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Not always! ;)


There are always extenuating circumstances so please don't consider this a hard and fast rule, but I generally suggest that dealers put on the customer hat and search for their business, or better yet, ask if they can look over a spouse or relative's shoulder and ask them to search for the business. The 4-5 sites that are most important are usually self-evident with that test. The web is intergalactic and hyper-local simultaneously. I'm not saying ignore the rest, but focus on the ones that are visible.


Whatever you decide, I think it is a real mistake to only try to get reviews on Google and Yelp. Your success rate is going to be low with that strategy and your team is likely to give up. I think Mike is right on about the mental state of business owners that are pushing people to Yelp because they lost Google reviews. Yelp is for Yelpers. With any site that you want people to share on you should read through the TOS and make sure your collection initiatives are in adherence to their policies. I think you are going to see a boatload of filtered reviews behind a Captcha on Yelp for GM dealers in the coming months.


My opinion only, but I'm concerned about processes that try to separate the sheep from the goats through a pre-screening in the hopes of filtering out "bad reviews" on 3rd party sites. It is all the rage it seems. There is nothing inherently wrong with it, but Google has said not to solicit reviews. Reading Mike's original post I suspect it'll be about a week before they sniff out a similar referring entity for every submitted review. Just don't be shocked at the second round of disappearing review content on Google.


Last thought since you kind of asked, I do believe in what we do and hope that dealers that aren't partnered with us will see what other dealers here on Refresh have had to say about DealerRater, both as a company and a service.


 It makes me angry that according to GALLUP Car Salespeople have a trust factor lower than Congress and haven't polled out of the single digits in 35 years. I believe that real reviews from real people and real reputation management is what will fix this perception issue, NOT stacking the deck and gaming a system. It makes me angry to think about the quality sales professionals, some of which I call friends, that are lumped in with the "car salespeople" stereotype.


DealerRater isn't perfect, but we've been at this for 10 years and we do somethings very well for our partner stores. If you think about review sites like horses in a stable, DealerRater is the dependable workhorse you know you can always rely on. Our TOS is clear, you don't have to look hard to find a review that is 8 yrs old or older. We don't just change our mind and remove things. We also have a model that mirrors our industry. In addition to our technical efforts to control fraud, every review is read and scrutinized by a real person. We don't need to put abstract rules about how many reviews a user needs to write in order to not get filtered. Lastly, we have almost a million reviews collected and 1.4 million eyeballs on our content each month. With that trajectory and 61,000 dealership employees sharing their own personal review page to earn the trust of their prospects, I'm really hopeful that the next Gallup poll shows our industry in a more favorable light.