Automotive Social Media Manager – A Job Description

Written by on January 20, 2012 · Leave a Comment
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Automotive Social Media managerJob Specification The Automotive Social Media Manager will implement the dealership’s Social Media Strategy, develop brand awareness, generate inbound traffic, create ongoing training for employees, manage the dealers reputation online, and encourage social media adoption. This role coordinates with the internal Marketing and PR teams to support their respective missions, ensuring consistency in voice and cultivating a social media referral network.

This position stewards any content that’s thought-leadership and social media industry related and oversees the blog, webinars, podcasts, ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, client profiles – anything that helps contribute valuable, educational content to our community and customers around the social media space.

Responsibilities Implement the social media strategy by coordinating with both management and non-management employees to ensure its effectiveness and encouraging adoption of relevant social media techniques into the dealership culture.

  • Work with all outward facing employees to ensure that they are using social media as outlined in the written strategy and to offer training when needed.
  • Manage presence in social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, and other similar community sites, posting on relevant blogs, and seeding content into social applications as needed.
  • Become an advocate of the Company in social media spaces, engaging in dialogues and answering questions where appropriate.
  • Manage a Blogger outreach program and build an active brand ambassador network to spread the word about the Company.
  • Monitor effective benchmarks for measuring the impact of social media programs, and analyze, review, and report on effectiveness of campaigns in an effort to maximize results.
  • Manage the dealerships online presence through the creation of a social mention listening station and feedback loop.
  • Monitor trends in social media tools, trends and applications.
  • Local Market Thought Leadership: Serves as a thought leader for local market insights within the automotive field.
  • Content Planning: Prepares and provides information on locally relevant storylines and content for the Conversation Calendar.
  • Social Media Champion: Champions social media as an integral channel for execution for all in-market campaigns.
  • Content Managing: Updates and Manages the day-to-day conversations, engagement and escalation process for the brand’s Facebook page and other social media channels.

Content Execution: Ensures execution of “always on” and campaign specific  information provided by the Global team  and relevant content for local campaigns

  • Reporting: Provides quantitative and qualitative measurement, pre and post campaign execution.
  • Crisis Preparedness: Ability to identify and address any issues/crisis that may potentially occur within the social media realm.

Requirements

  • Strong project management or organizational skills.
  • In-depth knowledge and understanding of social media platforms and their respective participants (Facebook, Digg, Youtube, Twitter, Flickr etc.) and how they can be deployed in different scenarios.
  • Knowledge of the blogging ecosystem.
  • Ability to effectively communicate information and ideas in written and verbal format, and build and maintain relationships.
  • Team player, with the confidence to take the lead and guide other departments when necessary.
  • Good technical understanding and can pick up new tools quickly.
  • Have a good knowledge of principles of SEO.
  • Public relations, Marketing, Sales, Community Management experience, a plus.

Personal Qualities

  • A consummate team player who brings a passionate, positive, high-energy approach and  is able to deliver results.
  • A high degree of personal ownership and the quest for continually finding new solutions.
  • Able to effectively work on multiple projects both with and without a team.
  • The successful candidate should possess enough hands-on experience developing and implementing digital communication strategies.
  • A strong can-do attitude and a “don’t tell me no” level of curiosity is essential.
  • Excellent English proficiency both spoken and written is essential.

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David’s Top 5: 5 Things An Auto Dealer Can Do Now To Succeed In Social Media Today

Written by on January 19, 2012 · Leave a Comment
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#1 Ask Your Customers To Leave Reviews

It should be a non-negotiable that every customer, both in service and sales, should be asked to leave a positive review on your Google Places page. Then, follow that up with an email that includes a link. Another idea would be to use the Google Places app on the iPhone or iPad to get your customers to leave a review before they leave the dealership. You can even incentivize it by telling your customers you will give them a free oil change for their next visit.

#2 Connect With Your Customers On Facebook

In his book Endless Referrals, Bob Burg states, “All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, people they know, like, and trust.”

If that’s true, and I believe that it is, then we must continually strive to ensure that our customers, both in service and in sales, knows, likes and trust us. How do you do that though? I’ll tell you this, it usually doesn’t happen during the sale, it’s what you do after that makes all the difference. That’s where Facebook comes in handy and the fact that over half of all the people in the US are a member. What that means is that over half of your customers will have one as well, and what that really means is that you have a way to become part of your customers online social graph. Bellow you will learn a simple, yet powerful way to connect with your customers on Facebook and at the same time, through the Law of Reciprocation, earn a testimonial and a recommendation.

  1. First, have somebody take a picture of you, next to your customer, with both of you in front of their new ride. Ask your customer if it’s okay if you tag them in it on Facebook. You’re playing the odds here and the odds are pretty good that they have a Facebook page and the odds are even better that they will say yes to tagging them. For those of you that aren’t familiar with tagging, what that means is you are putting a label on the picture you’re uploading to Facebook, it will then link to your customers profile page and place the picture on their wall (their profile page).
  2. If you can, connect with your customer while they are in the store, that way you can ensure that you have found their profile and not somebody else with the same name.
  3. Tag them in the picture.
  4. Go to the picture sitting on their wall and say something along the lines of, “It was really great working with you. I really enjoyed the time we spent together buying your new Mustang, you are the reason why I enjoy what I do. Thank you for being one of my favorites!” Because of the Law Of Reciprocation, which states that we, as human beings, feel an obligation to repay an action with a like action, your customer will return the favor and say something like, “It was great working with you as well! We’ve never had such a positive buying experience in our entire lives!”

    Now take a look at what you have. There is a picture of you, your customer and their new car sitting on their Facebook wall for all of their friends to see. On top of their friends asking them questions about it they see the kind words that the said about you. Think about how powerful that is and the fact that one peer testimonial is worth two hundred traditional media impressions… that’s one awesome testimonial!

  5. Don’t stop there. Go back to their page, thank them and say something along the lines of, “As you know it’s important to me that my customers feel comfortable enough with the way I treated them to send referrals my way. Let me ask you, do you feel comfortable enough, should the need ever arise, to refer somebody you know to come see me?” Of course their going to say yes and now you have both a testimonial and a recommendation AND all of their Facebook connections can see it! That’s powerful stuff and 80% of the time it works just like that.

#3 Create Introduction Videos

Instead of just a picture and a quick bio about you and/or your staff on your website, consider video creation instead. It’s a great way for people to see the real you. Don’t be afraid to make if fun and exciting, talk about your likes and dislikes, how long you’ve been at the dealership and why you chose to work there over all the other dealerships in town. Also, a link to these videos should be in the signature line of all outbound emails, you will be surprised how often they will be clicked on and they could be the reason why you are chosen over a competitor.

#4  Create A Social Media Policy

As the saying goes, an elephant never forgets, neither does the internet. Everything said, everything posted, every video created and image uploaded is there for the world to see. People are forming opinions about your dealership without ever having to be a customer, of course this could be good or bad, it just depends on the opinions being formed.

It’s becoming increasingly more important to monitor your employees and how they interact on the internet. In a transparent world it’s easy to connect what a person says to where they work, that can be a problem if one of your employees lacks integrity, and is posting defamatory, pornographic, proprietary or libelous material about the dealership, employees, customers or even the competitors. In fact, they don’t even have to mention anything that relates to the car business, but through association can have an impact on the public opinion about your dealership.

After careful research I put together the following policy to get you started creating your own social media policy. Keep in mind that I am not a lawyer and the following policy should only be used as guide and is not a stand-in for legal advice. I encourage you to take a look at it and draft your own policy.

Social media can be a powerful supplement to any marketing campaign, but it can be a double edge sword, use it wisely and make sure that you know what your employees are saying, it could be the different between positive word of mouth and negative word of mouth. As we all know, negative word of mouth can spread like wildfire and before you know it , it can engulf the whole dealership. Be vigilant.

Download The Policy Here

#5 Listen To What Is Being Said About You Online

Reputation management is the process of tracking a dealerships actions and the opinions of others about those actions. Why is that important though, what do does it matter what others are saying?

In a recent study it was found that 1 peer recommendation, that is 1 person saying something about your dealership, is worth 200 traditional media impressions. That’s 200 TV spots, 200 print ads, 200 radio commercials or a combination thereof. Think about that for a moment and how powerful one recommendation can be. In another study done by Nielson, they found that of all the thousands and thousands of ads we are bombarded with on a typical day, we only trust about 14% of them. The reason is simple, the ads that we are seeing, whether they are on a billboard or in a magazine are self serving, that is they are created by the company themselves and as such we find it hard to believe the claims made therein. But if a review is seen about your dealership we automatically apply more weight to it because it was created by an impartial third party.

In fact, another study suggests that 70% of people trust the recommendations of people they don’t know and 90% of those they do know. That’s why it’s so very important that you know what people are saying about you, so that you can influence more of the positive, while at the same time fixing the negative. While there are a few free alternatives, here are a few paid listening services that I recommend you look in to:

While there are others, these three give you a wide spectrum of features, and pricing, for you to choose from. From there, make sure that you have a plan in place to react to what is being said about you online, both positive and negative.

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Learn To Love Your Negative Reviews

Written by on January 18, 2012 · Leave a Comment
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Bad Reviews - Reputation ManagmentYeah I said it. And you should! Negative reviews are those little pieces of gold that lets you know when you are doing something wrong. If you’re like most businesses you loath bad reviews, but without them, how do you ever plan on growing past the mistakes you’ve made?

Good reviews are great! I’m not saying that you should strive for negative reviews, I’m just asking you to see them differently thank you see them now. In a moment I’m going to give you some stats that will blow your mind, keep reading.

Think about it, would you rather have a customer that had a bad experience, who never told you why, but just stopped frequenting your business or one that had a bad experience and told you why? I know your first inclination would be to say “I wish they just told me and not the whole world on my Google Places page David!”

Trust me I get it, but a bad review can be a good thing for a number of different reasons but one that I want to talk about here, for just a little bit, is that it shows you’re human. Being human means that you make mistakes and by making mistakes you have the ability to showoff your customer service skills.

So, whenever you see a bad review, make sure that you go through the steps I outline in the video here, I call it The Closed Feedback Loop. The Closed Feedback Loop is a way for turning a negative review into something positive and by fixing the problems in a public manner you will go a long way to convincing your ticked off customer that it was a one time thing and that you will do everything in your power to fix it. A negative review that is followed up with publicly and to the satisfaction of the unsatisfied party is even more powerful than a positive review. Don’t take my word for it, here are a few stats for you to take a look at.

  • 85% of consumers said they would be willing to pay anywhere between 5-25% over the standard price to ensure a superior customer experience.Think about that a moment, In 2010 Americans spent $157 Billion on buying automobiles. That means they would have paid almost $40 Billion more for superior customer service. Ask yourself this, are the experiences my customers having at my dealership superior? I’m not talking about run of the mill, what’s expected customer service, but exception customer service.
  • 92% of consumers said they would be willing to go back to a company after a
    negative experience if they:·· Received a follow up apology/correction from a supervisor/head office (63%)
    ·· Were offered a discount (52%)
    ·· Or were offered proof of enhanced customer service (49%)

    Wow! 92% And you were just thinking about ignoring that negative review weren’t you? Time and time again I see where a customer has left a bad review and nowhere do I see an attempt to contact that person. Don’t say that you just called them, it’s important that you try to contact them on the actual service they used to leave the bad review as well.

  • Oh and your customers expect a response when they leave a bad review, at least 58% of them said that they would like a response back.·· 42% expect a response within a day
    ·· 39% within a week
    ·· 7% within an hour
    ·· 2% within a minute

If you are curious as to where I got these percentages check out this report conducted by RightNow.

Open your eyes, the bottom line is that customer service is important, very important, but as consumers we understand that businesses make mistakes, we just want them to correct it.

What kind of processes do you have in place to ensure that your negative reviews are being handled appropriately? Let me know in the comment section below.

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