Drew,
This is what makes this community so great. I had the opportunity to learn from you earlier this week in an area outside of my field on another thread and I sincerely hope that my comments here will be beneficial to you. If nothing else I want to try to challenge a few of your opinions about reviews.
Short answer - no, we don't know. And all the surveys/studies by competing vendors and promoters are only muddying the water.
I'll start by saying I absolutely agree with you on this point. I've seen and heard some ridiculous suggestions and best practices that were stated as fact and just like a review, I'd strongly urge a healthy dose of "consider the source."
Reviews are "hot" because dealers make them as such
Are actual pictures of inventory "Hot" because dealer's made it so, at what point did more than 1 pic become HOT? How about actual pricing on pre-owned units, when did that get HOT as opposed to "call for price"? Emailed quotes? Chat? etc and on and on. My point is simply that every facet of the business is a result of consumer demand, right? I'm sure you are familiar with the marketing wave concept. The early adopters offered a price, took better pics, or started leveraging reviews extremely successfully when they were the only ones in their PMA doing it. They knew consumer's would respond. The consumer base became educated and gravitated toward those businesses that offered that information freely and everybody else plays catch up or fails. Some markets are mid-wave, and some markets are on the back side of the review wave. Also, don't forget the review marketing wave isn't isolated to dealerships, the consumer is utilizing this content in a lot of their online shopping behavior. Consumer Demand is what is driving review marketing right now, not dealers.
I think the restaurant market in your area is pre-wave, but watch and see what happens when that wave hits...
we now have to hire companies to manage our presense and reviews.
I'm going to ruffle a few feathers here with my opinion... NO, YOU DON'T! Do you have a vendor on retainer for upset customers in your showroom? "Quick Mrs. GM, hide under your desk and I'll call our Reputation Vendor to come talk to this unhappy person." Totally Ridiculous, right? The best person to handle an upset customer in the showroom, or online, is the GM or Owner. PERIOD! There are some great tools available to help you identify potential problems, but most don't NEED a managed solution.
I get really aggravated by the fear mongering that is going on in the review space. There are a lot of businesses that have popped up that are attempting to sell a service based on fear, and as powerful of a motivator as that may be to engage online, it is the wrong way to go into a review marketing strategy. This isn't a war, it isn't you against the customer! They are your best asset, not your enemy. ZMOT got mentioned in this thread already, you can watch a short video on it
here, but the stat that gets left out of a fear mongering pitch is that 80% of review content is POSITIVE. Why isn't 80% of the sales pitch about leveraging authentic positive reviews?
DealerRater - This one pisses me off, you have to call and ask them how many pageviews you are getting.
Nobody likes reading negative mentions of their business and I'm truly sorry if anything we do causes you to be "pissed off." You are absolutely right about needing to request that analytical data at this time. The good news is that we have heard this request and we are working on a robust reporting package for our partner dealers, but our support team is very available to pull this manually in the meantime. This could be a totally new post, though. I challenge my dealers not to sit back and wait for somebody to stumble on their page. They are missing so many great opportunities to improve lead to show if they aren't leveraging the content early and often in the cycle. If the consumer is looking for this content shouldn't our sales team's be offering it as early as possible?
Is there anything else about DealerRater that upsets you? I'd be happy to talk with you offline if you like. Please PM me if I can answer any questions about what we do, I'd really like to talk to you about it if it is bothering you.
Ryan