The search engines function like nature. Well structured and well adapted pages populated with original and relevant content, planted in the right soil, over time, will thrive. People, consumers, are on the internet based on the need to seek pleasure or the need to resolve pain. The pain component has to do with searching for and finding answers to questions – solving personal problems or finding more information and a great deal on their next car. The search engines reward original, well-written and well-structured content. People are searching. You will be found at the intersection of content and search. This is why we hear about "Organic" search results. There is a root structure; your "social media" tree is growing and searchers are finding and harvesting your content. You give people something they are looking for and it is free.

What does this have to do with Automobile Dealers? It is that the fundamentals of SEO and Social Media remain the same for every individual, business entity, and industry. It is a level playing field and taking a few simple actions every week and, with regard to Twitter every day, will pay off over the long run.

1. Write one page Articles – I cannot impress enough that this is probably the single most important thing you can do for yourself and your business. Write about your expertise and what you know. Humanize the face of the business but content a consumer would find helpful in searching for a new or used vehicle. This takes time and creativity. The dividends are huge.

2. Produce Videos and post on YouTube – Share your knowledge with your customers. Let the consumer get to know you outside of the sales pitch. Let them see that you are a real person. You are a car salesman and you are their advocate. Change the paradigm. People love video and it is cheap and simple to produce.

3. Join and Customize FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn – Including YouTube, these are the four pillars that hold up everything else. People become fans and followers because you humanize yourself with relationship building and offering real content, value and reputation. This is essentially the basis of what Ford Motors is doing with their social media agenda. Putting the human face on the impersonal corporation. They still support American Idol and they didn’t take bail-out money. That is the kind of down to earth message that resonates with consumers. It will take some time to build up a following but if you are producing and publishing original and helpful articles and videos you will get followers who come back for more. I recommend not flooding your Twitter page with updates. Do not Tweet more than eight times a day. Once per hour. Start in the morning at 8 and tweet until 2pm. Use hash tags for greater search exposure (#keyword). For example, the Digital Dealer conference is coming up. Use #DD or #DD9 at the end of Tweets. Produce a customized Twitter background graphic that matches your company website. More on Twitter in another article.

4. Spread Your Seed Around at the Article Publishing Sites. – You have taken the time to develop great content and videos and you have twenty or thirty original articles. Become a member of the following and publish. Recognize that this will be a very time consuming endeavor. But this is what makes it all worth it. Because once your content is carefully published with the right titles, keywords and tags you can let it permanently percolate throughout the search engine soil, take root and grow out. Hubpages.com, Vox.com, DigitalDealerConference.org, ADPSocial.com, InternetSalesManagers.org, InternetSalesManager.org (the only difference between the latter two is an "s"), AutomotiveDigitalMarketing .com, AutomotiveSocial.com.

5. The above is a very short list of the available resources, however, even if you produce and populate only on these you will notice real results. Don’t forget Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. These two are bookmarking sites where you publish the links to your articles you published on the sites mentioned in point 4. If you want an instant traffic injection publish your article and video links to StumbleUpon.

6. Everything builds upon everything else. Write. Produce Videos. Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn and YouTube first. Once those are set up the article sites will ask you (most of the time) for those links. Then Digg and StumbleUpon will ask you for the links to the articles. What you are building are content islands; self-referencing worlds built upon specific layers and foundations that link and point to each other.

This has been a very brief overview on the nature and theory of social media – the "Why" of the "Social" and the precursor to creativity and relationship building of "Media". New Vision Sales Business Development and Automotive Dealer training are focused on training the "Why" behind BDC phone skills, customer retention, dealer relationships and the online relationships they develop with their customers.

Future articles will cover in much more detail specific content and technical issues about marketing your actual company website and blogs, SEO, and all things Web 2.0.
If you would like to talk about Automotive Dealer SEO, Web Content and Social Media, especially in the Charlotte, North Carolina Market, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Stephen Paine is the director of E-business for New Vision Sales Inc. and an active writer for the Automotive Dealer Community. You can reach Stephen in his South Carolina office at 803-802-2124 or by visiting http://www.NewVisionSales.com