The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is under attack by roving gangs of illegal street racers.

Okay that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but illegal street racing is a big safety concern for residents and a serious danger to drivers and their fans.

In hopes of curtailing illegal street racing, Scion Events has kicked off the second season of the Scion Drag-n-Brag, where racers are pulled off the streets and thrown into the relative safety of the Texas Motor Speedway.

Texas Motor Speedway is cutting their 1.5 mile track down to an 1/8 mile drag strip for the six week competition. Sadly last week’s opener was rained out, but everything is on schedule for tomorrow’s races and the next five weeks.

In order to connect with racing enthusiasts we’ve built out custom pages across a wide spectrum of sites.

We have a YouTube page with videos from the races.

We created a Tumblr blog with updates and information on the races.

There’s also an ever-growing Flickr photo archive with race pics and some shots from the Show-n-Shine competition, a weekly complement to the Drag-n-Brag races where car owners can compete on looks alone.

And then there’s a special tab on eight dealer’s Facebook pages providing real-time updates from each of the above networks. All of this furnished within Facebook.

Utilizing so many networks makes this a truly social campaign. There’s a little bit of everything for everyone allowing us to bring racers from all walks of life to the track.

The social awareness aspect of the races is of the greatest benefit. Last year’s Drag-n-Brag allowed dozens of racers the opportunity to showcase their skills under controlled  supervision at the Texas Motor Speedway.

We’ll be watching to see how it spreads across the Dallas/Fort Worth market.

]]> http://www.goso.com/blog/2010/07/scions-drag-n-brag-lets-street-racers-compete-in-safety-2/feed/ 2 http://www.goso.com/blog/2010/07/a-night-at-the-movies-with-the-number-one-volume-lexus-dealer-in-the-world/ http://www.goso.com/blog/2010/07/a-night-at-the-movies-with-the-number-one-volume-lexus-dealer-in-the-world/#comments Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:46:33 +0000 Korenne Richardson http://www.goso.com/blog/?p=871

It’s summer time. Which mean two things: it’s going to be hot and new movies. The summer is when all the great movies come out. JM Lexus, the number one volume Lexus dealership in the world, realized it was time for summer fun and launched their “Night at the Movies” campaign. The promotion awards two Muvico movie tickets each day until the end of summer to JM Lexus fans on Facebook and Twitter.

The rules of the promotion are simple:

• No purchase is necessary.
• Register at either Facebook or Twitter.
• Check both Facebook and Twitter each day between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. EST.
• Click “Get Tickets” when it’s posted at a random time each day.
• Promotion ends August 31, 2010.

JM Lexus recently expanded its online presence to a variety of social media networks as part of its overall business strategy. The Muvico giveaway is their first social media promotion. JM Lexus is known in South Florida for their excellence in customer service. Their social media initiative takes that excellence one step further.

The promotion was built on and administrated through our GOSO platform.

Every week there seems to be some pundit talking about the end of blogs, or even worse, the end of websites.

“Who needs a website when there are social media sites and Facebook pages?” they say.

Crazy talk.

Of course we have been hearing this for years.

• I don’t need a blog, I have a super flashy website, an in-house web designer, and an SEO on retainer.
• I don’t need a blog, I have a newsletter.
• I don’t need a blog, I have a Facebook Fan Page.
• I don’t need a blog, I have a sales team.
• Etc etc etc.

So why should you blog rather than go with those arguments above?

Blogs are a crucial part of social media for good reason.

They combine the best parts of having a …

• Website – You can have static AND dynamic content. For example sales pages and articles. The articles make the site sticky, meaning people want to return, and also blogs are famously good with that SEO stuff.
• Newsletter – The content is the reason people WANT to return, but allowing people to sign up to receive that content via email is the mechanism people prefer to return. Online, searchable content and navigation beats content that can only be found in an inbox. That SEO stuff again.
• Community – Attract people with content, retain them with conversation.

In a nutshell, you get a greater audience, keep them interested, and they are easy to maintain. Of course, you do a good job of that and you sell more too.

What about Facebook? Do both, but make sure your Social Media followers know about your great blog content, because one day Facebook or whoever comes next might switch your account off. Yup, much as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are great, we do not own our accounts, they do.

Go out and find your market in the social media sites, promote your content, but make your blog your home.

AutoNation prides itself on being the “un-dealer” and as being the automotive company that’s changing everything. Ryan wrote a couple of weeks ago about their social media game plan, and briefly mentioned their Mosaic Campaign.

It’s been a few weeks, and we’ve kept our eye on the campaign so I’ve wanted to go into a little more detail. Part of the reason I wanted to write about it was because we created the campaign, but the main reason is because it has really taken off.

AutoNation came to us with a challenge: How can we reward our customers for their loyalty, while showing them that they are AutoNation?

The first challenges were getting past customer’s skepticism of giveaways. What’s the catch? What do I have to buy? What am I signing up for?

All legitimate concerns. So we devised an idea to allow anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account to participate. They don’t have to sign up for anything. We offer the option to share your participation with your social groups, but it’s not required. We wanted to alleviate all of those concerns and allow participants to simply receive a gift from AutoNation.

The second challenge was how to visually represent the idea that AutoNation is its customers. So we took the AutoNation logo and  turned it into a mosaic of the faces of all the giveaway winners. By the end of the giveaway the entire logo will be engulfed by the smiling faces of the winners, and the mosaic will be complete.

Campaign Summary By the Numbers:

• 3o day campaign
• 300 gift cards to be given away
• Over 24,000 page views…so far
• 5,000 unique visitors…so far

Although, these are great numbers for a campaign that was born, promoted, and lived on social media alone, in the end the feedback was the true metric of the success of the promotion. We spoke with every winner and learned a little bit about each, then sent them a personalized thank you card with no strings attached.

Everyone has seen the recent growth of social marketing. One of the perks of such marketing is hopefully a great product, but also a socially conscious product. Through doing good, brands are able to maintain customer engagement.

There are many kinds of social marketing, one of the biggest right now is green marketing. GOSO recently created a Facebook campaign for the upcoming Nissan LEAF (Leading, Environmentally Friendly, Affordable, Family Car).

Although it hasn’t been released yet, the LEAF is already making waves as the first all electric, zero emission electric car to be produced for the mass market. The Nissan LEAF Plant a Tree Campaign was born of our client’s desire to sell a car while doing some good, much like the LEAF itself.

So we devised a concept that combined social media and social marketing by creating a green campaign which allowed people who liked our client’s Facebook page could plant a tree in one of four locations around the world: Haiti, The Philippines, India or Brazil.

The locations were chosen based on the recommendations of our partner in the project, Trees for the Future. Each site had a very specific need for the trees. Haiti for example needed to replenish forests devastated by recent hurricanes.

Campaign Stats:

• Created custom Facebook page tabs for 23 dealerships.
• Increased Facebook fans by more than 25% in two weeks.
• Client committed to planting up to 50,000 trees.

Overall the campaign was extremely successful for two reasons, we were able to connect the buzz surrounding the LEAF with dealers, and hopefully we’ll hit 50,000 trees to be planted.

What successes have you had in combining social marketing with social media?

Unless you’ve been living under a car for the past two years, you know about the Fiesta Movement. The social media marketing campaign behind the 2011 Ford Fiesta that has pulled down:

• Nearly 500,000 YouTube views
• More than 70,000 Flickr views
• More than 10.7 million Twitter impressions

The Movement has been huge for Ford in terms of creating brand awareness for the Fiesta, even before the car was released. In December of 2009 the second chapter of the Fiesta Movement began.

For the second chapter of the movement, Ford is tasking teams with developing creative advertising for the 2011 Fiesta, hitting the U.S. this summer. Then everyone votes for a winner. Crowdsourcing meets advertising, if you will.

Although the campaign is successful at creating buzz for the Fiesta on a national level, we wondered how to bring that buzz to the market level. How can we connect the two? How can we bring an OEM’s national campaign to the front steps of the dealer?

In the spirit of the Movement the obvious choose was through social media outlets. So in a matter of days GOSO created custom YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter assets for 36 dealerships across the nation.

Included in the assets was a custom Facebook tab where users could check in with their favorite teams on a dealer’s fan page without leaving Facebook.

The design is based on Ford’s Fiesta Movement website, including color and layout. We were able to bring feeds from team members social media outlets to provide real-time updates of each team within Facebook. Viewers were also given the option of choosing one of the Movement cities so they could see what was happening locally.

Overall the campaign successfully connected a national brand awareness campaign at the dealer level, where people actually buy the cars.

To the dealers out there, what successes have you had in bringing national OEM campaigns to your dealership? What are the benefits of bringing national campaigns local?

We very quickly learn how important listening is when we join social media.

One of the things I say ad nauseum is “We were given two ears and one mouth” and I tell people they should work to that ratio in social media as well as life. Another thing I try to reinforce is the idea that if you don’t have anything worthwhile to say, don’t say anything.

Taken these as a given, we need to take a step back and really think about what this listening thing is all about.

You will often be advised that there are certain things you should do, especially when first venturing into social media:

• Find people who are leaders in your niche and follow them.
• Seek out people who are “doing it right” and monitor what they do.
• Discover interesting people and read what they talk about.
• Do targeted searching using search.twitter, tweetdeck columns.
• Add social CRM tools and other sophisticated software and services.
• Monitor “sentiment” and work out how your brand is being discussed.
• Watch out for keywords so you can pounce when someone is asking about something, especially your area of expertise or what you have to sell.

All good, solid advice. In fact, these are foundational pieces that are worth considering if you want to be in this for the long haul. Should you be setting up plans for customer service, loyalty, brand monitoring, and PR, they are pretty near essentials in fact.

That said, there is a problem lurking that we need to address.

What many times people fail to mention is something simple and a basic human trait that seems to get lost in the mix.

Where does empathy fit into all this?

Listening is not just about searching, it is not about a feed that pulls in a stream of data, and it is certainly not just a metrics analysis!

If you want to make this stuff work you need to listen, then you need to seek to understand. What is this information-gathering teaching you? What are people trying to tell you? How are these conversations going to make a difference to your business.

What good is more data if you can not action on it?

1. Gather your information, home in on the most important and useful
2. Work to understand it, with further interrogation and insight
3. Use it to make a difference, to make plans

Rather than a “listening station”, build a research center!

Before...

Last week I set out to test the social media waters of Southern California, using myself as the guinea pig. The task was simple: find someone to sell me a car. The goal was two fold:

1. Get a good car deal.
2. See if dealers are listening.

GOSO is fortunate enough to work with hundreds of dealers across America, including some in Southern California, to be honest, the easy thing for me to have done was call up one of the dealerships we have a personal relationship with and say, “Hey, I’m looking for a car. Can you help me out?”

No doubt our dealerships would have responded, “Sure, come on out!” But the goal was to be as unbiased as possible, and so I asked our internal monitors not to respond so that perhaps I could find a realistic response to the question: Are dealers listening?

I wanted to be a normal customer, granted I have a pulpit that a lot of customers don’t have, but the theory remains the same: Can a customer post his purchasing aspirations online and expect someone to hear them?

So how did Southern California do?

Not well. I had envisioned dozens of responses from dealerships across the county, but that didn’t happen.

Of the few responses I received only one was really actionable, and the caller, David Harris of Mazda USA, was very serious.

Harris, Social Media Manager of Mazda USA, called me direct. Which isn’t a small thing. David is a very busy man. Someone I never expected to take the time to call little ol’ me. His message was straight to the point, “We’d love to get you in a Mazda. Give me a call.”

So what did I do?

Well, I returned the call of course.

A big part of social media is helping dealers to understand that the customers are online searching for a deal and a dealer. It’s not like the old days where you ran some ads and wait for customers to roll in. Today you have to be more proactive. It’s only going to get worse as younger generations come of age. I guarantee they will begin their search on the Facebooks and Twitters of the future.

According to a recent study from Foresight Research, 86% of car buyers used the internet to help them in their purchasing decision. The same study revealed that 24% of car buyers under 35 used social media to share their purchasing decision. These are important numbers.

Now back to my experience. I used both the internet, my blog, and both my Facebook and Twitter accounts to say to the Southern California automotive community that I wanted to buy a car, and Mazda listened.

David connected me with John Patterson and Jim Feinstein at OC Mazda. I went in with no expectations. I tried my best to be as aloof as possible. I even refused the multiple offers of refreshments, and I mean multiple. Jim tried everything he could to get me to accept a bottle of water or snack. He even offered me Pop Tarts. Pop tarts! What kind of dealer has Pop Tarts. I’m not going to beat around the bush here, but the answer is a great car dealer. It wasn’t just the Pop Tarts that won me over, the guys were amazing. Probably the best car buying experience I’ve ever had.

Beyond the Pop Tarts of course were, obviously, Mazdas. Jim took me out in a 2010 Mazda 3. He wasn’t at all dissuaded when I told him perhaps I should go with used. I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of my car buying process. The short and sweet of it is that I bought a 2009 Mazda 3, and I’m not looking back. The guys were friendly, informative and genuinely cared about my ultimate happiness.

The real surprise was David Harris and Mazda USA’s personal investment in the purchase. After the deal was finished, Harris called me personally to congratulate me on my purchase.

Obviously I don’t want anyone to expect the same personal attention, but I do want to everyone to realize that this experience is indicative of the interactions we’ll see in the future. Customers will continue to express to use the internet and especially social media to share their purchasing intentions, and dealers will have to find them in the vast terrain of the world wide web and build a relationship with them. As you cultivate that relationship, you’ll be gaining future customers.

Because Mazda built a relationship with me, I bought a car from them. It’s that simple. Well, and I liked their car.

So it’s clear your customers are speaking online. The question is, are you listening?

After...

Many people are using social media as a route to increased sales and profitability. When we think about using social media this way our minds will leap to certain tried and tested approaches. What do you think of immediately when you consider how to use social media to sell?

I can think of several good options, see if they match your thoughts:

• Show casing product – On your Facebook fan page you can display your inventory, plus you can use blog posts, status updates, photography, video and notes to discuss and promote new arrivals.
• Direct offers – Rather than give contacts an opportunity to “browse” your good stuff, perhaps make a direct offer? 10% off your new purchase if this code is redeemed by saturday? 0% Finance? Cash rebate? Sometimes the direct approach is the best … but best used sparingly.
• Events – Generate buzz and excitement while getting more people to turn up in person. This is a great approach because the emphasis isn’t on the sale but on the experience. Once people are there surrounded by your beautiful automobiles of course there is no harm in answering one or two questions or allowing people to take a spin around the block …

So what is this overlooked approach?

I have two questions for you:

1. Why are people not buying?
2. What would get people to buy?

Social media is very much about conversation and interaction. The clue is in the name. We can use the social aspect to get into the heads of our prospects and discover what they are thinking.

Why is this important?

• It shows you care
• Forewarned is forearmed
• These insights could have a profound impact on your sales and marketing

We are often too close to our offers and approach to know how effective we are, or if we are appealing or confusing our prospects. By talking to them we can find out exactly what is triggering or putting off the buying process.

Recently I had an offer that was selling ok, but by fixing one line based on customer feedback I increased the conversion rate significantly.

What might you be saying that is turning your customers off? What could you explain that will increase sales?

Perhaps you should talk to your customers and find out. Get social and you will improve sales!

About a month ago, I wrote a blog in which I told of my desire to buy a car with my fiancee. I’m bi-coastal right now. I split my time between Washington, DC, where she is, and Orange County, CA. My time in each city is about 50/50. In DC I don’t need a car because I’m fortunate enough to live in the beautiful Dupont Circle, and it’s accessible to the GOSO office and all other parts of the city by metro and/or bus, and despite DC Metro’s recent announcement to raise fares….again, I’m going to continue to use the metro.

However, California is a whole different monster. Right now I drive an old pickup truck. I know, I know, I’m working for an automotive social media company, I should be driving something a little sexier, but I’m a Texas boy, and we Texans love our trucks.

The thing I forget about being from Texas is the ridiculous price of gas outside of Texas. As a Texan I was spoiled. As a Metro rider I was spoiled too, of course that was before the many Metro fare hikes. So buying gas in California is doing a number on the checkbook, therefore the update.

This is where the auto dealer comes in. I need a car. So I’m going to run a little experiment, just to see if the Southern California auto dealers are on their social media toes. Essentially, I want to be sold a car through social media. Let me clarify this.

The plan:

• I am going to post messages on my Facebook and Twitter accounts soliciting advice on auto dealerships in Orange County, California.
• I’m going to Tweet my trials and tribulations in search of an automobile, giving dealerships more opportunity to find me.
• I’m going to wait to see if a dealership tries to find me.

Seems pretty simple, right?

So what will this prove? Well, there are tons of people doing the exact same thing on their social networks right now. Thousands of customers looking to their networks to find a dealership they can trust. What this will prove is whether or not auto dealerships are taking advantage of social media to find those customers. We no longer live in a world where dealers can sit around waiting for the customers to come to you. You have to go to them.

I’ll make it even easier for the auto dealers out there by giving you some information about what kind of car I’m looking for. Now keep in mind, you probably won’t get this much information from the average Tweet.

What I want:

• Need a economical car, sadly that means no trucks, so compact car.
• Although a brand new Mercedes would be perfectly fine with me, I’m not rolling in the money yet, so we’re going to have to go with used. Something no older than 2007.
• My fiancee and I are buying this car together, and we came really close to buying a car on Friday, but a dealership tried to convince me to adjust some paperwork to reflect something that wasn’t true. So, understand that we live in different states but we’re both buying the car.

So here’s hoping someone contacts me with a good deal. I’ll be going to Twitter account now. Oh and the reason for the Sunday post is you have to expect your shoppers to be shopping on the weekends. Now someone sell me a car….please.