Retweet “It’s a people driven economy, stupid.”
It’s the catch-phrase of social media marketing celebrity, Erik Qualman (@equalman), who has headed up social media initiatives for Cadillac & Pontiac, AT&T, Yahoo!, EarthLink, Travelzoo, and many more companies. Many of you may know him as the author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business, which topped Amazon’s #1 Best Selling List for the US, UK, Canada, and Germany.
And 3 Birds has some great news…. (more…)
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Birds of a feather can flock together on Twitter
I love Twitter. I will admit that when I first started a Twitter account for myself, I didn’t get it. I wasn’t sure who to follow and no one was following me. I tried a couple tweets and waited for something to happen, but nothing did. I might as well have been in my closet with the lights off spouting profundities for all of the people who were hearing what I had to say. I concluded that Twitter wasn’t for me and decided to stick with Facebook.
That was until I went to a marketing conference about a year ago. I attended several presentations I found valuable. At the end of each, the speaker included his or her Twitter handle on the final slide. I returned home determined to figure Twitter out. I began by following the speakers I had seen at the conference, listening to their tweets and I gradually branched out from there. Over time I became more vocal and began to connect with others. For me, Twitter is a great tool for exchanging ideas with people in the industries I inhabit, staying on top of articles and blog posts on subjects of interest to me and connecting with people with similar interests. I especially love to use Twitter at conferences. In fact, prior to the 9th Digital Dealer Conference in Las Vegas earlier this year, I had many Twitter exchanges about #DD9 and then enjoyed meeting my new Twitter friends in real life at the event (hello @austinthompson @arnoldtijerina @cfousek @BrentWees @michele07 @john_m_bowman). Andretti Brown (@BrokeDesign), one of our incredibly talented designers, is another person I “met” on Twitter and eventually convinced to come work with us at 3 Birds. For all of these reasons and many more, I consider Twitter an invaluable tool.
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3 Birds at our first Digital Dealer Conference
I loved everything about the whole experience of my first Digital Dealer Conference last week at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. I had the chance to speak to exhibitors, attendees and others, some of whom had been coming to the show from the beginning and, by all accounts, this was the best Digital Dealer Conference yet from an attendance and agenda perspective. The event was so successful, that where NADA was once THE must attend event, many exhibitors were commenting that going to NADA did not seem as important or essential anymore. Digital Dealer has become a much needed micro-NADA devoted to advanced technology for dealers.
This shift makes all of the sense in the world. It is a shift that is taking place in many other aspects of dealership operations and other business verticals. More and more dealers are moving away from aggressive, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink methods of advertising and marketing in recognition of the fact that consumers have more power and voice and are increasingly demanding timely, relevant communications and interactions with the companies with whom they chose to do business. More and more people would agree that time is as valuable a commodity as money. People are busy. Everyone has a long “to do” list and it seems like there are never enough hours in the day to accomplish everything that needs to be accomplished. Dealers feel the pressure of too much to do and not enough time to do it more acutely than most given all of the moving pieces involved in running a dealership. I was impressed by the focus and advance preparation the dealers I met brought to the conference. Dealers had done their homework. They had identified needs within their stores, they had specific questions and they were at the show to find solutions and actionable ideas to implement. (more…)
Retweet I learned an expression from one of our developers not long after we relocated to Chapel Hill. He told me that, with technology, you have to eat your own dog food, meaning, on the most basic level, that you have to use the software and applications you develop. It is the broader interpretation of this expression that really resonates with me though and that is the idea that it’s not good enough to just talk the talk, you have to walk the walk too. From this came the idea for what will now become a recurring blog post category that will be known as, “3 Birds Eats Its Own Bird Food” which is, of course a bird-centric take on the dog food expression.
The inaugural post in this category will relate to creating and posting video content. The popularity of You Tube, Vimeo and other video sharing sites is no secret, neither is the positive SEO value of video content or the simple fact that consumers gravitate toward the interactivity of rich media. We consistently urge our dealer clients to capture customer testimonials, vehicle walk arounds, dealership and community events and a variety of other material on video for these reasons. Even though I intellectually understand all of the reasons for creating video content, it’s a challenge for me to push past the discomfort I feel about putting myself on video. It is difficult for me to knowingly appear in a video without feeling incredibly awkward, nor can I watch a video of myself without being shocked to hear how my voice sounds to others or making any number of other self critical observations. If left to my own devices, I might scrutinize the recording like it was the Zapruder film, torturing myself by stopping, rewinding and playing it frame-by-frame and studying every fleeting, unflattering facial expression. Nevertheless, I decided to toughen up and take the bull by the horns, a technique that has worked well for me in the past. (more…)
Retweet While I was frequently checking my Twitter account a couple of weekends ago to see if I had been upgraded to the “new Twitter” yet, I couldn’t help but notice some strange tweets coming from a large automobile group’s community Twitter account. Some automobile dealers have established “community sites” with dealership news and events as well as discussion forums and other features for their customers and staff. It is not uncommon for such sites to have a feature that auto-posts any action taken by a community member to other social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. These posts can consist of declarations that one community member is now friends with another community member or that so-and-so posted a discussion topic about such-and-such. After barely noticing three or four tweets announcing discussions about various prescription drugs, a post providing information about buying Viagra online jumped out at me because it struck me as odd that a large auto dealership group’s community would be in the Viagra business. I decided to investigate and clicked on to the Twitter profile and then the auto group’s online community.
Before I explain what I found, I need to provide a bit of background on the automobile group. The auto group that created the community site has more than a dozen rooftops, is listed among the top 50 dealership groups and the community site appears as the #4 organic search result on Google Page One when the group’s own name is searched. When I went to the site, what I found was a “community” which was purportedly for “customers, employees and suppliers” of the auto group that had been untended for months. The community site had been taken over and made into a link farm for sites selling prescription drugs online and promoting adult sex dating! (more…)
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There's a new "meet and greet" that happens before customers enter your dealership...
Chris Brogan (author of the book Trust Agents, President of New Marketing Labs, well recognized blogger, sought after speaker and social media thought leader) recently wrote a blog post entitled, “Dear Car Dealerships – Stop Sucking.” In this post, he recounted his recent experience of shopping for a Camaro. Like most people who are “in market” for a vehicle these day, he began to research his purchase online. He found Kelley Blue Book and Edmunds.com to be useful sites, but when he transitioned to local automobile dealership websites to locate available inventory, that’s when things went “haywire.” Brogan complained about the content management systems the dealer sites used to manage inventory feeds, design flaws and usability/readability issues, but what was a glaring omission to him was the way dealer website don’t do much to try to get prospects into the store. Brogan nailed it. (more…)
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Our company has undergone a big transition recently. We relocated from the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. There were many factors that influenced our decision to move, but we selected the Research Triangle in North Carolina, and Chapel Hill in particular, for its deep talent pool, progressive sensibility and the quality of life it offered for our family and the families of our staff members. (more…)
