The Dealer Impact Blog

Karl Chevrolet’s Carl Moyer: In the Driver’s Seat and Out of the Ordinary

Automotive News TV Special Report gets up close and personal with auto dealer Carl Moyer, as he shares insights and best practices that helped him build a rock-solid Chevy empire at Karl Chevrolet in suburban Des Moines, Iowa.  Dealer Impact Systems is proud to be a long-time partner with Karl Chevrolet, serving the dealership as a client since 2003.  We salute Mr. Moyer as an industry innovator, and congratulate him and his entire team on making Karl Chevrolet one of the nation’s most progressive and successful dealerships.

Digital Dealer Conference 2011

Dealer Impact will be in Vegas this week for the 2011 Digital Dealer Conference! If you have any questions about our Full-Service Programs, Social Media, or Reputation Management please don’t hesitate to ask.

You can find more information about the conference here.

Introducing Full-Service Digital Marketing and Social Media Programs for your dealership

Dealer Impact Systems is here to let you focus on what you do best, Sell Cars!

Let’s face it, in today’s digital marketing world things are moving so fast it takes a team of people to keep up with everything; writers, bloggers, web developers, marketing personnel, social media experts, reputation management, and someone to manage everything to make sure it gets done on time. All this equates to more employees, more programs, more training, more time, more money and more headaches.

What Should Your Dealership Do? Nothing!!!

Let our Team of Digital Marketing Professionals do the work for you.

1) Retrieve
Your dealership has content in many forms and places. Whether it’s an ad, news, or special generated from your sales or service department, or a marketing agency we retrieve your content.

2) Ready
Once it’s in our hands, we ready your content for the web. Optimizing for maximum benefit.

3) Release
Our content team takes your optimized content and syndicates it across the digital landscape, building your presence and getting you noticed!

4) Radar
Once released, we keep our ear to the ground, monitoring for social media likes, tweets, mentions and reviews. We even help respond!

5) Recruit
Our team creates and conducts proactive campaigns to build traffic, enhance web presence, increase Facebook likes & followers, and requests customer reviews.

6) Report
Your customer success manager will conduct monthly, bi-monthly or weekly reviews of your results, and provide recommendations for content that enhances customer engagement.

Click Here for Details.

If you would like to get going on one of our new programs contact us at 877-334-9638 or email sales@dealerimpact.com and get in the queue first.

5 Ways Social Media Has Changed Marketing Campaigns

Mashable has a great article about how Social Media has fundamentally changed how marketing campaigns are executed.

“Social media engagement.” It’s a phrase that generates a lot of buzz, but what does it actually mean? And, more importantly, why does it matter to companies that are integrating social media into their PR and marketing strategies?

We turned to some of the leading communication experts to discover the importance of sparking online engagement and how this new focus has forced PR, marketing and advertising campaigns to evolve.

via Mashable

Facebook Studio Launches

Click Here for details.

Get the Most Out of Facebook Insights

This is a great Facebook page resource for small businesses. Bookmark for future reference!

You’re a small business owner and you’ve decided to create a Facebook Page for your company. Or you’re an employee in an organization and, since you are the only one who “gets” social media, you’ve been charged with running a Facebook Page.

You set it up and make it look nice. You put up some photos and videos that you think represent the organization well. You e-mail a bunch of your friends and the page has almost 100 “Likes.” But one day, your boss comes in and asks you the question that you have been dreading: “Is this Facebook Page helping us or just eating away most of your time?”

Enter Facebook Insights, a powerful analytical tool that can help any organization evaluate the effectiveness of its Facebook presence. But, for a small business where time is perhaps the most important (and often rarest) resource, Facebook Insights can help you evaluate whether you’re investing or wasting your time.

The following scenarios are illustrations of how a fictional small business, “Bill’s Tech Company,” can leverage Facebook Insights to evaluate the effectiveness of its new Facebook Business Page. Within each scenario are the different aspects of Facebook Insights that Bill could utilize to answer his questions. Beside each measure (in parentheses) is a note on where to find that specific piece of data in Facebook Insights.

via: Mashable

GMs New Social Media Marketing Agency Is Staffing Up

It looks GM is putting some weight behind their Social Media Marketing.

Big Fuel, the New York-based agency that handles all of General Motors’ social media marketing, is opening a Detroit office to service the account and is on a hiring binge. Avi Savar, the CEO and founder of Big Fuel (pictured), said he has about 15 people on the ground in Detroit right now and is looking to double that number by March. The agency has another 80 people in New York and handles other clients including McDonald’s, Neutrogena and Colgate-Palmolive’s Wisp toothbrush. Savar said he hopes to have a staff of more than 200 by the end of 2011.

Big Fuel was brought on about three months ago. Previously, the agency had been gearing up to work with Hyundai, but when Hyundai’s lead marketer Joel Ewanick moved over to GM (after a short stint at Nissan), Ewanick persuaded Big Fuel to come over. The agency hasn’t executed any campaigns on behalf of GM yet, but Savar said a few are set to launch in January. This includes one for the Chevrolet Cruze called “Cruze-arati” that gives Cruzes to people who have big followings on social media.

GM’s social media marketing had previously been handled in house by, among others, Chris Barger and Mary Henige. The two were behind a program back in March in which eight teams of drivers/bloggers attended South By Southwest on GM’s behalf. GM’s social media marketing, however, has often been overshadowed by rival Ford, whose Scott Monty has more than 48,000 followers on Twitter. Ford also made a splash this summer when it introduced the Ford Explorer on Facebook and, in November, began circulating videos featuring celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Bret Michaels responding to consumers’ questions about the model.

via: Mashable

Social Media Success: 5 Lessons From In-House Corporate Teams

While implementing a successful social media campaign is something to celebrate, longer term, policy-based programs (which may not garner as much immediate publicity) can be even more rewarding.

Here we are highlighting five companies that have enjoyed long term success with their own social media teams and taking a look at some of the measurable returns they have seen as the results of their programs.

Key personnel from within the five companies below (in alphabetical order) have commented on their teams’ successes to offer you an insight into their various processes. Meanwhile, please be sure to let us know in the comments about any other companies that you feel should be recognized for having strong in-house social media teams.

Via: Mashable

Dell Has Some Interesting Twitter Sales Numbers

It looks like Dell is having great success with their @DellOutlet account.

Dell continues to be one of the more visible corporate behemoths actively using social media, and today they’re out with new numbers to demonstrate some of the success they are having.The company tells us that they’ve now generated a total of $6.5 million in revenue from their Twitter presence, where they have nearly 1.5 million followers on their @DellOutlet account (and 3 million “connections” across all social sites).

Via: Mashable

Top 5 Emerging Brand Trends on Facebook

1.) Facebook Exclusives
2.) Facebook Places Experimentation
3.) Facebook Commerce
4.) Facebook Support Centers
5.) Facebook Giving

Field of Dreams may have popularized the notion that, “If you build it, they will come,” but in today’s Facebook  generation, brands are beginning to go where the masses are, instead of relying on the masses to come to them. With 500 million members, Facebook represents real-time access to the online mainstream.

For years, brands have been using their Facebook Pages to connect with customers. As Facebook blossoms, so too does brand ingenuity, and in recent months we’ve seen a surge in campaigns that inspire Facebook giving, incorporate Facebook Places and feature Facebook as a prominent part of product reveals and fan exclusives. Application makers are also building tools that small and big brands alike can use to sell their products and offer Facebook-tailored customer support.

What follows is a deeper look at how and why these five emerging brand trends are bubbling up on the world’s largest social network.

Via: Mashable