Believe me Joe, I'm with you on prioritizing time and I certainly wouldn't expect nor suggest anyone drop whats working for something that might produce a glimmer of hope.
I've built facebook apps, iPhone apps, social networking sites, and during that time learned that more than anything I was actually building relationships with people.
I know that you've done a lot of your own web development on your sites as well, even if you didn't code it, you put together the scope and told them what to build. Having that kind of commitment is evident in the help you provide here.
For me, I wouldn't be nearly as far along if I didn't have help from certain people that are involved in this forum and in this industry, including you.
Along the same lines, I suspect that the more people help others whether its going and helping them move into a new house or give some advice that led them in a new direction, the value of that relationship becomes exponentially more powerful.
So how does this relate to which sources send you traffic?
This is just my theory, but heres what I think. The most powerful or valuable things that happen in life are done without explanation, without being measured, without being able to replicate under the same conditions, without having business objectives, without attribution. This simply means that for me, when I speak to someone who gets this stuff I learn and when I speak to someone that doesn't I teach. When I can neither learn or teach, I find someone else to speak with. I think thats becoming the motivation of most people in every experience they encounter and in supporting that we open new doors for people that they are comfortable in exploring.
Take Ford for example. I sincerely doubt anyone is sitting around saying "we should have never done that Facebook reveal of the new Explorer" or "we should never let the CEO say that Lexus has the best car in the world" even if it was the truth at the time. Mulally said that because it was true, but because he also wanted to be the best and set out to get there. These are risky things to do, not with thousands of dollars either, they gambled the company on social media and won.
I'm not saying that the car business has to become events of enlightenment, but I really do believe that if your business wants to resonate in the minds of the customer, it must seek out ways to become different. The fact of having things in the best interests of the customer must be #1, and currently they aren't. Here's why.
The customer has issues with not being consistently spoken to from one person to the next. I believe that internal competition, or unwillingness to accept blame when a mistake is made can be a couple of reasons. It seems that regardless of what is really going on, the customer never sees it exactly the way it really is so even good transactions carry a certain amount of hesitancy in the minds of the customer to feel fully confident.
Since referrals can represent to some extent the value or perceived value of a relationship, people are careful not to give poor ones out. On the contrary, if someone goes way beyond to help in a situation where not only is help unexpected, its to the disadvantage of the person giving it, the value is hard to measure or compare.
One example, giving away a customer to a competitor because it is in the best interests of the customer. This is hard, its clearly not doing anything for you or your business if you strictly measure ROI. What it does though, is become a memory that can span years and come around without ever really having the expectation to.
I see incredible opportunity for business owners to re-evaluate the message they're sending to people and do some analysis on how that message is intended to help or somehow make someone have a better day. Advertising and displaying the inventory, getting visitors to view the products are one thing, but getting someone to think that when it comes time where they're buying a new car it is without a doubt going to be from a certain individual is another.
Its become such that before I even think of talking to someone, I've looked them up, saw their blog, website, facebook, twitter, and have gained a tremendous understanding of how I can help them or how I see a mutual benefit to meeting them. This act typically stems from someone having said I should meet up with someone they spoke to recently because it sounds like we'd have some interesting things to talk about.
When people are doing this, thinking of me because of a previous discussion or what they read about what I'm doing these days on my blog, I am yet to find anything more valuable than being able to reach out to the people I know for help on just about anything I can think of.
This is why Google is threatened by Facebook, but eventually Facebook will be threatened by those who may have started building a network on their site or leveraging their site have gone off onto their own domain where organic search is low in terms of percentage of new visitors. The ultimate is to have people subscribing to you, reading your emails, engaging in the commentary, but essentially coming back because they gain a little bit of knowledge each time. When that happens, in my opinion, the budget spent to advertise isn't needed, and word of mouth represents a majority of the business.
This may seem like something that doesn't apply to cars, and it doesn't, at that point. Because you made it not about the product, but about the people who are looking to gain that thing that they get from you, that nobody seems to fully understand or be able to valuate they just know they need it.
