Dealer Web 2.0

While techies have embraced Web 2.0 since O’Reilly Media introduced it at their 2004 Web 2.0 Conference, mainstream business has only recently begun to look past the buzz phrase and get excited about what they can do with it. In the aftermath of said conference, Tim O’Reilly wrote a detailed article on what Web 2.0 means. But to save you some time, allow me to sum it up in three words:

While we could talk about blogs, wikis and tag clouds, these are only structures of Web 2.0. We could talk audio, video and SMS texting, but these are just media channels. We could talk about Ruby on Rails, AJAX and REST but these are just underlying technologies. Regardless of these particulars, it’s only Web 2.0 if it is extremely SIMPLE to use, encourages wide PARTICIPATION within a group or community, and is truly USEFUL in that it solves real problems and generates real results.

These three core characteristics of Web 2.0 are sure to find a welcome home with dealers who have long struggled with complex, hard-to-use software. I have no doubt that dealers will address the social and policy issues associated with Web 2.0 and adopt it to their advantage. The question is, exactly what areas of their businesses will they target with Web 2.0 technologies.

The obvious choice is to use Web 2.0 to reach out to customers. DealerRefresh recently published a blog post by guest writer Audrey Knoth underscoring the wisdom in dealers turning now toward Web 2.0 for their marketing and sales. While this is huge, I think the even huger opportunity is for dealers to adopt Web 2.0 for their internal organizations.

Web 2.0 can help dealers get their people talking to each other and working together like never before. It can help management effectively manage larger stores and more stores in this consolidating industry. It can increase transparency, making clearer the paths to cut costs and right-size the organization. It can help workers within departments, and cross-department, take better advantage of all the sales and service opportunities that come their way.

Dealer Web 2.0 is the real deal, for both internal operations and customer marketing.