Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics, said “The ROI on social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years.”

Harsh I know but social media encompasses several major topics that every dealership has to focus on to ensure their continued success including reputation management, community awareness, and brand development. All of these are affected by every profit source in a dealership and steer dealers towards the ultimate goal: Create customers that create customers.

What is social media? It is an old business tool used in a new way. It is networking squared! Social media allows you to network to the masses and create a much large scope of influence.

A couple words of caution that your social media efforts should not be an extension of your offline advertising. Also, do not be a shameless self promoter or you will be viewed as spam.

Here are some tips to put social media to work for you in your dealership.

Finance department

Sales of F&I products have the added challenge in that a customer cannot touch of feel them and people in general hate to spend money on insurance. Having spent 15 years in “the box”, I have tried numerous methods to try to develop a mental justification to purchase VSC and other backend products.

Create a short video showing your customers the warranty claim process and let them see how easy it is. In a video, show a relatively new vehicle coming in for a repair since most customers think their vehicles won’t break. End the video by asking the customer if they think their vehicle is 99% perfect since it is a machine and machines do break from time to time.

Your business manager can then tell a customer this word track: “We believe your new vehicle is 99% perfect as well but with over 5000 moving parts in it, that means 5 things will break over its lifetime. You saw how easy the claim process was. Isn’t that easier than paying for it out of your own pocket?”

Special finance department

Special finance customers always have the fear of being turned down and embarrassed. Setup a blog site and write blogs about credit and what lenders look for to approve loans. Blogs build authority. The more information you provide, the more people will look to you as the expert on a subject.

Also, this is a great area to get testimonials and you can include them in your blogs such as “This week at ABC Auto Loans (whatever you call your special finance department), Tom H. came in after being turned down by several other dealerships and we managed to get him approved for a new family car.” Then have a quick quote from your customer. Immediately people reading your blog will start to have more trust in you and your ability to get them approved.

Service department

Have you ever sponsored a baseball or softball team in your community? What usually happened? You wrote a check and got a picture at the end of the season that you proudly hung in your service department for everyone visiting your dealership to see.

Well, most everyone that is visiting your dealership already likes you. Add social media to this scenario and create incredible community awareness. Ask the coach to take a couple of pictures per game and send them to you with a quick game recap. Post the pictures and recap on your Facebook page and congratulate the heroes of the game. You will have proud parents engaging you and thanking you for the kind words. Plus, they will be bragging to all their friends and sharing the information.

Body shop

Do your customers even know you have one? Every new car delivery has salesman walk their customers through service. Why not your body shop too? Wouldn’t it make sense that a customer would prefer to have their vehicle fixed in a place they know especially since their insurance is paying for it.

Create a slide show that shows before and after pictures and place it on your website and all your social networks. Include in their pictures showing if you are a for instance a “Geico Certified” dealer.

A lot about social media is not revolutionary such as engaging your community and making friends but it does take execution. When done properly, it can pay big dividends at the end of each month at the bottom of your monthly statements.

The numbers are staggering, at the time of his election Barack Obama had over 3.1 million fans on his Facebook page, John McCain just 614,000. But he didn’t stop there, his YouTube channel had over 20 million views and just over 825,000 friends on Myspace.

Check out the rest at:

Persuasive Concepts

Repossessing a vehicle is never a good thing, but technology has certainly come a long way in helping dealers do just that. The Special Finance Coach discusses how to keep customers on time with their payments, as well as how social networking sites like Facebook can help when they’re not.

Contrary to popular belief, repossessing a customer’s vehicle should be the last resort when it comes to the buy-here, pay-here (BHPH) business. It’s bad for business and it’s an outdated philosophy.

Unfortunately, some dealers are ready to “hook” a customer’s vehicle if they are one day late on a payment. What a dealer needs to remember is these customers have a history of not paying on time. That means they need to be trained on how to stay current on their payments, which is what payment assurance devices are designed to do.

Another common misconception is that all devices are created equally. There are two basic types of devices: GPS devices and payment reminder devices. Both tout shut-off features, but they vary greatly in how they’re used.

Payment-reminder devices are for dealers who want to collect their money. They are also proactive tools that help dealers nurse customers along during rough times. GPS devices are for dealers who want to collect their collateral. They are reactive tools that allow dealers to quickly make repossession decisions.

Both products serve a fantastic purpose and can be great assets to any BHPH dealer. Deciding on which works best depends on that dealer’s business plan. “Dealers have different ways of managing their portfolios and we have products to assist them with any business model,” said Jake Frank, co-founder of PassTimeUSA. “In fact, our Elite product is unique to the industry in that it combines both the GPS and payment reminder technology.”

Payment assurance devices go a long way in eliminating “skip hazards,” but skips are going to be something every BHPH dealer has to deal with. Repos will happen to any portfolio, but at least you have your collateral to remarket or sell off at the auction to minimize your loss.

On a skip, you will have to write off the entire amount of the outstanding contract. If you are new to BHPH, one of your fundamental underwriting guidelines must be to eliminate possible skips. That means you need to be wary of customers with credit bureaus that list addresses from several different states.

One precautionary measure I always recommend to my dealers is to Map- Quest the customer’s address. If it’s an invalid address, this is the easiest way to catch it. That’s not to say I haven’t been fooled before, but most of those instances occurred before technology was available.

Cybertracking Revolutionizes Collections

I once had a customer’s phone bill with his address on it, which I thought was golden. I went to his house to collect payment on a bounced down-payment check, but the address did not exist.What a horrible experience that was. Turns out the customer went around writing hot checks after opening anaccount with $50.

Regardless of how diligent you are, this situation will still happen every once in awhile. Some customers will just try to get one over on the system whenever possible. I refer to these people as “credit criminals.” They will clean up their credit reports and lie right to your face just to be able to get into a car.

One time, I had a customer run on me when I was heading up a BHPH department in Louisiana about 15 years ago. It took a couple of months, but we finally tracked down the customer and repossessed the car in Trout Run, Penn.

Professional recovery companies specialize in “hunting” down your runaway customers, and the most common practice being used today by recovery companies is a process referred to as cybertracking. Cybertracking does not replace fundamental collections practices, such as calling references, but it is a powerful tool for when a credit criminal tries to run.

Ron Brown, president of Confidential Security Investigations (CSI Group), is a self proclaimed hunter. His company has been a leader in cybertracking. “In all the years that I have been in this business, one thing has held true throughout: Man’s ability to skip trace has always paralleled their ability to communicate,” he said. “Early on, hunters would track people on foot. Then, as years went on, they started to track people by the paper trails they left behind. Now, we follow their electronic trails.”

Collectors Employ Social-Networking Sites

There are several companies out there that are in the business of gathering data. Much of their efforts are fueled by their ability to track an individual’s interactions and conversations online. Some of these sources are pay-as-you-go sites that provide access to public records, such as MasterFiles.com. There are also sites that allow free access, such as brbpub.com or Black- BookOnline.info.

“The key is being able to decipher the data,” said Brown. “Some data can be very misleading. Have you ever pulled your credit bureau and saw a job you never worked at or a residence you never lived in? We are trained to see the difference between the real and fictional data.”

Social-networking Websites are also great tracking tools, said Brown. “People update their Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace accounts several times per day, allowing anyone following their actions the ability to know just where they are and what they are doing,” he noted.

Imagine a skip feeling like he or she got away with the car without paying for it, and then heads out to lunch one day and Tweets: “Off to lunch at my favorite Italian restaurant, Tony’s.” And just as soon as he hits send, the CSI Group intercepts the updated message and sends a local field agent to Tony’s restaurant to look for their collateral.

Technology is assisting many BHPH dealers across the country to increase their profitability and minimize their losses. These products require a small upfront investment for a huge long term profit.

17 years ago when I started in the car business, advertising in the newspaper was a staple of any ad budget. Dealers felt they had to be in the paper to attract customers or else their competition would steal their market share.

Today, dealers feel the same way when it comes to the internet. Every dealer is trying to figure out a way to increase their visibility through higher placement in internet searches specific for car sales.

Have you heard of micro sites? These are web sites designed to attract customers at specific times in the buying cycle and ownership cycle.  For instance, there are sales micro sites like HondaBatonRouge.com that attract new car buyers during the early stages of their buying process or as it is referred to, the “information gathering” stage.

The key to turning a well designed micro site into a lead capturing vacuum is to pair it with a combination of search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and social media marketing to own your local searches.

What can micro sites and digital intelligence marketing, as we like to call it, do for you that your regular website can’t?

The overall Vision

The purpose of these micro sites, technically speaking, is to be a trap for the search engines. They are designed from the beginning to rank high and to take over local search. It’s a one stop research portal that brings in customers from the very beginning of their “buying phase.” It’s widely known that when a customer begins to research they could be three month, six months, and a year or further away from actually making a purchase. That’s why it’s important to build top of the mind awareness as early on as possible so that when the customer decides it’s time to buy they will remember the time spent on the micro site. That’s not to say that some people won’t submit a lead their first visit because quite a few will.

The Conversation

The internet has undergone tremendous changes over the years and the biggest has been the change from information gathering to information sharing. The internet has evolved into a Social Media machine. Everyday there are conversation happening all across the internet in tens of thousands of forums, social networking sites and in chat rooms, just to name just a few. Unlike traditional communication everything said is logged, every communication saved in databases and on websites that are constantly crawled by the search engines and indexed for the world to see. It’s in knowing how to find these conversations that a whole world of car sales open up. Imagine being able to find people talking about buying a car in your local market or talking about being turned down for a car loan what could you do with that?

Now imagine one of our micro sites being right in the middle of one of that conversation, the contents of the site speaking directly to your future car deal. These conversations happen every day and are repeated multiple times every hour by hundreds of people in your local market… we bring those conversation to you.

Behind the Veil

The physical part of the site, the part of the site that’s seen, is just the tip of a very large iceberg. It’s the pretty face of a multifaceted search marketing approach that includes hundreds of videos across hundreds of websites, dozens of social networks and countless blogs and micro-blogs all of which will bring local traffic to the authority on your specific make and model, our micro site. For each page that is visible on the site there are dozens of pages of high quality content and videos that are made to bring traffic to that specific page. As time progresses the long tentacles of these sites will reach into every search phrase that says Honda or Ford, Mazda or Toyota, Chevy Tahoe and Cadillac Escalade to name just a few.

The end result is you will dominate your local searches and that translates into increased market share!

Next Generation Dealer Services is developing micro sites for every phase of the buying cycle and ownership cycle including new cars, used cars, service, body shop, accessories, and even aftermarket warranties. It is time to embrace the future of marketing in the car business and that marketing is on the web. Many battles are won with good intelligence so why not win the battles on your own sales home front.