type of conversation do you think people could have about it? If the answer is nothing, through it away and never do it again.

People are looking for content that gives them inspiration for thoughts and ideas that they can then express in their own way and share with others.

If you have hosted events at your business, and took photos which were posted on Facebook, you’ll notice that people are very engaged whenever they are tagged in a photo. This represents a memory that they can directly recall and identify with, forming trust in a way that is social and fun.

Another thing I love about the way SEOmoz runs their business is how they connect with their customers and help them become successful. You can guest post and potentially have it pushed to the SEOmoz blog which has hundreds of thousands of readers.

Think about ways you can help your customers improve their business as a priority over how you can help your own and it will really uncover some ideas that will push your brand higher in the public eye.

Great companies just have a way of appearing so naturally successful, but if you dig in a bit you’ll often notice that it’s largely connected to the way they make their own customers successful first.

Social Graph – I Know A Guy

To conclude this post I thought the best way to express the fact that advertising is dead is to draw on a phrase that has existed forever offline, but is about to become very big online as people rely more on their networks for referrals.

“I know a guy who can….. “

Usually you might hear that phrase and think someone is looking for a service where they need someone skilled, reliable and does great work. People who run into problems at their home might seek the advice from a friend before picking up a phone book and dialing blindly in hopes of finding someone available that isn’t going to screw them.

People turn to online reviews, and read them diligently to see recent experiences and find out who’s fair priced, does quality work, and is technologically savvy enough to create an online profile.

Generally, these people will be more organized, won’t waste your time, will do the work they were hired to do, and here’s the kicker…… Won’t rip you off!

This is why people look online, and actually search themselves to find a service provider as opposed to just select and go with one that is advertising. They are doing their due diligence. They know that doing business with anyone who can’t be found online is taking a risk.

This is why advertising is shifting into an entirely different realm where the customers are the ones seeking you out, and for that reason it’s all about being found instead of sending out things to those who aren’t looking.

To understand the concept of inbound marketing, you must first understand what outbound marketing is. The reason I say that is because outbound marketing is what most companies spend their advertising budget on today.

Outbound marketing is telemarketing. It’s sending direct mail, it’s TV commercials, it’s pre-roll advertising (the 10 second ad you can’t skip before the video starts), it’s magazine ads, newspaper ads, and billboards.

Outbound marketing is what many companies still chose to spend their advertising dollars on despite a growing demand for information, the key ingredient of inbound marketing.

When companies like TiVo are highly successful, that should be an indicator that customers don’t like the intrusive nature of outbound marketing.

Outbound is fading fast, people are finding better ways to spend their time, and this is primarily because the internet is self serve. Just about anything that exists can be found in fractions of a second thanks to search engines. So instead of companies standing in the way of what people want they have to learn how to step aside but still be noticed.

Inbound Marketing

Here is a simple way to grasp inbound marketing. Suppose you own a car dealership, and every day 10-15 people call you up and ask “can I use synthetic oil if my car has conventional oil in it right now”?

An inbound marketing solution would be to create a blog post, or a page on your website that answers that exact question in detail. Your dealership will have made a positive impact on anyone who finds your site looking for answers to that question.

In addition, the chances are much much greater that someone will share your post, and in doing so your site will become more valuable to search engines thus sending you more organic search traffic.

That strategy is much different that buying keywords like “synthetic vs conventional oil” and pointing it to your service department page. For one thing, you won’t get a very high quality score if the page doesn’t offer information about synthetic vs conventional oil, and the chances someone will ever share your service department page with their friends is slim to none.

Inbound marketing takes much more thought and creativity, but it can bring a lot of value when combined with other SEO best practices. If there were ever a time to consider shifting some of the budget towards inbound marketing, now would be the time because it’s much easier to dominate when your competitors haven’t yet figured it out, than to wait and try to out rank them after they’ve started to create valuable content.

In addition, car dealers that create this type of content should reach out for a little love from the manufacturer’s who should be willing to share links to quality information with their audience. This will also help the manufacturer illustrate to prospective buyers that they support and encourage this type of marketing in favor of the outbound type.

Inbound Marketing Is SEO

The fundamentals of any SEO campaign is to publish valuable content, that helps people understand concepts and/or how they relate to a particular query. Search engines are built to index information and to make it readily accessible when someone is looking for it. They rely on links, and not necessarily the amount of links, but the quality of them in particular.

If a website that contains unique and high quality content, links to another website using keywords in the anchor text, it’s sending a signal to Google that this site should help explain and/or offer additional information related to the keyword.

The more high quality links, high quality unique content, and a mix of other indicators not fully made public, determines how high up in Google a site should be ranked.

So to practice good SEO, a site must have good content. This will attract people to link to it.

So high quality content, is one of, but not the only, inbound marketing strategy.

What other types of inbound marketing strategies exist? Share your ideas in the comments, and check out recent posts like this one from SEOmoz about inbound marketing and the definition / branding of SEO.

Join thedealerblog group on LinkedIn! Share your thoughts and create a discussion if you have a question you’d like others to provide feedback on.

You Won’t Know Until You Blog

Blogging, who has time for blogging? It must be nice to have time to sit back, relax and write a masterpiece every other day. Why don’t you wake up, Rockefeller. This isn’t the oil business, and content isn’t black gold.

I Sure Had A Positive Attitude Didn’t I

I couldn’t see the benefit, or the reward that one might get from writing about things that they did or wanted to do.

Save it. I couldn’t care less about things that didn’t have dollar signs plastered all over em.

But the one thing I kept noticing was that many of the people I met who were founders of successful startups all shared one thing in common, they all seemed to have started with a blog.

People who I admired most, and who worked really hard on their brand, and cared deeply about their customers, and their products, all were very very passionate about blogging.

That was when I started to realize that a blog was much more powerful than what I saw them to be.  These were the beginnings of some of the most successful startup companies, even if all they looked like to you and me were a soapbox that people liked to stand on.

Your Blog Isn’t Just For Your Customers

The greatest thing I learned almost instantly from blogging was that I would see value almost immediately.  Even if what I started writing didn’t flow that great, or was too long and aimless, the act of blogging itself was revealing new ideas and inspiration.

Find Ways to Save People Time

Here’s something that your customers would appreciate.  Anything that saves them time, like gathering and organizing information that they might need to know before buying is great stuff for a blog.

Put yourself in the customers shoes and think about what they would want to see so they can make informed purchase decisions.

Blogging is Inbound Marketing

Companies are so used to spending money on advertising, that they keep trying to make it more compelling and clever while missing the opportunity in attracting people (Content) as opposed to distracting people (Ads).

When you produce content, it’s about attracting people to something they are interested in or curious about.  It’s content that is created to help someone solve a problem, and doesn’t have to be a problem your product solves.

The companies that are truly interested in their customers, are creating content they know their customers will enjoy and want to read, watch and share.

Today, people aren’t looking or listening at what you say your product does, they can find that out from other people in reviews and community forums.

People are looking at what you do, and how well you do it.  So if they see your company doing things that are interesting, they are more likely to have confidence that the product sells itself.

Companies that seek to enhance the lives of their customers beyond just the experience with the product will be successful, as they give their customers a reason to promote them.

98VRENGV9RMB

Today, Dolan Auto Group announced the winners of their $30,000 School Upgrade Project.

The first entry came January 18th, as detailed in a blog post from Dolan Auto Group:

This month marked the beginning of Dolan Automotive Group’s newest Facebook contest: “The $30,000 School Upgrade Project.” The project allows Northern Nevada principals to submit a proposal on behalf of their students and teachers to fund a $10,000 school upgrade.

The first entry comes from Hunsberger Elementary School Principal Sally Scott. Hunsberger was among the winning schools in this past fall’s “Class Project,” and teacher Chantal Dibble’s 2nd grade class won $2,500 towards their project, “Learning by Leaps with Laptops.”

Principal Scott’s project has a similar theme to Ms. Dibble’s with her entry, “Computers on the Run!” “What has now happened is that our school’s computer lab is being closed for computer-based student testing so often that our students’ computing skills are suffering,” wrote Principal Scott in her submission entry. Her proposal requests one or two classroom sets of laptops and charging carts to house them, so students will continue to have the use of computers while the school’s lab is closed for these mandated tests.

School Upgrade projects must be submitted by Tuesday, February 14th. Voting on proposals will begin on February 15th. For details on the $30,000 School Upgrade, click here, or visit our Facebook page.

As of this blog post, thousands of people are interacting and talking about Dolan Automotive Group on Facebook.

This is a great example of what dealerships should be doing online today.

Social Media initiatives like this can create brand evangelists, and lifetime customers for dealerships.

The posts on their wall speak for themselves, go check them out as there are about 100+ being added daily.

The best part is this is just the beginning, and fortunately since Dolan Auto Group is a client, I expect to share more posts on how dealers can leverage social media as a part of their online marketing strategy.

We see brands spend truckloads of money on outbound marketing, but very little on inbound marketing, where it’s out in the open for the world to see.

Car dealers want to find flaws in social media, despite the overwhelming trends that indicate it can’t be ignored. However, once they see the impact and overwhelming response to their dealers social media efforts, they want more!

Outbound marketing today is like standing in front of a crowd with a bullhorn, only to realize that everyone is wearing an iPod and listening to their favorite music. They might pause it just for a second, long enough to confirm their suspicions on what’s being said. One would imagine, that over time, they won’t even bother to pause for a second.

Inbound marketing is like standing in front of that same crowd, only this time it’s someone from the audience that is speaking and soon the entire audience is eagerly awaiting a response so they can like you or go back to their iPods.

Inbound Marketing would represent the investment and efforts put into insuring they listen and perhaps even share it with others.

So why are dealers still pumping dollars into less effective outbound marketing? Most likely because they are still trying to get whatever sales they can out of it before it’s completely gone. Even though they’d like to have lifetime customers, many dealers just want to get the sale today regardless of anything else.

Inbound marketing is a two way conversation. It builds confidence and trust, and it’s something you want people to see and identify your brand with.

Example:

You want to promote your service department. You can run ads (outbound), or you could reach out to people on Twitter who have recently tweeted about car troubles and offer them a coupon to help them out.

The goal with inbound marketing is to create a unique value proposition in the experience of one customer that could lead to many more based on how you handled it.

Outbound Marketing

Here are some examples of outbound marketing. You don’t open up a dialog with someone, you just blast. The problem is that many people are so overwhelmed with having access to stuff they want, there is no time for the rest. This is why the following forms of media are becoming so ineffective:

• TV
• Newspapers
• Radio
• Billboards
• Direct Mail
• Email Marketing
• SEM / PPC Google Adwords

Inbound Marketing

• Social Media
• Blogging
• Charity / Sponsorships
• Community
• Word Of Mouth
• SEO

Most dealers allocate a high percentage of their overall marketing budget towards outbound marketing. That was effective at one time, but not anymore.

People don’t spend as much time watching TV, because they can see most of what they want online, at a time that is convenient for them and without commercials.

Newspapers are being replaced by online news.

Radio is replaced with iPods.

Billboards are online banner ads.

Direct Mail is the spam folder.

Adwords is part inbound (customers are entering a search) and works best with an SEO Strategy.

So how about inbound, here’s what’s happening:

Social Media – Facebook has 500 Million members. Run ads that aren’t targeted and you can blow through money fast. This is because people decide what they experience, and your brand has add value or it will be ignored.

Blogging – A blog establishes a presence. It’s like having a neon open sign. The challenge is getting people to come in and feel comfortable. This is accomplished by responding to comments and having recent posts added.

Charity – This gives people appreciation for your business, and the help it offers to people in need.

Community – Having an interest in the community is supporting local schools and giving back.

Word of Mouth – One of the most powerful ways to get business is by having someone recommend you, but giving someone reason to do so requires effort.

SEO – Having an SEO strategy ensures your site is among those that are clicked 80% of the time, and doesn’t cost you for each visit.

One of the most obvious things that could explain the slow transition for dealers is that the inbound list can vary greatly in cost. There are some really cheap offers out there, but as the saying goes, you get what you pay for.

Dealers are also old school, so they like the outbound pricing consistency and process. They are familiar with it, it’s very consistent and predictable for them.

The inbound marketing is more volitale and perhaps risky in terms of what can happen and whether they would be prepared to handle it. This takes more time to build since it requires learning how to engage and become seen.

The fact is that people want to see businesses having a conversation, and helping their customers with questions, and offering advice to solve problems. This is how people make decisions today on who to trust, who to buy from, and who to refer their friends to.

Today, perhaps it’s a conversation on Facebook. Tomorrow, it could be a comment on your blog. The next day it could be a customer who wrote a review on your Places page. Your job is to be aware of it, to respond to it in a timely manner, and to encourage more of it everyday.

If you’re doing those things, chances are you’ll be much more visible in your market without being seen as intrusive. You’ll be offering people the information they are asking you for, because they are confident you’ll provide it. And your competitors will be the ones competing on price, spending money on ads, and trying to delete bad reviews while writing fake positive ones.

So consider your options carefully, and an easy way to remember which one to choose is that inbound marketing is an investment and outbound marketing is over.

There has been a lot of conversation lately about dealerships allowing 3rd party access to their data. In this post, I will provide you with some information that you will be able to use in determining how your data is used and some ways you may limit it’s use.

First of all, what is data? What’s the difference between good data and bad data? Why would anyone want to have access to my data? What could they do with my data and how can I monitor what is being done with it?

Data is stored in a database, and the easiest way to visualize a database is to think of an excel spreadsheet. You have rows and columns. At the very top is a row that is divided into columns, and each column has a title.

ID | Name | Address | Email | Phone | ……

Then each row represents a “record” in the database, that makes it unique so that it can be cross referenced by other database tables “other excel spreadsheets” if you will.

Lets assume the following:

1030033 | Fred Smith | 213 Main Street | fred@yahoo.com

The first number, or the ID is tied to Fred Smith. In a real database you wouldn’t see things like the numerical portion of the address in the same column as the name of the street, but I’m just doing it like this to simplify the example.

So 1030033 refers to Fred Smith, and if you had another database table where you wanted to create a new way to reference Fred Smith without using his name you could simply use his ID and create another number. Lets say Fred Smith is a lifetime customer, and each time Fred buys a car you want to create a new ID for him because its a big deal. All of his ID’s will refer back to the original 1030033, but instead of doing that you want to give Fred a “VIP” status so whenever he brings his car in there is a little “VIP” icon next to his name.

One way a web based application could accomplish this feature is like so:

The first digit of the person’s ID identifies how many vehicles they have purchased from your dealership. So if you wanted to know at a glance without diving into data you absolutely don’t have any use for in this particular query, you could simply sort your ID column and immediately you could see you have 6 people that have a user ID that begins with 8. That would mean you have six people who have bought eight cars from you. Then you have 20 that have bought seven cars, and you get the picture.

Well instead of looking at the “raw data” for every customer who walks in, you simply have your web developer design a cool looking little “VIP” icon that will be displayed next to any customers name that has a user ID that begins with a 2 or above. That means anyone who has bought 2 or more cars from you will have a VIP icon.

The purpose of explaining it like this was to illustrate that your data is only meaningful to you when you understand it in the context of how it is stored. If the above example was true in your system, a user ID number would have significant meaning to you as opposed to just looking like a random string of numbers.

Find Out What Data Is Being Shared and With Whom

Now with that being said, the next step is to understand how your data is being stored, who has access to it, and so forth. Let’s just keep with the above example being true, that the first digit represents the number of cars purchased by a customer.

If you were given 15 minutes to select 5 ID’s from a competitors database, don’t you think you’d like to take the five with the highest first digit in their ID? Of course, they would be considered the most profitable customers of that dealership.

However, you would make that selection only because I haven’t given you any other parameters to consider.

Let’s add another field to make it more interesting. The column header just has “CLV” at the top and since I created the database I know that “CLV” stands for Customer Lifetime Value.

Without having been told what CLV stood for, that column wouldn’t have meant much to you, just a three digit column from 000 to 999. Who cares what that means right? Wrong.

This column is the cumulative figure (multiply by 1000) of the total revenue earned to date by this customer.

So if your customer has an ID of 5959393 and their three digit number is 050, you can tell me on average how much they spent per vehicle. ($10k). The first digit tells me they bought 5 cars, the three digit code tells me they’ve spent $50k. Now we are getting somewhere.

That “CLV” column has lot of importance now, perhaps even more important that the first digit of their ID #.

So How Can This Help You Protect Your Data?

This simply boils down to what fields your 3rd party needs access to. In the case of TrueCar, they simply need to know if Fred bought a car from you after he went through their process. They don’t need to know how much he spent, or how many cars he’s bought from you, or anything else.

So the answer to this is to simply create a dedicated True Car database table. This table will only be populated if one of their leads actually buys a car from you.

I’d also suggest time stamping their lead in your own database so if you and another local dealer wanted to do a little “analysis” on how they are distributing the leads, you’d have some ability to identify trends in the data.

Dealers really need to spend some time understanding how their data is collected, stored, analyzed and shared. Your database is gold. Don’t let outside people wander in and out of the vault unless you know what they are doing in there.

And if you know what they’re doing in there, you won’t have to question whether they are up to no good, because you simply give them access to the areas they need and that’s it.

If you ask any legitimate company to provide a recent snapshot of the data they’ve taken they should be able to answer you within 24 hours and if not, lock em out.

What Is TrueCar?

TrueCar operates a website which publishes prices for new and used cars. Their slogan “Know the Real Price” claims to offer the most transparent pricing data available on just about any vehicle on the market.

So if you are in the market to buy a new car, and have narrowed it down to the one you want, you can go to their site and enter in the year, make, model and TrueCar will give you a price, and list some of the local dealers who can sell it to you at that price (if they pay TrueCar a fee.)

TrueCar doesn’t sell cars. They just try to dictate the way cars are sold, and if it means turning dealer against dealer, that’s what they’ll do. In fact, they’ve been at it for awhile.

How Does TrueCar Rip off Dealers?

TrueCar is ripping off dealers by accessing data and using it to create competition in the market.

A customer who buys a car from a dealership after going through TrueCar will be “proof” that a dealership was able to sell a particular car at that price. If one dealer can do it, others should too, and so the “race to the bottom” ensues.

It doesn’t take long to see how dealers are going out of business.

TrueCar aims to make a commodity out of the car business. I don’t know about you, but buying salt, sugar, coffee beans, soybeans, aluminium, copper, rice, wheat, gold, silver (commodities) is not very realistic for the automotive industry.

That’s where this goes if dealers don’t step up and stop this now. Cars are highly sophisticated, and it turns out that sophistication comes from the US, more specifically Detroit.

TrueCar Is Betting $200M That It Will Take A Long Time To Figure Out What They Did

And quite frankly, they know they are going to get away with it:

In a statement, TrueCar said it is “addressing technical and procedural questions raised by regulators who may not know what to make of our service…. TrueCar invites and takes seriously questions about consumer protection and is vigilant about ensuring that its partner dealers honor their commitments to buyers.”

[LA Times]

So what exactly are they doing, and why does this need to be exposed and investigated.

1. They are charging dealers a fee for every customer who buys a car through this process. It’s $299 for a new car buyer, $399 for used.

2. They have access to a growing number of dealership databases so they can accurately charge the dealer for every sale they sent their way.

3. They are currently partnering and acquiring companies that have vast amounts of customer data, pricing data, email addresses, phone numbers, credit scores, and private financial information.

So isn’t it odd that they are charging dealers, the same dealers they may eventually put out of business? Sounds like ethical business practices to me.

Next is the dealers database they so “conveniently” need to have full access to in order to determine whether or not the customer who came in with a TrueCar price sheet actually bought a car. Don’t worry, they don’t care about the price that customer just paid, and they certainly wouldn’t tell your competitors, can you imagine?

The point I’m trying to make on that last one is, that Scott Painter, the CEO wrote on his blog that they don’t use that data:

We don’t use our dealer partners’ information to populate the TrueCar pricing curve. That information comes from entirely separate sources of anonymized data that represent nearly 90% of all vehicle transactions in the U.S.

So what I’m sitting here thinking is, what does he consider the definition of “anonymous data” to mean? If you delete the names is it anonymous? Because, if you have enough data you can certainly cross-reference by email address. That’s crazy talk!, or is it?

TrueCar claims it’s not using the data like that, which seems odd especially for a company that is acquiring data is massive quantities. DealerTrack has already started turning over their data, as of October 1st, 2011:

On August 19, 2011, we agreed to sell our wholly owned subsidiary, ALG, to TrueCar in a transaction structured as a tax-free reorganization. In consideration for the sale of ALG, we were to receive a 15.0% equity interest in TrueCar and a warrant to increase our ownership interest to up to 19.9%. In a separate series of transactions, TrueCar completed a new equity financing raise with other investors. To maintain our 15.0% ownership upon the closing of the transaction on October 1, 2011, we made an additional investment in TrueCar in the amount of $7.5 million through cash remaining on the balance sheet of ALG on the date of sale.

We have also entered into additional commercial arrangements with TrueCar for its use of certain DealerTrack and Chrome intellectual property and data in its products and services. In addition, we have the right to appoint a director to TrueCar’s board of directors, which we have exercised as of October 1, 2011.

[source: DealerTrack Holdings 10Q]

TrueCar Tells Dealers To Change Prices

Now remember the quote from Scott Painter’s post? The one where he states that they don’t use the pricing data. Well it appears that is not true based on the following information shared in an industry podcast.

In Larry Bruce’s podcast, pay attention to the 20:00 mark:

“It has been an absolute race to the bottom, and our TrueCar rep used to call us 3-4 times a week because people were changing prices that fast. TrueCar was telling you this? Yes, they can go in and see the data, and they can see what everyone else was doing…..”

Here’s a recent quote from Painter where he is indicating that consumers don’t have to trust the dealers:

“There’s an average 25% range from top to bottom on what people pay for a commodity — the exact same car,” Painter says. “Buying a car should be more transparent. You don’t have to trust the dealer anymore — trust the data.” [CNN Money]

What consumers should do is question the data.

What dealers should do is ensure the privacy of their customers data.

What the state should do is investigate TrueCar and find out what they plan to do with all the data they claim they aren’t using, and were never authorized to be in the possession of when it was originally submitted.

Dealers are always looking for new ways to reach prospective car buyers, and when a company comes along with a product that will bring people to your showroom floor, dealers are anxious to jump on it.

Of course, the service isn’t free. In fact, it’s $299 or $399 per car sold, with the higher of the two amounts when it’s a used car.

You don’t sell a car, you don’t pay. Or do you?

For one, they aren’t going to call you up at the end of the month and say “Hey, did you sell any cars to the people walking in holding a TrueCar report?” They are going to need access to your DMS. Whether you realize it or not, your DMS is a goldmine of data. It’s got phone numbers, email addresses, and all kinds of stuff you’d never want your competitors to get their greedy little hands on.

The fact is, TrueCar should have access to only the data required to analyze the ratio of people who came in via the TrueCar process, and whether they purchased.

What I would like to know, and what dealers should band together and ask is, what data is being utilized, and if such data is used in a way that may be considered a conflict of interest.

I would request in writing that your DMS provider disclose to you anyone who has access or has requested access to your data, and provide the names and phone numbers as well as a copy of the contract you signed that authorized them to do so. If you’ve authorized it, I would consult a lawyer immediately.

Dealers need to understand that access to their DMS should be restricted to internal use only and any company that requests access should not be permitted to store such data, sell, publish or in any way distribute it to other partners.