Five Alive is back!! I can’t believe I missed the April edition but I was travelling through Scotland and Ireland and was taking some time off the blogosphere. I could have just posted 5 random articles from the usual spots, but I didn’t want to do that to my Dealer Geek friends.
Keep your eyes open for some new content I will be posting on the Kijiji Autos blog over the next few months. One article that has been getting some attention is Writing Killer Headlines. I’m still obsessed with writing creative copy for 3rd party sites like Kijiji and Trader. I’m thinking if I can get enough content together I could publish a short E-Book. If you have any ideas or feedback on that idea feel free to contact me.
So here we go with the Top 5 articles from around the web in May picked by yours truly:
- Being a Customer is Tough: Alex Snyder give us his perspective of being a dealership customer. Growing up in a dealer group family Alex gets a wake up call on what it’s like being on the “other side”.
- Say Goodbye to Google Places and Hello to Google Local: DOH! another Google change that requires dealers to get educated on their local strategy…. I’m sure everyone has a local strategy, right
- 10 Most Misleading Social Media Metrics in the World: My boy Marcus put together this super detailed blog post. I love the spot on Klout.. those who know me also know how much I hate Klout.
- April sales hit a snag: Full breakdown of Canadian passenger vehicle sales in April. Dammit GM, do I have to go back and sell you again.
- 20 reasons to switch to Google +: Great infographic from the crew at Mashable. I’m still not switching though.
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jason craine June 4, 2012 at 10:52 am
Hi Ryan – The article on google places/google + local sent us into a tailspin.
The example in the article (mio restaurant) shows a content rich google+ page, so we have spent the morning trying to figure out why our new place/+ page didn’t link to our existing google +business page like the example….here is the rub, it doesn’t!!
If you do a google search on “mio restaurant washington DC”, it takes you to an entirely different google + page from the one referenced in the article.
We discovered that Google has created an entirely new and separate google+local page for every business that is NOT linked to your existing Google+ business page.
To summarize, if you have already created a Google + page for your business…you now have two. The one you set up, and the new Google+ local one that Google just set up on your behalf using some of the information from your old Google Place page.
If it sounds confusing its because it is. However, this new Google + Local page is going to be every dealers most visited piece of on-line real estate, so we all need to get up to speed.
Ryan Thompson June 4, 2012 at 7:55 pm
Thanks Jason. Here is a really good thread from DealerRefresh on the topic: http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/google-places-over-company-makes-google-center-gravity-local-search-2678.html