Automotive machine churns on

The banking and market meltdown, the credit crisis, recession, and ‘global warming’. Yesterday’s spiraling gas costs, US automotive over production and poor product mix. ‘Dealer consolidation’. Detroit is a nervous town. The question on everyone’s mind is how much change all this turmoil will cause and which US automotive manufacturers will survive.

All three are scrambling to raise capital, talking about mergers and sell offs. They’ve already been rushing to cut inventory and produce products consumers want at competitive prices. They’ve laid off employees, outsourced, cut production, discounted, discounted and discounted even more. With all the challenges there is some normalcy, the machine churns on. A number of online initiatives have launched recently. Let’s take a look.

Chrysler LLC recently launched new dealer sites focused on driving more revenue. The refreshed sites do a nice job of repackaging existing functionality. The corporate dealer sites are fully integrated into the brand sites. You can’t ‘visit’ a dealer site, you can view inventory, request a quote, schedule a test drive etc on Chrysler.com, Jeep.com and Dodge.com. They incorporated google maps to find dealers near you.

Still missing is the ability to search inventory across dealerships and accurate pricing. Still missing is any attempt to incorporate the social sharing tools all online junkies have come to expect on every site.



Ford continues to provide store sites for their dealerships. They’re all template based, but at least Ford let’s dealers upload videos to inject some personality into the site. Here’s talking at you. Being able to search inventory across dealerships is a nice touch.


GM also provides template sites for its dealers bu even if they were links out it would be hard to tell. Competition for dealership business is fierce and owned by a few big players. The only way for vendors to make money is to resell a template based platform. Most dealer sites, regardless of who implemented them, look very similar with similar functionality. Almost all use the same data and image sources. Where are the sharing features? Where’s the conversation? Where’s the talking at you video?



There are some renegade dealerships experimenting with virtual F&I and accurate pricing. These are the exceptions; innovation generally comes from startups leveraging the lead generation model. Lead generation is the automotive retail monetization model of today. Leads and ads.

Domestic auto companies and dealerships continue to do things the way they’ve done them for the last 10 years. It’s web 0.5. Accurate pricing and a shopping cart would take them to web 1.0. Simply adding social sharing tools would move them onto the beginning edge of web 2.0. Matching the dealerships mega store business model to help them upsell and help consumers shop their entire inventory based on needs. Errr, No.

Maybe in the next few months as more dealerships go under we’ll start to see to real changes in how cars are sold. Both online and off.

Triiibes

In early August, I was invited to join Seth Godin’s online community, Triiibes. It’s a gated community, the price of entry was preordering Seth’s book 'Tribes'. All members were also ‘approved’, only 3,500 people were invited. For me, Triiibes has been a study in how leadership style and exclusivity effects group dynamics.

I didn’t know what to expect when I joined, but I have been a fan of Seth Godin for over a year and was thrilled to be invited. The first week I got used to the format. I created my profile, read the rules, accepted some friend invitations and sent some of my own. One of my new friends invited me to join a game where the leader starts a story and tags someone to write the next scene who then tags the next person. This was incredibly fun to watch the story unfold and see where each person would take the story, until someone didn’t participate. The leader didn’t step in to tag someone new. I felt this same kind of disappointment with a lot of the threads.

With 3,500 members, there’s a tremendous amount of activity. I could read for hours. I found it hard to catch a thread at the beginning that I could contribute to meaningfully. Many of the threads were over by the time I could jump on. Most seemed to last one or two days and I found that many people felt the same way I do about social media. Conversations end abruptly. The relationships are shallow. Someone you’re having a conversation with will leave and you’ll never hear from them again. You never know why. It’s disconcerting if you expect a reply. Triiibes is better than most social networks in regards to depth. Some threads went on for days and the conversations were very deep. Certain people emerged as natural leaders.

Anne has a natural talent for encouraging more conversation. After each reply to her post she’d make an insightful comment and pose another question to encourage deeper conversation. Becky, is amazingly prolific. She flits around contributing to so many posts. She’s an amazing story teller with tremendous depth. Mary added the hard core marketing perspective. The hard love. You’ll notice I don’t mention Seth Godin.

It wasn’t that Seth wasn’t there, he was. He set the ground rules, he posted, and his posts ran longest and had the largest participation. He was a leader, but he took a background position. I learned to pick up his posts from the home page and look at his page to see where he posted. He was very active. He set the rules and let the tribe lead. He encouraged and complimented members. He let the natural leaders emerge. He did enforce his rules. One was that triiibes was not a place to promote yourself. One person was excommunicated early on. Then someone tried to excommunicate an entire category of members in the name of Seth. Weird.

Three weeks in, a few people still had the default monkey picture. One member wanted to kick these people out. He called his post ‘The thinning of the tribe’. He attempted to change the rules and used Seth as his lever. His point was that Seth had asked everyone to upload a picture and these people had been disrespectful in not following Seth’s request. They should be ‘thinned out’ if they didn’t comply. He went as far as recruiting people to write to the slackers to update their photo or else. A few responded. They had been incredibly busy or on vacation. They were obviously people you’d want in the tribe. Seth’s only input was that it would be too much work to remove the profiles. This was a very long thread and many posts and comments about the monkey pictures followed for weeks after. The original poster changed his story to ‘It was only an experiment’. This guy is a leadership coach who works with politicians. Whew!

In September, Seth held a webinar. The agenda as purposely left open. Two people that hadn’t been strong leaders in the tribe led this initiative. They organized it, collected questions, and conducted the interview with Seth based on the questions.

I’m an even stronger fan of Seth Godin after hearing him speak about an experience we had shared vicariously for weeks. The most telling answer, paraphrased below, was to the question of what you keep score of.

‘What you keep score of is important in whether you see yourself as successful. Some people measure money or traffic. I measure how many people I can touch and help to be successful. My goal was to take the idea of tribes and flesh it out and allow people to experiment with it; to push people to build their own tribe. I believe in peoples’ power to make a difference. The biggest thrill would be to have someone come back months later and say ‘we never conversed during tribes but I did what you said and it made a huge difference.’’’