Kelly - thanks for the commendation! And I'm glad we aren't in a situation where we did something wrong - just something that looks fishy, but wasn't! Phew! I don't consider it a losing battle at all! In fact, like I said in my first post - I find it really interesting for a B2B brand that is looking to bring in international followers/community. There are definitely some lessons we learned early on that are still showing up and reinforcing what we learned. #ProTip: Have social media policies for your partner companies, especially ones in cities that have 28 million people!
We promoted the post with Facebook promoted post feature that is available to anyone and everyone. If you aren't familiar with this option, you CAN'T geotarget, but again, we were ok with that as you can read about in my other posts. What I learned after my original post was we put more into the promotion through Facebook than we usually do with the other types of ads we run - which is why over 70k actually saw (those are the "impressions" you pay for with promoted posts on Facebook) the post in their newsfeed/sidebar. We didn't do anything "edgy" @Yago...but we knew it would be somewhat interesting due to the international contingent of our current fan base. (As you can see from Kelly's original post, we didn't get a page liker spike, just a spike in "people talking about this".) Again, the largest concentrated percentage of likers of our page is the US.
As best we can tell, the outburst of likes came from the friends of friends of our Indonesian followers....Indonesia and a lot of other developing countries are heavy in the black-hat tactics it was assumed we employed, but I assure you we did not. I'm open about our contingent of Indonesian likers we have from years ago (read other post about that) and our guess is there are some connections of those people to some of the spam accounts that need to like/engage with lots of accounts (done automatically through computers) so it can't be pinpointed which companies they are paid/not paid to work with and so the accounts look "legit" because they interact with multiple pages. It's crazy that it's a business! I mean, who falls for that?? Or spam emails - the same thing - why?! How do these companies stay in business? So weird. Sorry...I digress...this is why I'm not so active on DR! Haha...
As for the deletion of the spam posts....that's a philosophical point. We prefer to delete spam. Real comments whether positive or negative - we do not delete. Thus Ryan/Greg getting left up on that post, but for the spam posts? They just look weird - you can't read them...one literally said "dude I like to party" with some jibberish before it. As a dealership, I wouldn't want that kind of spam on my page - some lewd and some just jibberish. I would delete it on my dealership's page and I stand by that decision of our company and believe that a dealership does not need to leave spam on their page - I don't feel that is a reflection of their opennness or transparency. If someone sprayed graffiti on you dealership would you leave it for all the world to see, in an effort to be open and transparent? I mean if it was really cool and mural-like, maybe, but I'm guessing 99.9% of dealerships would paint right over that graffiti! Now, Deleting real comments - that's another story - we don't advocate that and you can see we didn't do that in this case either.
I don't feel we have hesitated or skirted any issues. As soon as I heard about the post, within an hour I called Kelly directly to reach out, which I do feel is a best practice for a dealership, as well - to handle situations offline, as well as publicly. (Btw, have any of you talked to Kelly on the phone?? She has a beautiful voice - Kelly - as a sidenote, you should do voiceover work!) If anything, this situation has made me even more proud of my company because we can take a situation like this and show the world there was nothing weird about it AND get some additional training for our corporate FB ads team, as well as for B2B consulting!
Kelly, I do 100% agree with you, dealerships need to really understand what they are getting when they partner with a company, and I do believe the dealership should talk with the company about let's say a situation like this - because again, we can be painted to look like the villain, when in reality there is nothing further from the truth. Also - talk with our customers!! Heck you may or may not believe what I say, but I would hope you'd believe the dealerships that work with us. They did their homework - they did their due diligence. As did our OEM partners - they did REALLY thorough due diligence, investigating and talking with existing customers! All of them have full access to all of our financials, as well - so if something "shady" were going on, they would see it quick!
I think there is a perception that we are promising dealerships "massive engagement" or "gzillions of likers" or just signing them up for vaporware - not the case. I would be happy to take any of you on this thread and any of you lurkers through a full presentation of what we do (in a purely educational/non-pitchy way)...so you can see, we are a people company first and foremost. What we do isn't sexy/glamorous and "hidden" from our dealers...we do the heavy lifting of social and reputation. One of our largest value props we offer is time savings for the dealership. We are SUPER transparent with our dealerships on everything we do for them and how we do it. It's not magic or secret and we don't guarantee a ton of new likers, crazy engagement or perfect 5 star ratings across the board with 100 reviews per site - no one can guarantee those things and that's when you should be wary. There is effort and team work involved in all of it. In fact - Kelly, Kevin and Eley - since you guys are the most passionate, I would love to have you down to our Scottsdale office to meet the 100+ team members dedicated to Social/Reputation and get a chance to talk with them. I think you'd be pleasantly surprised that we are a whole bunch of people who work really really hard for our dealerships! (And c'mon - It's not warm where you guys are! Ok, Eley - yours isn't so bad, but it's going to be 77 in Scottsdale on Wednesday...heck, I'll come with you - I'm in NY and it's FREEZING!!!)
I'm really thankful this happened...while this was a case that wasn't what it appeared, it reminded me there are really committed dealerships out there looking to better all of their fellow dealerships for no gain of their own...which is why Jeff originally started DealerRefresh and should be really proud of it. It's why I started reading DR when I was at my old dealer group and how Jeff ended up at that dealer group! (Haha...sorrryyyy.....) You guys are champions for dealerships and I think that's awesome...what you do for your dealerships makes you part of the very small and savvy 10% of dealerships, but what you do for your fellow dealer makes you part of the 1%.
