Changes to DealerRefresh

[joe.pistell]

Been reading through this Joe. I like it!

DR attracts the brightest minds. Many of them are readers only.

I'd love to have long time readers, get a popup modal with an invite to drop a short thank you note to share with the audience.
or a 'what does DR do for you?"
or... "[Check here] if you've come to see what mad scientist work is @Ryan Everson upto this month.

 

[Alex Snyder]

@Alex Snyder, I have a quick question. The old UI had a setting that I could change the number of post that shows in the forum feed. I can't find it now. Is that feature gone?

It is back. And @Jeff Kershner has his username hover overs again.

 

[Alex Snyder]

@Jeff Kershner we have a new feature in the Admin panel that allows us to remove entire Nodes from the Acitivty Widget on the home page:



I have already taken the reviews Nodes (forums) off. We can turn those back on once all the reviews are built.

 

[joe.pistell]

we have a new feature in the Admin panel

dammmm... u are rocking!

 

[Alex Snyder]

New registration page is up. Callout to Todd Caputo for the quote that can't be seen in this screenshot.

I've been heavily concentrated on making the Guest experience better with the hopes it will lead to more people becoming members. Membership grows the community and is good for all of us!

 

[Alex Snyder]

Big update today in the backend. DealerRefresh now has a complete end-to-end lead-to-sponsor-to-banner-ad-to-accounting management system.

Think of it as a CDP and CRM custom-built for our needs that flows directly into a DMS with two-way sync. Not anything anyone other than Jeff, myself, and staff see, but I wanted to nerd about it here.

The banner ads you're seeing are 100% hosted and served by this system.

AND the ads are contextual. When we create a sponsor, an API examines the ad and the sponsor to generate keywords for the ad. If a keyword matches the AI summary about a thread, that ad scores higher for placement. When an ad doesn't match a keyword, ads are displayed randomly. There are also some performance algorithms built into the ad server. This all helps our sponsors reach the right eyeballs. 97% of DealerRefresh traffic is not from members; it is from lurkers.

 

[Will G.]

Looks clean. Love it.

 

[Alex Snyder]

We now have our own Showroom. A fresh coat of wax on our top 100 posters by volume, our sponsors and what the benefits of being a member are.

I have plans to redesign the look and feel of the awards page. I will make a fresh post about the Best of the Best because that was such a good idea by @joe.pistell it warrants more eyeballs. We also have more ideas for it.

My 2nd favorite part of this is the Sponsor Spotlight. It is fully connected to our new Sponsor Management System. It is so cool to watch the automations from taking a lead to a full sponsor and see them appear on this page. This isn't something I can share publicly, but as someone who loves building CRM-type systems this is soooooo much better.

And oh yeah, do I now have some cool ideas for building another CRM... maybe one day

 

[Jeff Kershner]

View attachment 9993

We now have our own Showroom. A fresh coat of wax on our top 100 posters by volume, our sponsors and what the benefits of being a member are.

I have plans to redesign the look and feel of the awards page. I will make a fresh post about the Best of the Best because that was such a good idea by @joe.pistell it warrants more eyeballs. We also have more ideas for it.

My 2nd favorite part of this is the Sponsor Spotlight. It is fully connected to our new Sponsor Management System. It is so cool to watch the automations from taking a lead to a full sponsor and see them appear on this page. This isn't something I can share publicly, but as someone who loves building CRM-type systems this is soooooo much better.

And oh yeah, do I now have some cool ideas for building another CRM... maybe one day

SWEET additions @Alex Snyder !!

This Best of the Best feature really highlights the many OG's that have CONTINUED to participate over the years. I'm also seeing several OG's that ARE still in the business but participate very little, if at all. SHAME!! Like any long standing forum, there's peak and valleys for traffic and engagement. With these changes we are already experiencing a HUGE peak. Maybe some of these OG's that no longer participate will find their way back to the OG of dealer forums.

Sponsor Spotlight is a HUGE upgrade for our sponsors. It's obvious you've been tapping into your abilities and experience building out CRM/CMS. Before you're done, DealerRefresh will be a turnkey marketing platform for industry vendors. Hummmm

 

[MattCopley]

I am not an OG. Largely because of my sporadic engagement using different email handles and low content contributions over the years with different companies. That said, I’m here to contribute… thoughts, prayers, and hopefully value here and there… would be good to build in some additional “core brain” alerts for users that are contributing to the forums on where they can add value.

Ok I’ll stop now and go back to the kids table … also emojis no longer render in content