2012 Honda Civic Sneak-Peak Review

The 2012 Honda Civic is a celebration of its heritage of surpassing super-high mileage landmarks, combined with progressive features and superior affordability. Sticking to its original vision of a “Civic for all people,” the 2012 Civic…

Before I get into what this blog is about I think it might be better to tell you what this blog isn't. First, I won't be discussing why you should be blogging, I'll take the fact that you are reading this as a sign that you already know you should. Second, it won't be a technical how -to-manual of setting up and maintaining blogging software. In this post…

By Neal Gorevic

This is the first in a series of articles by Neal Gorevic and Haven Thompson that will look at electric vehicles and how automakers, as well as other players in the space, are planning/will need to plan on leveraging digital marketing and product development to help drive adoption for electric vehicle purchase and to help manage and support EV ownership.

In 1899 and 1900,…

Easier Negative Keyword Management in AdWords

Written by Duncan Parry 

In January, Google introduced a useful addition to AdWords that potentially makes managing negative keywords across multiple campaigns a lot easier. Maybe it was…

I'm working on a white-paper to present at the Automotive Marketing Boot Camp that compares the choices dealers have to advertise their used car inventory. One of the elements of the white-paper is to document how Vehicle Detail Pages (VDP) are designed and presented to consumers.



From a dealer perspective I have a problem with…

When Bob Burg, coauthor of The International Phenomenon, “The Go-Giver” speaks of giving, he’s talking about constantly and consistently providing value to others, and touching lots of lives with that exceptional value.



In fact, that’s the only way one can make money in a free-enterprise based society. Thus, shifting your focus…

With the increasing number of ways that both social networks and email providers are working to help their users receive less noise, it's time that you stop producing so much of it. Take a look at your content, whether it's a status update on Facebook or an email newsletter it's important to note that just because you put it out there doesn't…

I just finished conducting a 20 Group workshop on digital marketing strategies and all the the dealers in the room had incomplete or inaccurate Google Places data. What was also interesting was that no dealers in the group had more than 15 reviews posted on Google Places.

Once I showed the dealers how easy it was to fix their profiles and setup a process…

What items stand out the most to you in search results? Often pictures and especially video will initially draw your attention more than plain text results. Videos posted to sites like YouTube show up especially well in search listings. Auto dealerships need to take advantage of this free exposure by creating videos of walkarounds, customer testimonials, test…

Too many dealerships seem to practice as “faith-based” businesses—not faith in a higher religious power (which might actually help!), but faith that their GM, GSMs, salespeople, marketing, etc. will work as they always have.  That they can somehow resist modern business changes from sales to processes because they have magical faith both in people who…

Imagine a world where car dealers earned the same community respect as fire fighters, police officers and other local philanthropists. A world where little…

Last Wednesday a marketing employee from New Media Strategies, Chrysler’s former marketing company, mistook the Chrysler Twitter account for his personal account and posted on the Chrysler Twitter page, ““I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to drive.” Between “to” and “drive” was an unfortunate word. The impact was felt immediately when followers began to retweet the post. Chrysler quickly responded by posting “Our apologies-our account was…

Support.  It's not something that a good product can do without.  Ever.  The best training will not overcome the need for it.  So, with the products you have, do you get Product Support?  Do you know who to call?  And when?

I spent some time last week talking to a dealer who had installed a key, new piece of software at the dealership.  Training had been…