Thought Leadership Summits - Automotive Social Media Summit 2011

June 15, 2011

The Ritz-Carlton,

Marina del Rey, CA

For more information
please contact us at
720-287-0145 or
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Sponsored By:

Media Partners:

Wards

ADM

auto sussecc

dealer elite

Agenda

June 15, 2011

7:00 AM – 8:00 AM
Registration & Breakfast

8:00 AM
Welcome
Jon Munzel
Founder
Thought Leadership Summits

8:05 AM
Opening Remarks from the Chair

Chad Beasley
General Manager - Los Angeles

Dealer.com

Biography

8:15 AM
Industry Overview

Thilo Koslowski
Vice President & Lead Automotive Analyst
Gartner

Social Media in Automotive – Early Adopter Lessons

Adoption status in the industry
Lessons learned
Key emerging media

Biography

8:30 AM
Keynote Presentation

Tammy Darvish

Vice President
DARCARS Automotive

Integrating Social Media between OEM, Dealer, and Showroom Personnel

Collaboration between OEM and Dealer has long been a goal in the Automotive Industry as achieving true collaboration delivers a competitive advantage through more effective and efficient marketing, sales, and customer service. Collaboration is also a key goal within a dealership as the effectiveness of even the best run operations can be impacted if team members aren’t working together. The advent of the wide variety of Social Media as customer interaction channels drastically increases the complexity of collaboration between OEM, Dealer management, and Dealer personnel. Does Social Media create the challenge of harmful complexity or the opportunity for improved engagement with customers?

DARCARS believes that Social Media does both - creates a challenge that solving offers very significant rewards. Tamara’s presentation will review the strategy DARCARS has developed to address the challenge of the explosion of different Social Media and how they plan to leverage Social Media to improve collaboration with both OEMs and personnel throughout their organization. She’ll explain the priority DARCARS has on working with all dealer associates, regardless of position, to make sure they understand how Social Media work and what their responsibilities are. Tamara will identify the Social Media DARCARS plans to leverage along with how they will be broken down into basic language that everyone can comprehend – ensuring DARCARS gets the most out of all of the opportunities Social Media creates.

Finally, Tamara will discuss the importance of cohesiveness between OEM's and Dealerships, and the opportunity Social Media creates to improve collaboration, quickly share ideas, and communicate seamlessly with customers. She’ll present DARCARS view on bridging the traditional divide that too often separates OEM and Dealer and discuss the great benefits for both of presenting a united front to the customer.

Biography

9:15 AM
Jeff Eggen
Experiential Marketing Manager

Ford

Want to Break Through? Bring Your Consumers on an Adventure!

Jeff’s presentation will discuss how to “Break Through” and gain exposure by combining the power of Reality TV, Social Media, and Online Gaming. Jeff will explain how Ford's “Focus Rally America” attracted millions of consumers to ride-along on a 5 week "virtual test drive" in the new Ford Focus. He’ll also provide the results that demonstrate how this groundbreaking program not only built mass awareness of a new product, but also drove deep program engagement, product advocacy, and consumer sharing. While the final statistics will be shared in June, preliminary response to the program has been incredible including: over 400K views on Hulu.com, followers & fans viewing over 8.1 million minutes of livestream video, over 30K consumers registering as “Focus Followers” to join a team and play along from home, and the average fan spending 4 ½ hours viewing video content throughout the Rally.

Biography

10:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Networking Break

10:30 AM

Matt Murray
Director - Digital Marketing

Dealer.com

Customer Service - Our Grandparents Had it Right!

When our grandparents were coming of age, businesses in America were truly small and therefore were able to develop an in-depth understanding of their customers. This resulted in personalized customer service that consistently exceeded expectations. Fast forward to today, and what are considered “small” businesses still have hundreds, if not thousands, of customers. Technology has long promised the ability for business to interact with a large number of customers in a personalized way, and Social Media is no exception. Many view Social Media as no more than a series of witty comments, groups of followers, and online reputation reviews. However, utilized correctly Social Media offer the opportunity to better understand customers and provide an experience beyond their expectations. In this session, Matt will discuss the scalability of personalized customer service in the Social Age. He’ll also provide concrete examples of how to successfully leverage Social Media to develop insight on customer behavior, create true connections, and increase sales.

Biography

11:15 AM
Andrew DiFeo

General Manager

Hyundai of St. Augustine

Successfully Managing Your Online Reputation in a Transparent Market

Reputation has been an important factor in the success of business for hundreds of years. However, in the past 10 years, the Internet has created an increasingly transparent marketplace for every industry. Given the checkered past of Automotive retail, reputation is even more important than in most other industries. In addition, the Internet amplifies customer praise and complaints far beyond a conversation across the backyard fence. Now more than ever, your online reputation is a sustainable advantage that can help differentiate your business from the competition. Andrew’s presentation will cover low to no cost methods to solicit positive reviews, monitor your reputation, respond to negative reviews, and leverage your online reputation through search engines and traditional marketing. Andrew will review Hyundai of St. Augustine’s online reputation management strategy, key tactics, and the tangible improvements seen in reputation ratings, customer satisfaction, and vehicle & service sales.

Biography

Noon
Linda Gangeri

Manager - National Advertising
Volvo Cars of North America

Auto Shopping Millennial Style - Introducing New World Marketing to Old School Business

The 80 million people of the Millennial generation (born between 1981 - 2001) have created new expectations on how auto shoppers want manufacturers and dealers to interact with them. Shoppers today want to be able to collect information and interact with brands, dealers, third-party sites, and other owners through digital platforms - particularly mobile and social. In other words, shoppers today want ultimate control and the traditional automotive business model is struggling to adapt. Linda's presentation will explore the motivations, mindsets, and needs of today's auto shopper as they quickly move across multiple touch points. She will also discuss how the shopping funnel has evolved due to mobile and social technologies. Finally, Linda will discuss the strategies and tactics Volvo has implemented to address this challenge, and what results have been achieved with their dealers in courting the Millennial generation.

Biography

12:45 PM – 2:00 PM
Lunch

Special Joint Presentation

2:00 PM
David Boice

CEO
Tier 10 Marketing

Biography

Mario Murgado
President & CEO
Brickell Motors

Biography

Leveraging Social Media to Attract More Customers for Less

Brickell Motors has been - and continues to be - an early adopter of Social Media strategies and tactics. Their experience has enabled them to quickly identify which Social Media work and how best to leverage them to attract, retain, and build deep customer relationships - all while reducing marketing spend. In this joint presentation, Sean and Mario will join forces to present a case study demonstrating how Brickell Motors utilizes Social Media to:

Generate website traffic & leads at a lower cost than traditional advertising
Convert Social Media leads into sales
Communicate with thousands of customers for free
Build a high quality customer database to support sales & service today & tomorrow
Reinforce the brand throughout the Social Media community
Improve natural search engine results
Strengthen their online reputation
Promote their involvement in the community & support of worthy causes
Increase both customer & employee satisfaction & retention

Sean and Mario will explain the step-by-step process they followed to develop and execute the Brickell Motors Social Media strategy. They will also share specific metrics that show the dramatic improvements achieved in marketing, sales, service, and retention, and the reduction in traditional mass marketing spend.

2:45 PM

Robert Brown
Senior Manager - Social Media Marketing
Nissan

Managing Diverse Social Media Across a Large Ecosystem

Companies have long struggled to maintain a consistent brand image with their customers. This challenge has become more complex as companies have grown – whether that growth represents “going global” or simply accessing new local markets. In addition, advertising and communication channels used to be centralized and therefore easy for companies to control – no employee was going to place thousands of calls on their own initiative out of a call center. However, the advent of Social Media has created a diverse channels that enable an individual employee to impact on the brand with thousands, if not more, potential customers.

Robert’s presentation will address this challenge and cover Nissan’s strategy to communicate a consistent brand image to their own and their dealer partner employees. In addition, he’ll explain how Nissan is providing content that supports the brand tailored to each of the wide variety of Social Media channels, making it simple for employees in their ecosystem to reinforce the brand during customer communications. Robert will complete the discussion with examples of the success of their strategy with Facebook, Twitter, and several other media.

Biography

3:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Networking Break

4:00 PM
Keynote Continuum Presentation

Gary Marcotte

Senior Vice President - Marketing
AutoNation

Has Social Media Enabled True Customer Engagement?

Due to a large number of requests from delegates for continuity between Summits, TLS has added a follow-up presentation to the 2010 Keynote. Gary Marcotte, Senior Vice President of Marketing at AutoNation will provide an update on the ideas he discussed with the delegates last year. Gary’s presentation will review if Auto Nation has experienced success with their Social Media strategy. Specifically, he’ll explain if AutoNation’s dealerships have achieved their goal of creating genuine engagement with their customers by utilizing Social Media as a listening tool and if this type of engagement has resulted in developing true customer loyalty. Using several real-world examples, Gary will demonstrate how Social Media has impacted AutoNation’s business processes and what the quantitative results have been.

Biography

4:45 PM - 5:45 PM

Panel Discussion:

Does Social Media Work? – Stories from the Front Line

While most companies are monitoring Social Media as a way to protect their brand from negative publicity, more and more of them are using Social Media for consumer outreach and insight. So what’s working, what’s not, and what’s the future in the way companies are using Social Media? In addition, the challenge of creating true connections with customers – especially the new generation of Millennials will be addresed. Hear stories from the OEM and Dealer representatives who are making it happen. Take advantage of the unique opportunity to ask them about their successes, lessons learned, and pitfalls to watch out for.

Moderator:

Alexi Venneri
Co-Founder & COO
Digital Air Strike