Justin Murphy, Creative Director

GM Dealers are being forced to take a Cobalt site (for free allegedly) to be able to receive our leads from GM.com and chevy.com through OneSource.

Apparently, our CRM providers (AutoBase in our case), weren’t giving GM the type of data they were looking for to show how they are driving internet business to our stores. The data on their reports never matched the data on our system.

The concerns I have are:
How is GM and Cobalt going to geographically protect our franchise territories?

Will Cobalt be able to push data to our CRM application? I shudder at the thought of manually adding data to our CRM that is currently pushed in.

Will we have to invest double in sem/seo to put our “new” website up in the listings?

We have a terrific website currently and are positioned very well. This positioning required a tremendous investment for which we have high equity.

Are we going to fall victim to the larger purchasing power of Cobalt to supplant us in seo/sem listings and positioning? In effect is this Cobalt initiative going to take all of our market leading efforts and nullify them?

I really need a clearer vision of the push and pull of marketing and data for this Cobalt initiative so that I can get my head around it.

One of the things NOT mentioned in the enrollment website for this GM initiative is the promotion and link out to our well established dealer website. Is this going to be available and if so will we be forced to pay for the redirect?

What motivation will Cobalt have to seamlessly upgrade us on an ongoing basis if they will already have been generously handed a huge portion of this highly competitive market? This internet market lives and breathes and moves very quickly. Will Cobalt be able to respond in a timely fashion with a minimum of down time?

Finally, we have seen in many previous posts that the level of service (or CSI if you will) is not very good at their present volume of business. What type of customer service can we expect to receive when several thousand more dealers will be added to the mix almost instantly?

I am sure we will have many more concerns until we see more information.

Once I find out more I will post again good, bad, or indifferent.

Jim Setele

Since, my Cobalt rep Lydia Edwards and tech support ‘Andy’ have been in constant contact assisting me in my quest for better functionality of our websites which were in dire need of repair.

Tech support at Cobalt is still a challenge to contact in a timely manner, but when reached are intuitive and helpful.

It seems Cobalt’s contracts are also attempting to conform to the industry with shorter, more flexible terms.

In this same time frame, I have heard from a few fellow internet managers time strapped like myself, how their premier and cutting edge automotive website company has let them down. One as simple as the geographic region of the website marketing as they were consistently receiving all their leads from over 60 miles away. Oops. Im assuming it’s probably from the recent buyout and marketing blitz without beefing up the tech support/developer staff first.

I don’t forsee Cobalt selling out any time soon.

More updates to follow… thanks Jeff!

I’m Melissa McCann the Marketing Director for The Cobalt Group. I’m responding to your thoughts and questions about Cobalt.

We want you to know that we are listening – and we do hear your comments, concerns and feedback. And, we have both good news I want to give you and some explanation about the changes that are taking place that will greatly improve your website experience.

Today, our new platform is in use in over 5000 dealerships and is producing very strong results. We still have a few clients on our legacy platform but they are being migrated quickly. This platform update has been an amazing undertaking and brings Cobalt to the forefront as the new industry standard and I’m not just talking marketing BS. I’ve been in the automotive industry for a long time, and I am speaking as someone who can appreciate what dealers really need.

This platform was built dynamically with the guidance of our deep search partnerships with Google and Yahoo!. Dealers on this platform are experiencing better than ever organic search results because of the new frameless website architecture and many other architectural features that allow search engines to perform a deep crawl into relevant content.

Why should you care? Well, the features of the new platform address concerns and needs that our clients, like you, have shared with us. This new platform does so much for your websites, for example:

• Radically improved content management tools making it easier than ever to update your website and proactive services if you would rather be selling cars than updating your website

• Enhanced vehicle merchandising that allow dealer to better sell what’s on their lot and capture business for vehicles they could easily trade for or acquire

• Social networking features like emailing a friend

• New Specials functionality that allows you to feature vehicles you’re trying to spotlight to move now

We also noticed concerns that were voiced on this blog by some of our dealers and we wanted to address them here:

We’re constantly balancing OEM and dealer needs to provide dealers with the ability to leverage the millions of dollars their OEMs spend on advertising to the dealership’s advantage. We care deeply about dealership success and are always looking for ways to provide more offline advertising leverage online.

I noticed some blogger concerns about their ability to move to the latest platform as a group. Let me explain why that is the case. As we create integrations between the OEM and Dealership we custom code lead routing, brand site integrations and custom tools for each program. These are the back end details that insure each dealer receives all brand lead referrals and that websites meet compliance standards. These are also the customizations that deliver automatically placed advertising allowing dealers to leverage OEM offline advertising dollars.

We must customize each OEM program before moving it to the new platform insuring all of this works for the dealership. This creates a situation where some dealer groups may have some sites on Nitra, our legacy platform and other sites on our new Website 3.0 platform. We are very sensitive to this situation and are working quickly to migrate all sites. Dealer portals may be moved to the new platform now providing portal level search optimization.

There are many new and exciting website designs, features and services available to improve your support options and give you more flexibility than ever. After all we believe you should be selling cars. Let us deal with your online marketing. We do appreciate our clients and we want you to know we are listening and we built this new platform to meet your needs.