"Social Media Marketing", "Social Networking" catchy buzzwords used to push new platforms and for dated industry "experts" to claim a new found mastery.

Opinions on proper use of popular platforms vary immensely.

• From one tweet a week to many per day.
  
• Website providers putting Digg and Delicious buttons on Inventory?
  
• Ning sites for car dealers?

The real question is what are you using different social media platforms for and what are the methods you are using to promote awareness?

The image above comes from a viral event as a result of an idea on Facebook.com. Users in the UK plotted to reproduce this commercial by T-Mobile in real life and effectively closed down Liverpool Street Station in London. (<also source of the image)

Think of the cheap marketing that T-Mobile got, even if the whole thing was plotted by a social media marketing firm or happened "organically".

Click to expand...

To be effective using social media to drive awareness and sales it requires GREAT CONTENT and a network that will respond.

Effective Social Media Content

The quality of your content is the most important factor, the better it is the more it will be passed around to create a viral effect. Without content that has the potential to go viral it's usually a waste of bandwidth and spam. (Don't even get me started on using social media spam as a "SEO tool", that's a series of posts) Others will link to it and get people talking about you, your company, your products and interacting and viewing your content.

"Direct marketing will reduce the chances of a piece of web content going viral. People do not want to be sold to, the initial social media marketing push should be more about the conversation than the sale. A more aggresive sales angle can be added later, once the social media push has ended." - Wordtracker.com

Building a Social Media Network

To effectively promote content via Social Media and Social networking you have to be networked. A twitter account that follows noone, a digg account that only self promotes, a facebook profile in the name of a dealership, linkedn profiles for corporate mascots, ning sites for car dealers that only consultant participate in really serve no purpose other than to republish content and has zero Social Media value.

To make sites like digg, facebook, stumbleupon and twitter work you have to work them or find some someone to work them for you in concert with yours and others GREAT CONTENT. Each site has it's own rules written and understood. Promoting your own content on twitter is completely acceptable and doing it on digg may cause you and your domain to be banned from digg and place your site in a social media "sandbox".

Each site offers levels of connection with other users and those friends make using these destinations not only easier but profitable as well.

• Want a car story to go popular on digg.com? Get a high end user to submit it for you. It got us national press and we sold cars from it!!
  
• Want to test out the drivingsales servers on traffic from twitter? Tweet a story that others will retweet.
  
• Want your commercial to get over 300,000 views from youtube.com? Make it worth watching over and over again.

Cuban Gynecologist: Local Car Commercial

Automotive Content can get noticed and drive traffic. Just remember what the users of the sites want to see and build your network in each location and connect with other users who can help you drive traffic to your content. While at the same time remembering that social networking is a give and take, you have to promote their content as well.

Here are some easily identified noneffective uses of social media and networking sites.

• Bouncing JPEGs of used car inventory on video hosting sites.
  
• Having delicious and digg button on inventory.
  
• Feeding your your inventory to twitter.
  
• Stumbling and digging your new microsite.
  
• Fictitious zip based twtitter accounts.
  
• Ning Sites and facebook profiles for Car Dealerships
  
• Scrapping email addresses to send spam to from social networks. (Sorry couldn't resist)

About the author: Paul Rushing provides SEO services, microsites and craigslist inventory distribution to car dealers nation wide. His business has been completely built via social networking and inbound marketing. He can be reached at 912-266-1629.

As someone who has been playing on the eCommerce side of the automotive industry for some time now I find myself having to explain things quite often.  Some folks get it, others don't.  And that statement can be used for just about any venture I've worked on in the past 8 years of doing this.

I also have a degree in History and have always been fascinated with how many similarities can be found since man began recording things (yeah, I know I'm a dork).  We seem destined to repeat ourselves over and over again, but with bigger toys.  I will say that I have struggled to find a similar thread in history that can relate to this Information Revolution we're in.  The only major event before, when things moved very rapidly, was during the Industrial Revolution, but things are much cleaner this time around.  And you didn't have two major widespread-philosophies in the industrial revolution.  Yes, there were the workers and the owners, but that was not as global as the users and the doers are in our current revolution.  So, what piece of history can we correlate things to today?

I know!  The transportation evolution.  Not sure if we can really call that one a revolution because it took so long, and is still occurring even today.  But if we look at the earlier parts of the evolution we have the wheel, the horse/camel, and the boat.

Sailing vessels did more for humanity than any other form of transportation.  It brought villages together, it created commerce on a large scale, and it created exploration.  Communication, Commerce, Advances - these

themes sound fairly similar don't they?

The sailors of the day were on the cutting edge.  These were tough individuals who understood the mood of the sea, knew how their hull cut the waves, and what type of rigging material could get them to port before the competition.  They were delivery men who were paid on how much and how often they could get a product to market.  A product, in this case, could be grapes from Italy to France or a map of a "New World" with scientific studies of the indigenous people or wildlife.

Then there were the people who just booked charter on a ship, or simply waited at market for the latest products to come in.  Is all of this really starting to sound familiar now?  Sometimes products failed because it was too much for people to stomach.  There might not have been the financial resources available for the expedition or nobody knew what to do with that silk you were hauling back.

Essentially, we had the doers and the beneficiaries.  The sailors and the customers. And all the same principles that govern us today were in existence thousands of years ago.

Today, most of us on DealerRefresh are sailors and our customers are both our coworkers/bosses/vendors and the people who buy or service their cars at our stores.

So, what is the take-away from this article?  Next time you find yourself against a wall, trying to get something accomplished, find some relief in that you are on the cutting edge attempting to take someone on a voyage with you who is just doesn't get it.  And you're definitely not the first person trying to get the ship out of port amidst adversity.

And here's a little quote that popped up in Viigo for me yesterday of Putt's Law:

"Technology is dominated by two types of people:  those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand."

Click to expand...

Disclaimer:  I'm sure I am not the first person to ever compare the information revolution to the transportation evolution, but I didn't do a single bit of research on this article.  I'm claiming it to be 100% original to me.  It actually stemmed from a Sunday afternoon chat with my grandfather about the evolution of car sales from the horse trade and his struggle with technology.  During that conversation I formed the similarities between these two different periods of human history in an attempt to help him understand things a little better.

Car Buyers Will Get Quick Access to Quotes from Qualified Dealers and a Better Overall Car Buying Experience; Dealers Will Have the Opportunity to Connect with More In-Market Buyers

Redwood City, CA, July 7, 2009 – Dealix, a division of Cobalt and an industry leader in automotive sales leads for dealers, dealer groups and manufacturers, announced today that it will power the car quote and dealer selector platform on Yahoo! Autos beginning next month. Yahoo! Autos, one of the leading automotive research websites, attracts a broad range of car buyers, with over 6.5 million unique visitors shopping on the site each month, according to May 2009 comScore Media Metrix data.

Car shoppers on Yahoo! Autos can research and compare vehicles, read expert reviews, and get information on vehicle incentives. Once they decide on a vehicle, Dealix’s new Lead Platform will present consumers with a choice of local dealers and quickly deliver the request to the chosen dealer. This will enable dealers to launch a fast response to consumers’ inquiries and deliver a better overall car buying experience.

“Yahoo! Autos’ extensive expertise in delivering a great online shopping experience for millions of car buyers, coupled with Dealix’s leading technology and strong relationships with auto dealers, creates a great experience for the buyer, while speeding sales for U.S. auto dealers,” said Ed Crawford, vice president of strategic planning and business development for Dealix. “Our research and firsthand experience show that when you present qualified, local dealers to car buyers and facilitate a seamless and quick connection between the two, the overall experience is better for the car buyer and helps the dealer to match them with their ideal car.”

Click to expand...

Dealix will begin powering Yahoo! Autos New Car Leads on August 15, 2009.

About Dealix
Dealix, a division of Cobalt, is the world’s leading provider of quality leads for new and used cars for dealerships, dealer groups, and automotive manufacturers. Dealix has the broadest reach and the highest quality lead supply network in the industry, including Yahoo! Autos, Kelley Blue Book, Edmunds.com, AOL Autos, MSN Autos, and others. Dealix also represents Edmunds’ Premier Dealer Program and powers AOL Autos’ and MSN Autos’ price quotes. Dealix connects dealers with the millions of car shoppers who prefer independent Internet sites when shopping for new cars and used cars online. Dealix’s Lead Platform 2009 quickly matches thousands of serious new and used vehicle buyers to the most appropriate dealers daily, delivering a quality car buying experience for consumers and providing dealers with one of the most efficient methods available today for marketing and selling cars.

Contact
Amy Hatch
Cobalt
206.219.8132

If you have no idea what has been happening in Iran, it is probably because you've been living under Iraq a rock.  I'm going to try to stay out of the politics behind it, but Iran is the "religious democracy" with an Ayatollah as the head of government and an elected president who serves as the "faceman".  The recent Presidential election ended up in conspiracy as many of the citizens did not believe the outcome (who, why, what are irrelevant for the purpose of this article).  As a result Iranians poured into the streets in protest of the election results.  During the protests, violence broke out and the Iranian government banned foreign news reporters from the country.

Without adequate reporting how is the world keeping up with everything that is happening in Iran?  How are Iranian citizens rallying people to their cause?  Social media!

Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and facebook have been the main forms of reporting and the coverage has been much better than any major broadcasting network could ever fathom.  Of course the quality of the media might be a little off, but the number of stories, conveyed emotions, and believability more than make up for cell phone pictures and hand-held video footage.

Ladies and gentlemen, whether you care about what happens in Iran or not, this event is going to go down in history as a major change in the way people communicate and how much power a single voice can have.

Click to expand...

I have read stories by newspaper journalists stating that the state of accurate information is going to decline along with the decline of the newspaper.  I have also heard people say that things like Watergate will never be exposed again because the professional journalist will not be around to snoop things out.  These could be true; only time will tell.  However, there is a trend of information sources moving to social media that has now been exposed by the conflicts in Iran.

Like you, I am getting tired of reading all the stuff about social media.  I am not going to tell you this is a must and you're going to go out of business if you don't use it.  I just wanted to point out a major event in our lifetime and maybe give you a little something extra to think about.