Industry News & Trends

The Weekly Refresh – Basic SEO, Video viewing study, Days in stock and Amber Alerts

Jeff Kershner
Posted onJul 11, 2008 at 12:40 AM
Updated onUpdated on Oct 23, 2008 at 11:59 AM

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It’s been awhile since we’ve had a weekly refresh. So let’s get started!

  • New Study: Decrease Days in Stock for Pre-Owned Units by Nearly One-ThirdHomenet performed a
    solid study showing dealers that had great multiple photos, comments and pricing for their pre-owned vehicles could move their inventory nearly a third faster.
  • A another new study by
    The Nielsens Company     summarizing the amount of activity, including video viewing, which occurs on a monthly basis by the average user over television, Internet and mobile phones.

    Neilsen_study_videoviewing

    “Watching video on the Internet is no longer a novelty; nearly 119 million unique viewers viewed 7.5 billion video streams in May 2008. The average viewer spent 2 hours and 19 minutes in May streaming video online.”

  • Some very basic SEO knowledge for for your dealer
    website! The one and only Matt Cutts.

  • As I commute to work, the Amber alerts are rarely but sometimes warning drivers of a possible missing child. The other morning I was thinking how great it would be if one could subscribe to a text messaging service that would alert you when a child was missing in your area. Well, low and behold..there is!The national Wireless AMBER Alerts Initiative is a voluntary partnership between the wireless industry, the United States Department of Justice, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), to distribute AMBER Alerts to wireless subscribers who opt in to receive the messages and are able to receive text messages on their wireless devices.I encourage all DR readers to sign up for Wireless amber alerts.
    https://www.wirelessamberalerts.org

That’s it for this week.

Jeff Kershner
Founder of DealerRefresh - 20+ Years of dealership Sales, Management, Training, Marketing and Leadership.
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    Pete
  • July 11, 2008
Thanks Jeff for another great article and topic.

This topic reminds me of about 8 years ago talking to a GSM in charge of 15 stores arguing that the "net" is a fad with regard to e-commerce.

He predicted that Carmax, will be gone in a few years. Autonation's corporate systemization will never work and that people will never want to see video of vehicles.

So within 5 years after making that statement that franchise sqeezed all the lemon out their stores and heavily relied on push pull and tow sales, guaranteed trade $$$ and midnight madness sales. The result they now have two stores and have heard that 90% of all their business is secondary finance and sell 100 new fords a month in a major suburb outside Chicago.

On a side note: are your coupon pop-ups really working?

Adapt or die. If your last generation management or dealer principle and don't know to surf Youtube once in awhile or at least registered a MySpace or what Linked In is and see what its all about, it's time to move on or be gone.

Read into these quotes by Bill Gates as you like;

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction." From his book, "The Road Ahead," published in 1996.


"And so it's fair to say what's going on today is like the arrival of the printing press, or the telephone or the radio. And these communications tools did have pervasive effects. They made the world a smaller place. They allowed science to be done more efficiently. They allowed politics to be done a new way. They had a modest impact on how people were educated, but people were optimistic that they would make a very big change. Now, the personal computer connected to the Internet is far more powerful in many ways than any of these other communications devices." Harvard Conference on Internet Society, May 29, 1996, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

(THIS IS THE BETWEEN THE LINES FOR ME ON VIDEO BELOW)

"I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in. E-mail in Russia was very key in allowing people to get together and think about, did they want to revert back to the previous mode of government? In country after country, you can see that having these tools, there has really made a pretty incredible difference.

I own a company that is heavily postioned to provide a dynamic video service. Time, distance and trust is the problem and video can overcome this barrier and help you sell more vehicles. I don't want to abuse and respect this site so I won't self promote and only mention if that's okay Jeff.

If you use video into your selling model it either has to be:
1.) Entertaining or
2.) Informative
3.) There is no three. So just put a video of your cat doing silly things then.

Leave the "Hi I am Joe Smoe" at so and so dealer at home.
Why I make that comment is that we all have seen video e-mail and my opinion, if it's not a cute women talking to me I have zero attention span and vise versa for women. Or even better if its not Oprah or Rachel Ray in that personal video e-mail your sending to a female buyer...delete, mark as spam, etc.

All the best,

Pete




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