I have the honor and privilege of participating in two batches of automotive social media seminars in Orlando this year. One, the Automotive Marketing Boot Camp, will be more of a training-class setting that includes 5 trainers offering their insights for nearly 4 hours each on different aspects of marketing. I am doing the classes on social media itself.
Even though 4 hours seems to be a long time, believe it or not you could double that time and still have more to cover in the realm of social media for car dealers. The opportunities are endless, the risks are many, but regardless of what a dealer does or doesn’t want to do in social media, they need to understand that having a presence in some form or fashion is required, even if just as a defensive stance against those who would go after their name.
This event is not for those people. It’s for people who are ready to take their marketing to the next level. Hands-on, extremely informative, with small classroom settings geared to give everyone a one-on-one feel and to be able to take away tremendous value from the event.
The only problem is that, while social media is viable for most businesses out there, it seems to have eluded car dealers and other automotive-related companies. There are hundreds of dealers and dealership employees who have created Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter accounts. There are dozens of vendors who are attempting (usually in vain) to use social news sites for traffic and SEO reasons. Blogs are buzzing and popping up left and right.
