What is Social Marketing - Can Dealer Micro Sites Help?

A while back I did a post at my blog about being an Internet Sales Manager describing my research of Dealer Micro Sites. Once I did blog about it I got some caustic remarks from a vendor of Dealer Micro Sites that were comical to say the least. He took the time to post 15 links and description of what he does and trying to justify his pricing. Do not get me wrong, I do feel that people are entitled to a fair profit from their work, but their are some real cons to using dealer micro sites for automobile dealers and unless a dealer is willing to make a concerted effort at using the medium properly they will far out weigh the pros.

The Cons of Dealer Micro Sites

• Dealers do not own the content - Once spending the money to have a vendor create the landing page or micro site for them they lose the use of that web property once
  the contract expires. The dealer does not own vendor created micro sites content in most cases.
• Universal Search
  - Google is changing their algorithm to offer the surfer more options when they search for specific terms. Of course their own directory listing will show on top for specific dealer searches or market area and brand searches. More and more you will see other items such as blogs, video, images, books and maps in addition to plain website returns.
• Content Updates - If something changes and you wish to display different content to your potential customers you must wait for a vendor to update the content or pay them to do so. If there are dealer micro site providers that have a full functioning CMS for dealers to update content please let me know in the comments.
• Loss of website traffic - If a search engine user lands on a micro site instead of your main dealership website it may confuse them into thinking that it is you main piece of online real estate and not offer them what they are looking for.
• Accountability - If a micro site is not performing like it was promised the dealership is stuck in a contract that they cannot escape from in most cases. There will always be fine print that says "results not guaranteed" while you are stuck with a bill each month or even worse prepaid in advance.
• Advertising
  - Beyond creation of the micro site you will have additional expense of SEO and SEM to drive traffic to it. A site does not SEO itself just via submission to the search engines. There are other factors to consider such as link building and pay per click management.

Leaving caustic comments, dropping tons of links, and not using your real name on a personal blog is the anti thesis of Auto Industry Best Practices and violates any amount of decency in automotive social networking environments. Hopefully the car dealer network does a better job an social marketing then the vendors in the space today.

Nothing to fear - Blow hards just blow

Not long ago I did a blog post on my automotive marketing blog about how a company chose to advertise a training program called "The Masters of eMarketing". I am not going to get into the details of the post here. If you want to know more just click the title of the training program.


The response I received from Jim Ziegler and his attorneys would of scared the heck out of most people. To me I found it comical. One of the attorneys who signed this letter, Richard N. Sox, and Mr Ziegler write for the same publication, Dealer Magazine. I guess they were trying to flex their power by sending me that letter as "Recognized Automotive Authorities" and assumed I would buckle.


When it came to light that Jim Ziegler threated to sue me I got a tremendous amount of support from the Automotive Community and had people reach out to me that would surprise most. What is funny it appeared that sock puppets were employed to try to denigrate me at every possible step. One called me and apologized, a friendship may have even developed, and another can't seem to move on and a friendship ended.


At the end of the day I think the threats they sent me were hollow and unfounded, the interference that people are still trying to cause is backfiring and damaging their reputation, and I have dealers coming out of the wood work to throw me business. As my good friend at Suzuki of Wichita says, these people just don't get it!