Part of my daily online experience is visiting Automotive-Internet blogs and online communities. I’ve been doing this since joining Dealer.com 3 years ago to keep up on industry related discussions and understand what new shiny toys dealerships are using to produce results.
This year, participation in these forums by dealerships has been minimal at best. After trolling through DealerRefresh, Automotive Digital Marketing, and DrivingSales this afternoon, the posts and comments have been dominated by vendors in a seemingly never-ending back-and-forth battle of who is the king and the court jester in their respective markets (whatever those markets might be, primarily SEO services). Whenever I see these posts and want to comment, I wonder what audience is going to see my thoughts. Someone @ a dealership? An OEM employee? Nope. I’d bet that a majority of these website’s visitors are the same guys and gals working for our competition that I shake hands with at industry events and after presentations at dealerships.
The only community that is ‘keeping it real’ is DealerRefresh’s Forum. I think this is probably by design with the forum’s moderators each being from dealerships, not auto vendors.
My question is, where are the brightest minds on the frontlines of automotive retailing? I want to see what they have to say and learn from their experiences. What am I missing?
Where have all the car dealers gone?
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Patrick, thanks for the mention and I hear you loud and clear. Most of the sites/forums have been overrun by the vendors. Myself and Alex have really worked hard to try and get “dealers” participating. I’ll go out on a limb here and agree with you that DealerRefresh.com does indeed have the most dealer personnel contributing and commenting, something we are very proud of. With that being said..we welcome the vendors to participate but strive for a balance. I would venture to say less than 80% of dealers are active on any of these 3 forums.
Didn’t you and I have this conversation at JD?
Getting more dealers involved in social is another reason why we are running a Meet-n-Tweet contest during the 7th Digital Dealer Conference.
http://www.dealerrefresh.com/win-a-free-flip-minohd-video-camera-from-dealerrefresh/
@dealerrefresh
I had a ‘Where are all the dealers at?’ conversation no less than 20 times @ JD Power. I understand that times are tough and a team to Las Vegas for 3 days isn’t in most dealership’s training budgets (whether this is a good move or not is an entirely different conversation).
BUT…these online communities are free learning environments for dealerships. Why General Managers don’t promote and encourage participation on these sites is crazy! What’s the harm…your staff will up-to-date on industry trends, success stories, and best practices?
I think you’ve developed a great concept for #DD7. From the 200+ dealers already enrolled, it looks like Digital Dealer 7 WILL be where the dealers are at. Dealer participation in these conferences is key in driving our industry forward.
I would guess that less than 20% of dealers use any of these websites. It is mostly vendors.
I think that 20% is still high. I mentioned ADM, DealerRefresh, and DrivingSales during a majority of my conversations with dealers. I’m shocked by their reaction of hearing about these websites for the 1st time.
So much information is shared through these communities that could better their processes and people…
Yeah, I agree with Patrick, 20% seems a bit high.
I’ve been somewhat out of the community loop for the past 18 months and only now getting back into things. I, too, am surprised at how few dealers are in the online communities sharing ideas and best practices. This is an immature industry, fellas, with lots of room to evolve and flourish. And, you are right, the vendors have (understandably) highjacked a lot of the sites with their constant postings of white papers and thinly veiled advertisements for their products.
Not that I have any solutions to this, of course.
Patrick, if you took a look at the Google Analytics from the ADM Professional Community, you would see that every month there are OVER 11,000 “Absolutely Unique Visitors”, sometimes more… Yet, there are less than 3,000 registered members who participate in the Forums, Blogs, Videos and other content being contributed. I know from looking at random selections of IP addresses, locations, browsers and other technically identifying data that appears in the analytics reports that the majority of site VISITORS are not suppliers… However, I also know that content contribution is disproportionately high for suppliers. Which is what we should expect.
My point is that I believe a lot more dealership employees visit, read, observe and take what they can get of value, versus those that speak up or express an opinion.
When I worked at Courtesy Chevrolet, I visited DealerRefresh and several other sites on a daily basis… But, I rarely contributed. The fact is that the most popular of these types of sites are each different in several striking ways. Each community or blog has a different set of policies and procedures, and each one generates a unique personality. My own personal vision when starting http://www.ADMPC.com was to have a wide open, unfiltered and uncensored exchange of ideas, best practices, strategies, tactics, etc…. And, if they come from suppliers and get used by people working in dealerships, then more power to everyone involved!
Ralph – I don’t disagree about the value that people in dealerships can get from these online communities. What you have done with ADM is amazing and truly a reflection of the content and voice that has been created.
The point that I was trying to make is the disproportionate amount of suppliers to dealers participating in these forum. Understanding that a large majority of any visitor to a blog, forum, or community is a reader vs contributor, I find it odd how few individuals in retail are adding to discussions in our industry.
Keep up the good work with the ADM Community. It’s one of the best communities for information in our space in my opinion!