Dr. Natalie Keynote: Social Media And The Automotive Industry

Here’s my talk on Social Media Excellence in the Automotive Industry:

The summit is an exclusive environment for senior-level OEM, dealer, and finance executives in the car industry. In preparation for my keynote talk, I conducted some research to compare the level of social media engagement in the automotive industry. The platform I used was www.InfiniGraph.com

The point of the research was to show Marketers how to go beyond the “Like” and actually measure and compare engagement (As well as other metrics like post volume, best time of day to post to get the most engagement, what type of content gets the highest engagement…)

Here’s where you can access the data from the study I conducted on the automotive / car industry social media engagement and the comparisons: http://bit.ly/AutoSummit2013

In the research, we looked at various vertical market segments in the auto industry. Here’s a list of some of the groups of cars we compared:

Here’s a link to my slides from the Social Media and Automotive Summit:

Social Media and Social Media Marketing are evolving at a rapid pace. The question is– is the automotive industry capitalizing on it and getting social media ROI from their social marketing and sales initiatives. The evolution of social media marketing is focused on engagement — “talking to” is now “talking with” —  “interrupting” is now “engaging" and  “marketing communications” is now “one-to-one conversation” or “one-to-many conversation.”

In addition, the consensus among many marketing executives is that engagement leads to persuasion, utility, and ultimately inspiration as well as advocacy and referrals — which is how word-of-mouth leads to sales.  My presentation explains how to analyze a brand’s engagement and how to understand what content creates the strongest engagement with a target audience. It also looks at how to focus content spend to achieve a higher ROI by increasing key target market audience size, engagement, and sales.

“Social ROI – Qualitative & Quantitative Benefits”

The Social Media Summit closed with a panel discussion featuring thought leaders from both the OEM and Dealer communities.  The discussion focused on the ROI delivered by Social 2.0 – both the qualitative benefits that the innovators and visionaries believed in as an act of faith, and the quantitative benefits that pragmatists required before making significant investments.  Areas of commonality and divergence between OEM and Dealer was the basis for a spirited discussion, providing a last opportunity for all delegates to engage the panelists and one another, leaving the Summit with newly gained insights on successful social media strategies in the automotive industry.

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