Lowering the Anti- of Social Media
Check out this great article on how to leverage social media to turn your disguntled customers into fans! Not sure how you can use social media for your store? Talk to us! Just send an email to pmason@cimasystems.net and we’ll be happy to help.
source: Automotive News | April 19, 2010 | Lindsay Chappell | located here
Anyone who was a friend of Florida resident Thomas Alascio might have gotten the following Twitter tweet from him last October:
“Took the kids to Sonic for dinner. Great food and service. Route 60 Hyundai should take lessons.”
Tolstoy, it isn’t. But as millions of Americans link together on chatty outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and Internet message boards and product review forums, auto dealers are grasping that social media offer an explosive new opportunity to market themselves and their vehicles.
They are also an explosive new source of negative publicity and customer kvetching.
Just as customers easily can tell the world about the wonderful dealership experience they just had, they also can blanket the nation’s laptops and Blackberries with angry denouncements and warnings to stay away.
Dealerships are scrambling to protect their reputations online, and ad agencies and online marketing shops are offering to help.
Speeding word-of-mouth
The Alascio case illustrates how social media can propel bad word-of-mouth far faster than ever before.
Alascio had received a loaner car from Route 60 Hyundai in Vero Beach, Fla. The dealership said he had damaged it. The two parties disagreed over Alascio’s financial obligations.
So last October, after an altercation at the dealership, Alascio took his beef to the airwaves, tweeting critical remarks about the store once or twice a day.
A typical post: “Beautiful nite. Pretty moon and btw. Route 60 Hyundai sucks.”
The dealership wasn’t amused. In December, Route 60 had its attorney write Alascio a letter demanding that he “cease and desist” making what the attorney called defamatory comments. The letter warned Alascio that his Twitter comments “entitle Route 60 Hyundai to bring an action against you for defamation and tortuous interference with an advantageous business relationship.”
The letter closed with a stern warning to the customer in all capital letters and underlined: “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY.”
That warning sparked a longer letter from Alascio’s own attorney. It challenged Route 60′s legal claim and urged it to drop the matter or face a lawsuit from Alascio.
In a more conciliatory conclusion, Alascio’s attorney proposed that Route 60 instead consider actually inviting the unhappy customer into the store to discuss ways to improve its customer service.
That never happened, and the case simply disappeared, says Alascio’s attorney, Marc Randazza of Miami.
Stark advice
Randazza offers some stark advice for dealers upset at comments posted by disgruntled customers.
“If you are confronted with a consumer complaint and you pick up the phone to ask your lawyer to try and intimidate the consumer into silence, you should fire yourself for being an abject imbecile,” he says.
“Even if the consumer is wrong, it might cost you a few hundred bucks to make the consumer happy, which then would turn into positive word-of-mouth advertising.
“On the other hand, if you do something moronic like have your lawyer write a threatening letter or, worse yet, actually file suit, then you will get a firsthand lesson in how wrong the person was who said, ‘There is no such thing as bad publicity.’ ”
Other dealers involved in the untamed new world of social media agree that conciliation probably should be the first response to online complaints.
“There are always going to be people out there who are unhappy about something,” says Michelle David, Internet manager at Esserman Volkswagen and Nissan in Miami. “You’ve got to accept that and consider ways to turn a negative into a positive.
“In social media, it’s inevitable that some people are going to criticize you and make negative reviews. Hopefully, if you focus on doing a good job and treating your customers well, you’re going to generate a lot more positive reviews from customers than negative ones. People will read the good ones and realize that the complaint isn’t the norm.
“But you can’t just let it lie.”
Tracking comments
David is doing what many Internet-focused retailers and store managers are starting to do: She has free Google alerts set up to search the Internet for Esserman’s name. Anytime someone mentions Esserman, she gets an e-mail — usually about a dozen a day. She then can follow up and troubleshoot, if necessary.
Free Internet search engines, such as Technorati and IceRocket, trawl hundreds of millions of private blogs and Twitter communiques looking for references to a brand name or dealership name. But the real question is one of management philosophy: What should a dealership do once it finds a knock to its reputation ?
For Hagen Durant, the social-media-savvy general manager of Classic Chevrolet in suburban Tulsa, Okla., the discovery means responding immediately — doing a quick self-examination to determine whether the customer is right to be peeved, then reaching out to that person.
“Problems come up fast, and they can spread even faster on the Internet,” Durant says. “If you can just reach out and let the customer know the issue is important to you, you can often save the situation.”
Durant recently got an e-mail heads-up that a consumer was bad-mouthing Classic Chevrolet on his Facebook page. The critic had negotiated for a used van from the store, but by the time he drove 50 miles to buy it, the van had just been sold.
The critic’s Internet report: “These guys suck.”
Durant sent the customer a note of his own, offering to buy him a tank of gas to compensate him for his trouble of driving across town. The conciliation wooed the customer out of his anger and opened a dialogue with the dealership.
The next day, by chance, the deal on the van fell through. Durant alerted the Facebooking customer that it was available again. Durant promised to fill the van with gasoline if the customer would come back and buy it. He did.
At Suzuki of Wichita, General Manager Tom White Jr. discovered a customer writing Facebook complaints about bad service from the Kansas store. After looking into the matter, White concluded that the customer was right to be upset. A repair order had been mishandled, a part had gone unordered and a repair job had taken days longer than it should have.
‘Call me’
Store owner Scott Pitman posted a note on the customer’s Facebook page saying, “Please call me, I’m going to make this right.”
The dealership ended up buying dinner for the disgruntled customer — who has since returned to the store for more business.
“We look at this as an opportunity to turn people into repeat customers,” White says of monitoring the Internet for problems. “Obviously, you can’t give away your product, but you can go out of your way to do the right thing with people.
“Customers are talking to each other about you today. You have to be out there as part of that conversation.”
The Wichita store is active on youtube.com, posting short videos of the dealership to stay in the eye of local Internet surfers. Store employees use inexpensive Flip video cameras to shoot images of new products and satisfied customers taking deliveries. The store employs a high school student part time to upload the shorts, in hopes of generating positive comments from viewers.
Viewer comments are a key part of the new social media order. Web sites such as dealerrater.com and yelp.com — the latter welcomes feedback from auto dealership customers to compile ratings — are being used by a startling number of consumers, says Dave Howlett, senior director of consumer insight and strategy at J.D. Power and Associates.
Howlett says that if dealers are not closely monitoring those online reviews of their stores, they are being negligent. He recommends encouraging satisfied customers to weigh in on the sites whenever possible.
If only one customer posts a review of a dealership, and it happens to be negative, the rating site will show readers that 100 percent of the dealership’s reviews are negative. Adding just two positive reviews will reverse the impression.
“We ask our customers to visit those sites and post their positive reviews,” says Esserman’s Michelle David. “Maybe you can’t do anything about the one negative review. But if you can offset it with a couple of positive ones, you can undo the damage.”
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Tags: CIMA Messages, dealership, facebook, Social Media, twitter, yelp, youtube