Carl Sconnely's Dealership Technology Blog

Twitter – All Grown Up

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:00:00 GMT

Twitter has finally grown into the full potential of its unique niche within social networking. Up until recently, many businesses (RV dealerships included) have been quite unsure of how to harness the branding and selling power of this social network messaging site. Facebook is still the place to develop "strong-ties" with potential customers if they are willing to let you into their personal space, but unfortunately not all potential customers are willing to do this. In turn, Twitter has become a great tool to help businesses fill in their social media advertising gaps. Twitter creates effective, but less intrusive "loose-ties" with potential customers.

Twitter has evolved into a method of casually engaging potential customers and building your dealership’s brand rather than being just a convenient way to blast out press releases or featured units. A great example of a company expanding the use of Twitter is JetBlue. They use their Twitter account to handle customer service questions along with asking for feedback from their followers about things like what new cities they should fly to. If JetBlue customers have questions on delayed flights, baggage carry-on sizes, or anything at all, they can simply message JetBlue and they will quickly Tweet back an answer.

9 Million Reasons to Protect Your Identity

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:26:00 GMT

Currently, the Federal Trade Commission estimates that as many as 9 million Americans have their identities stolen each year. With this many occurrences, it’s likely that you already know someone who has had their identity stolen.

I have put together a list of common best practices that will help you protect yourself and your customers from identity theft. Passing this information on to your customers and prospects ultimately benefits your dealership: A prospect who has a stellar 800+ credit score one day, could be surprised to find that score knocked down or flagged for fraud alert when they try to finance an RV, making the sale tougher than it needs to be. In addition, customers will give you kudos just for passing on these helpful tips to secure their identity.

Start by searching for your dealership name and phone number on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search engines. You might find that someone else has a website with your name on it. Recently, thieves have created fake dealer websites, offering unbelievable prices and convincing customers to wire deposits for securing fake deals. When the customer shows up at your dealership to take delivery of that 2010 diesel pusher they paid $8,000 for, you will have more than a case of mistaken identity on your hands.

Advertising has finally come to Twitter

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:09:00 GMT

Twitter, the creator of the 140 characters or less social network, has finally disclosed part of its plan to start paying the bills after its $55 million dollar venture capital is exhausted. This plan will open the door for dealerships to use targeted advertisements similar to other popular social websites.

Much like Facebook and the other social networking websites, advertisements will begin being displayed on Twitter.com based on the keywords included in a user’s incoming and outgoing tweets. By doing this, it should allow Twitter to accurately target paid advertising, based on a user's interests and hobbies - for example, RV, camping, etc.. These advertisements should start appearing as "promoted" tweets throughout the site for users.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow - Get Found with Google's New Search Tools

Mon, 10 May 2010 19:41:00 GMT

Google has added new search tools to help users find the information they are looking for easier than ever. But the real question is - will these features benefit or hurt your dealership’s current online performance.

The most important new Google search feature is the ability to filter results by time. When searching, displayed information can be outdated from years past. To solve this, Google users, with only one click, can search by different timeframes, including; the last 24 hours, week, month, year, or even a designated date range. This means that having regularly updated units and fresh information (content) on your dealership’s website is even more important than ever. In addition to this filter, there is a timeline feature that will actually display search results in a graph for the year that the data is relevant to.

Next is a feature that will limit the Google search results to a users immediate area. Since an RV shopper can narrow their search to only their surrounding areas, this could hurt some RV dealers who obtain prospects from all over the US. On the other hand, this should help dealers keep more of their local business.

Don’t be Unsociable – “YouTube For Your Dealership's Success”

Mon, 03 May 2010 19:16:00 GMT

To continue with my “Don’t be Unsociable” blog series, this week I will be going over how to get your dealership recognized on YouTube.

YouTube is the single largest online video site and provides over 300 million visitors worldwide with over 5 billion video streams monthly. This means that on average, every user that visits YouTube watches over 16 videos a month. YouTube also is the 4th most visited website on the Internet.

YouTube, like all other social networking websites, requires that you to create a free account in order to start posting videos. Once your account is created, you will be presented with your “Channel” page. From the tabs at the top of this page, you can customize the colors, theme, and features to be displayed on your page. Please note that under the settings tab there is a place to enter your channel’s title and tags. These two fields are extremely important for the SEO (search engine optimization) of your channel, and your words and phrases should be selected carefully. If your dealership’s website has already been optimized, refer to the title and keyword tags from your homepage to help decide on a good title and tags. YouTube users are able to follow you from your channel page and receive updates of your new videos and announcements.

Don’t be Unsociable – “Keep Your Dealership LinkedIn”

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:55:00 GMT

This is the fourth installment of my “Don’t be Unsociable” series, and is dedicated to teaching your dealership to leverage the power of the professional networking site LinkedIn.

For those of you not familiar with LinkedIn, it is the worlds largest business professional networking website that is host to over 65 million users. The site allows users to keep in touch with co-workers, network with people in the industry, find new prospects, ask/answer industry questions, and post available job positions.

A successful strategy on LinkedIn differs greatly from Facebook and Twitter because the LinkedIn social environment is far less casual. All communications should be fairly formal and business in nature.

Here are the top 5 uses that every dealership can benefit from by signing up for LinkedIn.

Don’t be Unsociable – “Tweets and Twitters.”

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:09:00 GMT

If you have been following my “Don’t be Unsociable” blog series thus far, your dealership has probably already started down the road to Facebook success but don’t forget about Twitter. Twitter is still a hugely popular and efficient way to spread the word on just about everything.

Twitter is designed for text message blasting and like Facebook is a free social networking website! Messages sent out through Twitter are called “Tweets” (both are forms of communication between birds) which are brief 140-character messages that are displayed in chronological order on your follower’s profile pages and they can automatically have tweets forwarded to their cellphones. Due to most cell phone providers capping the text message character limits of cell phones at 160-characters, the guys at Twitter decided to limit tweeting to a 140-character message and an additional 20-characters to add the sender’s username to identify the source of the message.

Understanding Twitter is about as easy as understanding how, when and what you should be sending your potential customers.

Don't be Unsociable. - Part 2

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:30:00 GMT

Last week I covered a few basic techniques on how to get a dealership Facebook account off the ground, so this week I will be expanding on some techniques you can use to keep your newfound Facebook friends coming back for more.

The main drive of your Facebook page should always be meaningful and constantly changing content. Unless you have a fun viral advertising video or an amazing custom widget you have developed, consumers will only keep coming back to your Facebook page if there is regularly updated information. Educate consumers on how to maintain their RV's, what processes set you apart from all other RV dealers, or maybe offer periodic reviews on destinations that all RVers should make a point to visit.

Remember to post messages on your wall consistently but not incessantly. Try to avoid direct marketing statements such as a specific unit for sale at this price but instead invite your fans to come see updated information, or this weeks RV destination of the week. Try to involve your Facebook fans to post messages/pictures of their most recent trips in the RV they bought from you. Nothing is better marketing than a potential customer seeing happy past customers describing their perfect vacations.

Don't Be Unsociable. – Part 1

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:40:00 GMT

Most dealerships are already familiar or at least aware of Internet social marketing in the form of Facebook, My Space, and Twitter; but very few know how to effectively use these tools to help nurture a successful following to increase business.

Today, in Part 1, I will be covering tips for dealerships to successfully use B2C (business to consumer) social marketing on Facebook and then next week I will follow up with best dealership practices for other social sites.

The most important thing to remember when creating a Facebook account is that they do not allow business branded profiles. Facebook periodically removes those accounts, so make sure your dealership treads carefully if you have already done this. The best way to go about getting started is to create a business fan page for your dealership and then have additional personal accounts to help drive traffic.

To start with, how are you getting customers to your Facebook page? Just simply having a link on your website or mentioning it to customers is almost never enough.

Feed Your Mouse A Little Rat Poison

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:27:00 GMT

In 1963, Dr. Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute developed the first prototype of a computer pointing device which could allow a user to navigate on a computer screen without the use of a keyboard. This new invention was quickly dubbed “mouse” because of the tail-like wire that protruded from it.

Since then, the mouse has quickly become almost a necessity when dealing with any computer running a modern operating system, such as Microsoft Windows®.

In the RV business however, the mouse occasionally becomes troublesome for non-windows users when upgrading from an older DOS-based dealership software system to a modern Windows®-based one. This transition is typically toughest in the parts and service departments because many employees were trained years ago on computer systems requiring little or no mouse movement.

If you are one of those people that don’t consider the mouse to be an improvement, don’t get discouraged. Microsoft didn’t forget about mouse-haters everywhere and has built in a variety of keyboard commands that allow non-mouse users to do practically everything that their mouse wielding co-workers can.

Always Fly First or Business Class When Traveling the Internet Part 2.

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:17:00 GMT

As I covered in last week’s blog “Always Fly First or Business Class When Traveling the Internet – Part 1,” RV Dealerships have become increasingly reliant on the Internet in recent years, but many dealerships fail to realize the importance of using the proper bandwidth and network components to keep their businesses running successfully.

Your network is only as strong as its weakest link. Just because your dealership has made the jump to a business level Internet connection such as a T1, doesn’t mean that your network will suddenly be lightning fast.

Last week, I mentioned that Systems 2000 typically recommends to our dealers Cisco, SonicWALL, Netgear, Netopia, and Watchguard network component brands. Lately, I have received a lot of questions about specific models we felt worked the best. To answer this, we recommend the Cisco ASA 5505 Router. This router not only operates as a typical high-end router, but also as a VPN and Firewall. The ASA 5505 is easy to configure, and although other models could possibly save you $150 in upfront costs, the reliability and scalability of this piece of hardware will pay for itself ten-fold with fewer tech visits.

You will want to limit your employees from using “unnecessary” real time streaming video and audio to greatly improve the Internet experience for your entire dealership...

Always Fly First Class or Business Class when traveling the Internet.

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:07:00 GMT

RV Dealerships have become increasing more reliant on the Internet in recent years. Dealerships rely on Internet leads to fuel up to 60% of their unit sales, RV Parts and Service departments almost exclusively use the Internet to place online parts orders or submit warranty claims, and there's a growing trend is to use hosted or web-based DMS servers to reduce overall IT costs.

As dealers make decisions as to the services they wish to incorporate into their website, internal processes, or DMS software, software companies often hear the complaint that their Internet service is unreliable, slow, or down right non-existent. I have yet to see a case where these issues are not easily resolved; in fact the hardest part is just trying figure out what the dealership is paying for. Like understanding the restrictions on your frequent flyer miles, your bandwidth may only be available when that first class customer isn't using it.

Don't fly coach. Business-class Internet connections come with many features that average Internet connections do not. The first and most obvious benefit of this connection is the increased upload and download speeds. Upload is when you take data, such as pictures, and copy them from your computer to your website or some other computer. Download is when you copy data from another computer to your local machine or server. Be aware that you may have purchased slower upload speeds than download. Upload speeds are more important in a dealership since you are trying to move those all-important pictures onto the Internet as quickly as possible.

NTP Distribution Connectivity Launch in Palm Springs CA.

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:35:00 GMT

Systems 2000 will be demonstrating the NTP parts inventory communication link at NTP's annual trade show in Palm Springs CA. The show is scheduled to run this Tuesday through Thursday.

This is more than just an electronic file upload of a purchase order; its an active communications link that displays current availability, pricing, purchase order submission, and e-packing slips.

It is the biggest step forward in RV industry communications in years and hopefully other suppliers and DMS companies will follow suit. This type of business development isn't just good for NTP and Systems 2000, it's good for the entire industry. As overhead is lowered and order processing and delivery speeds are increased, the RV Industry will be able to move more product and raise customer satisfaction levels.

DMS Comparison Guide - We're Getting Close.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:12:00 GMT

Last week I had the privilege of being able to present our software to a very knowledgeable dealer 20 group. Within the allotted time, we tried to cover as much of the important aspects of our software as possible. I enjoyed the interaction with the dealers in the room, as their questions were intelligent, insightful, and to the point. This group called the "RV Profit Group" and moderated by Lee Berryman, contains some of the most successful dealers in the country; but more importantly, all members in attendance of the presentation are currently running on IDS. We made our presentation on Monday and then IDS was invited to make their presentation the following day.

What is so important about this meeting is that dealers were able to look at both companies and make comparison between the two software systems.. I have always been a big proponent of RVDA or RVIA doing a side by side comparison of the systems available to the RV industry. This would be an independent and un-biased comparison that dealers could use to shorten the evaluation period when deciding on purchasing or switching software systems.

Until that time, I can only suggest that more dealer groups follow suit. It is helpful to have your peers in the room asking the questions that one might not think of. It also allows the group to discuss features and benefits as they might apply to their niche. And in the end, they can probably negotiate a group rate with the company of their choice.

SQL: Behind every great dealership software package is a great database system

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:13:00 GMT

Databases are the core of almost every software program from Apple's iTunes to your dealership management system, but what makes one better than the other? Database servers come in many different sizes and contain different features.

Software for an RV dealership requires a database that can handle thousands of simultaneous database transactions, be secure to handle sensitive customer information, and be flexible enough to integrate with RV manufacturers and part suppliers.

Because of these reasons, Microsoft® SQL Server is the database of choice for Systems 2000. Outside the RV industry, many other large corporations rely on SQL server environments as well because it is accepted as a “commercial” level database server. MySpace, the popular social website, manages 8 billion "Friend" relationships, and stores 34 billion e-mail messages all through Microsoft® SQL Server. MySpace's databases contain over 1 petabyte of data (that’s 1 million gigabytes)!