Straight talk: This mandate has nothing to do with helping dealers build and promote their own reputation in a meaningful way. It has everything to do with dragging up the dealers that are damaging GM's reputation by failing to protect and promote their own. There are two names on the side of every building and GM has a strong case for doing this. That said, I echo Greg May:
"May said GM's intentions are good but the execution is ham-handed."
For those of you like me that aren't as smart as the author or the Dealer Principal featured in this article:
Definition of HAM-HANDED
: lacking dexterity or grace : heavy-handed
Drew makes an excellent point here, overwhelming sameness of the retailer is likely to be underwhelming to the consumer. Good for the OEM, not so good for the dealer. There clearly could have been some exceptions for dealers that were already successful in this area, many of whom are active readers and posters here on DealerRefresh.
As far as SFE is concerned, I'd strongly caution dealers from "mailing it in" and abdicating the responsibility of preserving and promoting your reputation to any vendor, OEM endorsement or not. If GM mandates that you use them, use them to augment your own efforts to engage your prospective customers in a meaningful way, but YOU must be involved.
I'm extremely concerned about the long-term effectiveness of pre-screening survey respondents and only inviting positive responders to post on 3rd party sites AFTER a positive review has been published on a Cobalt site's "testimonials page." This may be great for your Cobalt site's SEO, but let's be honest that may not be the best thing for dealers that have invested in a primary site for more control over user experience. My bigger concern is that Google will see the same referring domain attempting to dump positive review after positive review into a dealer's G+ page. I think they'll define this as solicitation at best, and their TOU is clear about that.
Last thoughts:
[*=left]A "testimonial page" on your own website is advertising, it is not the same as a vetted 3rd party review to the consumer. (There has been lots of discussion about this on DealerRefresh already. I think we settled that discussion 18 months ago.) It will be even less effective if it looks exactly the same as every other competing dealer for your brand. Expect consumers to reject that content as advertising and seek out 3rd party sites.
[*=left]Concentrating on "first to publish for seo" instead of "first importance to the consumer" demonstrates a misunderstanding of WHY reviews and reputation work.
