Hello and welcome to today's webinar. Our speaker today is Simon Hesseltine from Trader Interactive. Before I turn it over to Simon, I'd like to let those of you who are live with us know that you may submit questions during the webinar via the Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen. This webinar will also be recorded so that you may watch or re-watch on demand at your convenience. With that, I will turn it over to Simon. Hello, everybody. Well, welcome to today's webinar on reputation management, how brands get tarnished online and how to stop it. Thank you very much to AED for allowing Equipment Trader to speak today. So let's talk a little about who I am and why I'm here talking. I am the Vice President of Consumer Growth at Trader Interactive, where of course Equipment Trader is one of our brands. And no, there is nothing wrong with your speaker. I do actually have this accent. So let's get into a little bit of my background as to why I'm here. I used to work at AOL for about six and a half years back when AOL was a thing. There I worked with a lot of different brands, Autoblog, AOL Autos, a lot of consumer sites, TechCrunch and Gadget and so forth. I taught digital marketing at Georgetown University for about five years. I worked at Hewlett Packard Enterprise for about a year. And I was also at CoStar working for their For Rent brand, where I'm working on apartment marketplace. So these are some of the brands that I have worked with in the past. And as you can see, there is a wide variety of experience in a bunch of different fields. But obviously the ones that I'm going to be focusing a bit more on today are going through Equipment Trader and Rock and Dirt. So let's get into the actual topic of the presentation. The life cycle of a brand. This illustrates it rather well. When you're building the reputation of your business, of your dealership, you are, it takes time for you to do that. For it to grow from that little sapling all the way up to the reputation that you are known for. But it also takes a moment to destroy your reputation. Something can go wrong and your reputation is completely blown out of the water and you can't glue the tree of your reputation back together very easily. And it used to be that folks would say that something that happened online isn't going to impact you offline or something that happens offline isn't going to impact you in line. That's not true at all. Anything that happens offline is going to impact you online and things that happen online are going to impact your offline. People go and search for your dealership online. They read the reviews they see online. They see what people have said about you, about whether it's your sales, whether it's your service, whether it's parts that you have, they see what people are writing about you and they take that into account. And when something happens offline, people are sure going to go online and write those reviews. Or maybe even go out there and create a website if they really had such a poor experience. And of course you do also have things that are unexpected. I mean this is obviously a poor Chiron. I really doubt that this poor dog is guilty of said crime. But these things can happen. There can be misunderstandings. So you want to make sure that you are monitoring and you understand what's going on out there in the world around your brand. So what am I going to cover today? Well here's the agenda. We're going to be talking about employee mistakes. What are your employees doing that can negatively impact your brand and your reputation? Company mistakes. What are the things that your company inherently could be doing that are just going to be wrong, that are going to harm you in the long run? Technological mistakes. Now I am not going to get into the nitty-gritty of coding here. I'm just going to give you some examples and some ideas around what some of those technological mistakes could be that you have to look out for. And then I'm also going to talk about how you would avoid those mistakes and a little bit about what to do when they do actually happen. So let's get started with the first one of those which is employee mistakes. Now obviously you have folks that just are out there with no common sense. This gentleman working in a place where health and safety is an issue. You don't want to be in a kitchen posting shirtless pictures. Folks at your dealership could be out there posting things around the dealership that are just not good for online. So you do have to be careful about what your employees are posting. I'm going to talk a little bit about the processes that you can have in place for your employees to stop them or at least make them understand the repercussions of things such as this. And then of course you have folks that are out there posting their mind which for some folks is not the right mind. But they're out there posting things such as this and and when they do they come back to your business. Because people these days absolutely definitely they go out there and they look for how they can report them to their current employers and make things about their current employers. I mean we're all familiar with what happened last month with Jeopardy with Mike Richards. I mean he was well he kind of appointed himself as the new host but then folks went and they looked at his podcasts. They looked at things that he'd said in the past and suddenly he had to be out of that job. That wasn't the right person for a family job like that. And that kind of thing can impact your business as well. If folks are out there doing and saying things that are problematic. I'll just give you an example here. Nebraska's Coughing Karen. This was a woman who decided that she did not want to wear masks when there was a mandate to wear masks. Went into a supermarket and everyone she saw with a mask she started coughing at them. And saying that she couldn't wear a mask because of her asthma. Well that of course was videotaped. Went viral on I believe TikTok at first. And then of course all the other sites picked that up. And what did they do? They went out there and found out that she worked for SAP. And she was then fired from her job at SAP for behavior that was not consistent with their employee guidelines. However now SAP is tied to Coughing Karen. Folks who may not have heard of SAP before see this and it's a negative even though they've done you know the right thing according to their employee guidelines. I've done this presentation in various forms for close to about seven or eight years now. And each time I do it I refresh the examples and I always go up to Twitter and I always put in I hate my job. And every time I find recent tweets from folks saying how much they hate their job. And you can see this particular one from Needles and Lovers. I go back to work tomorrow and it's making me realize how much I hate my job. Like truly hate my job. Well her picture you can see there is you know you couldn't really see who she was. If she was being followed by people from her work someone may hand that over to her boss. If there are customers wherever she works that might get passed on to her boss. But she does have some anonymity there. Unlike Austin Williams who tweeted my name is Austin and I hate my job with his picture. Again if you are thinking about hiring folks for your dealership and you have one of your sales folks posting about how much they hate their job. That's going to make people think twice about coming and working for your business. So you do want to have these guidelines in place around what folks should be saying and when they should be saying them and how they should be saying them. And then of course you do have mistakes that your employees can make and of course that's a mistake I made on purpose there. Here's one from the Associated Press where they talk about Yogi Bear dying. Of course they meant Yogi Bearer but still this goes out there and it's amusing. It's not really impacted how folks think about the Associated Press but if your company is out there and you're not proof checking things that go on your website like this one. Ask and export. Obviously it's meant to be ask an expert but if you're putting this on your website to allow your potential customers to ask your sales folks questions about the types of units that you have at your dealership. They're going to look at that and think they can't even spell expert. Why should I trust what they have to say about these units that I'm looking to spend a lot of money on? So you do need to make sure that you are correctly proof checking things that go on your website in any print ads that you do to make sure that you're not going to get negatively impacted from this. And again another example of proof checking. Walmart was selling University of Maryland t-shirts which had a picture of Massachusetts on them. Maryland is not in Massachusetts so you again just make sure that your employees are proof checking things. If you're using influencers or having folks tweeting out on your behalf or putting stuff up on Instagram on your behalf make sure they know if you're helping them as to what you want put up that they should be as they're putting this content up putting the right content up. This particular gentleman was advertising a protein shake. The marketing department sent him the outline of what they wanted to say. He posted the entire outline. Here you go at 4 p.m write this here's the caption. That's like somebody in a sitcom reading out wait for applause. It just really makes it look amateur and it also makes it look like it's not natural which is what you're trying to do if you have influencers if you have people in your industry tweeting or talking about your dealership. So then let's get into talking about company mistakes. What are things what are things that you might be doing within your company that could be impacting how folks see your company? Well number one is targeting the wrong audience. You need to know where your audience is. Are they on the social networks? You know on the commercial space you might be wanting to target folks on LinkedIn more. You might have specific forums for your industry. I mean if you're an agricultural equipment dealer you might be wanting to look for those farming forums and try and get yourself in there and be seen as an expert on those particular forums so that when somebody does talk about a particular type of unit you can jump on there and talk about your combine harvesters that you have for sale. Is your audience on a marketplace and obviously you know equipment trader. If they're there then maybe that's where you need to be. You need to be in the places where your customers, your potential audience are looking for the units that you have for sale. You also want to think about how they are searching for you and you yourselves are subject matter experts in this. Think about how you would search for that particular unit that you have for sale or for that whole broad range of units that you have for sale. What are the terms that you would use? What would you type into Google? Are those the terms that you have on your website to describe that unit? If your site itself isn't driving enough leads do you have the right partners to drive the leads to your site? And again whether that's marketplaces, whether that's any other kind of advertising you're doing, whether it's even teaming up with your local chamber of commerce. Think about different ways that you can drive leads to your site to bring in the right audience. Those people that are looking for those units that are looking to convert. And then also think about whether you are meeting the needs of your audience. Do you have the right information available for your audience? I mean if somebody's in that information gathering phase do you have all the right specs there? Do they know everything they need to know about what this particular unit can do? Do you have the price listed? And I know some folks think well if I don't put the price on my site and I say call for pricing that's going to lead them to call my sales folks and they can then massage them into the whole sales funnel. What tends to happen a lot of the time that we see is those units that say call for price, folks hit those then they go look for somebody else that actually lists the price. So you're driving folks away to other people who are actually listening. So make sure that you are driving, you're putting the right information on your site so that they can find that. And then are you delivering the right message? Are you delivering the message to that audience to show that you are a subject matter expert? To show that you have what they're looking for? To show that you know what you're talking about when it comes to those units or those types of units? Also make sure when you're targeting that you're putting out the right content. Now this example, I just love this example that I actually came across. The Toyota recall floor mats. So that was news at the time. They recalled 3.8 million floor mats. I don't think they're exploding. I'm not sure quite what the problem was with them. But still, that was news. This was on a site hiphopmusic.com. I'm going to think that the recall of 3.8 million floor mats is not really going to be of use to folks who are searching for hip hop music. The same is true of your dealership. If you're putting industry news out there, make sure that it's related to your industry, to the types of units that you have, the expertise that you have. Don't go out there chasing the hot topics of the day. I mean, there are ways that you can do it right. I mean, if you're writing content about the Super Bowl, make it be about the construction equipment that was used to build the stadium the Super Bowl is at this year. But you're probably not going to be able to write great content about whoever the halftime show is just because that's what's trending. And Google does like to see that you are showing yourself as an industry expert. So if you are writing content, if you are posting news content around your industry, they know that that is your niche. And they are going to give you a little bit more of a boost when it comes to the content on your website. So make sure you do have that right content. And when I'm talking about the wrong message, this is kind of what I mean. So this is a tweet that was put out that I saw. A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. I mean, that is a really good message. You know, it's Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. And if you're thinking about, you know, vacations, if you're thinking about wanting to lay on the beach or just get in your car and drive, that's fantastic. However, this particular message was tweeted out by Amtrak California. I don't know about you, but if I'm getting on a train, I want to know the timetable. I want to know when I'm supposed to get on it, what time I'm supposed to arrive. And I also do want to make sure that the train is intent on arriving at my destination. So when you are crafting any type of content, make sure that, again, that it is the right type of content, that it is setting you up as the expert in your field. Now, if you do have social accounts, which many of you will have, make sure that you have control over your social accounts. And what do I mean by control? Well, the example on the left here is HMV. The music store, when they closed down, what they didn't do was turn off their social media account or change the password on their social media account. So as they laid their social media person off, the social media person was in the layoff meeting on the corporate social media account tweeting about being laid off. Now, I've seen this in small businesses as well. I had a great example a few years ago of a restaurant where the head chef was the only person who had access to the Twitter account. And they fired him two weeks before Christmas. They didn't have his passwords. So after he went home, he just started tweeting about everything that was wrong with that restaurant. And if you imagine the same thing for your dealership, if you've got a disgruntled salesperson that you've let go, and they're the only one who's got the access to the social media account, they're just going to keep going on and hitting your reputation. So make sure that you have a central repository that has your password information to any social media accounts for your logins for your website and so forth. So if you do have a member of your team leave, you can go in there and quickly change those passwords so you don't have the potential for this type of issue. Also, remember that you do not control the internet. You cannot, in your dealership, put up a sign that says, do not use social media accounts. It will be a breach of our zero tolerance policy. What the heck does that mean? And when it says here, we're happy to deal with your comments in the usual way. The usual way these days is online. People are going to go on Yelp. They're going to go on Google My Business. They're going to go on Facebook. They're going to go on Twitter. And they're going to talk about the complaints that they've had. So don't think that you have that control that you can say how people should interact with you. You have to actually have a full policy in place. And again, I'm going to talk about that in a few slides. But you do not have that control. And I've got a great example of that was this hotel that, as part of their contract, they had in there that for any wedding party that booked that particular hotel, for every negative review that someone in their party put up on Yelp, they added $500 to the bill. Naturally, as soon as the first person saw this contract, it screenshot, photo, up online, and it became huge news. Everybody knew that this particular venue did that. And you want to bet that their bookings dropped dramatically from this. Because for the bride and groom, not knowing how to book a hotel, not knowing how Aunt Ada is going to respond to the waiter seating her at the wrong table, they can't control that. So don't think that you can control that either from your dealership. And then there's another one that I see. Folks thinking that, well, I should go ahead and write my own reviews. I'll have my sales team write reviews. They work here. They can do that. Now, if it's something like Glassdoor, which is a review site for employees at a business, that's one thing. Because you do want to have your employees write those reviews. However, if you're thinking, I don't have a great score on Yelp, or I don't have a great score on Google My Business, and I want to improve that score, don't ask your sales team to do that. Don't write those reviews yourself. Because generally what happens is they will know, based on location, based on IP addresses, based on things that are said, based on the proximity of those reviews to each other, that these are fake. And you will get called out for it. And then you can get those turned off. And Yelp, for example, may give you some kind of penalty. They may not allow you to respond to the reviews. And this example I just love as well. I mean, if you are dealing with media, don't think that you can tell media how to react. If there's something that you do online that your newspaper either puts online or puts in the newspaper, be careful how you respond to them. This gentleman, Kirby De Lauta, was a councilman in Frederick, Maryland. And they posted a news article about him that was not positive. So he went back to them and said, you can't use my name in this because I'm a pub. I am, you know, I don't give you permission to use my name. They came back and said, well, you are a public figure. And even if you weren't, we can still publish your name. Your name is a matter of public record. So then they posted this particular article, which used his name as a public figure. Then they posted this particular article, which used his name 64 times. He did eventually find it amusing himself. But again, it's just an example of if you do something stupid, it can get out of hand very quickly. So let's talk about technological mistakes. And the first thing I want to talk about in here is about whether you care about your actual website. Everyone should have a website. I mean, we're in 2021. If you don't have a website, what are you doing? You've got to think about from a search engine optimization perspective. Is your website crawlable? When Google comes to your website, can they find every page on it? And there are lots of tools out there to let you crawl your website. There are free tools out there that you just put the URL of your website in and it comes back and tells you any issues that Google finds. And then is your site optimized? And I'm not getting into the whole everything that you need to do for SEO bit here. I'm getting into the 80% of SEO, which is the basics. And if you get those basics right, you are probably going to be ahead of your competition. And what do I mean by basics? It's what I talked about before with getting the right keywords, how people search for the units that you have. Are people searching for rotary cultivators? Are they searching for combine harvesters? Is there a particular abbreviation that people use for different types of units? You know how people search. You know what those units are. Make sure you have those words on the pages. And if you have access to the metadata, get them in the title tag of the page. Get them in the description of the page. Make sure that content is there and you stand a chance of Google crawling it and you actually being ranked for it or even getting up there in the local search so that you show in that local box. Usability. Is your navigation intuitive? If your mother or father goes to your website, could they find a particular unit easily enough or a type of unit? Can they navigate around your site? Are all the links that you would expect in your main navigation to be there? How many clicks does it take them to find a particular type of unit on your site? That's also useful for Google. If Google can find those units easily, as a user would be able to, then there is also a chance that they could rank those higher. And then the data on your site. Do you have the right information on your site? Do you have your name, address, and phone number on every page? Put it in the footer on every page. If you've got somebody that's going through your showroom, your virtual showroom, and they're looking at a particular unit and they're like, ah, I am kind of interested in this. Do they have the ability to either click to email you or your name, address, and phone number at the bottom so they can go find you? Rather than having to click the about to find your name, address, and phone number, and then not necessarily having the link back to that unit. Is all the information about the unit, the piece of equipment, correct? Can they find what they're looking for there again? And I've already hit on that once, but it's worth repeating. Make sure that what folks would expect to find that they need to know for whatever the job is that they're trying to do, that they're looking for that type of equipment. Make sure it's there. One example from a site I worked with, a developer didn't know what a line of code was for. So they just deleted the line of code and cleaning it all up. And it turned out that that line of code was the adult filter for the tag links. And this was a big site. It was actually Huffington Post. And when they took that line of code out, suddenly all these very adult terms started showing up on the comedy homepage, which was not good. And they were up live for about two hours until I noticed them. And they very quickly got that line of code put back in. But you have to make sure that whoever is working on your site, whether it's someone that you have internally, whether it's you, or whether it's a shop that you've outsourced to develop your website, make sure they know what things are on your site and why they're there on your site. And folks can say, well, this SEO thing, this search engine optimization, I hear that you're saying it's important, but do we have to do it? Do we have to do it on every page? Do you want to be found on Google? Do you want to be found on Bing? I mean, if you're not making sure that the information on your site is right, that Google can't crawl it, that Bing can't crawl it, users aren't going to find it when they go in there and search for that forklift that they want to buy. And they're going to go to your competitors. Now, the other side of that is that, yes, SEO does take time. And I've actually had someone say this to me. Well, since it takes time, why don't we just put it off, do something else, and then we'll come back and do the SEO work later on. All that does is delay when the SEO work gets done, which delays when it actually takes effect. So, if you have the time, if you have the impetus, if you want to help grow the organic traffic to your site, which organic traffic, when they're in Google, they click it, doesn't cost you a penny, as opposed to the paid search traffic. Every time they click that, it costs you money. So, you want to try and get that free traffic as much as you can. Here was an example of when folks think that they know enough, but actually, they know enough to be dangerous. When I was at AOL, I had a senior vice president who said that all our competition had hundreds of links on every page, and Google likes links, so we need to do that as well. We need to just create link after link after link after link on the sites. And I can hear you saying, well, what does this have to do with reputation? Well, here's what happened. He went to the dev team and said, we need to automatically create these links. We don't want to have somebody type them in. So, let's just take what's on the AOL search engine and how people search, and we'll just throw related ones upon the page. This happened on a Monday at 4.30. I came in at 6.30 on the Tuesday morning, at 6.30 on the Tuesday morning, and I started taking screenshots. We suddenly had how to divide banana tree news. We had bowel control news. We had BS news. These were not things that, one, we wanted out there, or things that really should be out there, or we wanted to be associated with. And there were a lot more than this that were, I mean, I could not put those in a presentation. We had 16,000 pages generated in one night that many of them were of an adult nature. And as I say, some that could not be shared in, nevermind mixed company, in company. It took four weeks to clean those up. So, when you're looking at your site and you're thinking, oh, I know exactly what to do. Make sure that you do actually have somebody who is an expert and knows what they're doing with your site, so that you are not damaging your reputation by putting something out there that could be harmful when seen by potential customers. And then we get to social. I know a lot of folks think, well, social, just throw an intern on it. It's for the kids. Social is a very viable marketing channel. If you're out there on Facebook, if you're out there on LinkedIn, some folks may see some interest on Pinterest. You know, you may find some construction or farming communities on Pinterest where you can throw up pictures of your different units and folks may like those and they may drive leads to your site. Units and folks may like those and they may drive leads to your dealership. You know, things for you to explore, but you don't just want to throw somebody on who has no experience and doesn't know what they're doing. You're not going to see the return on investment from that. You need to make sure that you do have somebody who knows. The organic social. I mean, if you're on Facebook and you're just posting organically, I think something like 0.16% of your audience is going to see that. And if they don't know how to grow an audience, it's just not going to do it for you. If they don't know how to respond to a reputation issue on social, that's also going to be a problem for you. So you do need someone who knows what they're doing. Here's a great example of a cross-posting problem. So if you have somebody who is posting to different types of accounts, make sure you know what the limitations are on those accounts. So this one is from a few years ago when Nikki Haley was the governor of South Carolina. She posted this on Instagram or her team posted this on Instagram. South Carolina made history this year by passing education reform. We will no longer educate children based on where they're born through reading coaching, blah, blah, blah. It did really well for them on Instagram. So they said, you know what, let's go post this on Twitter. Now, the difference between Instagram and Twitter is that Twitter has a character limit. This is what got posted. South Carolina made history this year by a passing education form. We will no longer educate children. That's a completely different message. So make sure as you are posting content on different forums, on different social sites, that you do proof, you do edit, you do make sure that somebody else is taking a look at that to make sure you are not putting the wrong messaging out there. So let's talk about how you avoid all of these reputation issues. So the first thing is make sure you have a baseline. Because if you've not got that valid foundation for your site, you don't know where you can go and you don't know what success, you don't know what's failure either. You need to make sure that you have good data, you have your analytics set up on your site. If you're pushing on social, that you have that social analytics ready, that you know what your key performance indicators are. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to grow traffic to your site? Are you trying to grow organic traffic to your site? Are you trying to get leads in from these different marketing channels? Are there different types of leads that you care more about? Do you want to track how many people open your emails? You probably do. But do you want to track what those different headings are and how they're impacting your open rates? You want to have all the information at hand so as you're moving forward, you can look and see whether you are growing. You want to have those good monitoring systems in place. You need to know, are people talking about you? What's changed within Google? How are you perceived within the industry? What's happening with your competitors? There are tools out there that allow you to see what your competitors are ranking for. You can look at those and see, well, maybe I should be ranking for that. Maybe I should have those keywords that I'm not currently targeting. You want to have a good process and good policies in place. For your employees, maybe it's enough for you to say, I think it was Microsoft or Yahoo that had the policy with regarding to employees and social, don't do stupid stuff. That was the basic policy. It sounds simple. It is simple. But people need to think before they post in a lot of cases, especially when you have a lot of contentious things that are going on around the world. You want to think about team education, making sure that your team knows what is the right thing to do with regard to social. Talk about your brand's voice. If you have different people on your team that are posting to Twitter, make sure that one, they maybe identify themselves with their initials. It's a good way for them to be seen as subject matter experts. Be involved. If you do find those forums that I was talking about earlier, be involved in those forums. You don't want the first time you go into a forum to be when somebody is complaining about your dealership, about your brand. You want to be a member of that community so that you can address those issues. And again, have a strict process in place. Make sure folks know what they can, can't do, should, shouldn't do, what the escalation process is. So if you have somebody that is tweeting about your dealership or about the unit that they bought, make sure they know exactly how they should react to that, what they should do to drop the tension in that situation down, to take it offline. Keep your site fresh. Keep your site up to date. Make sure it's got all the right information. Third time of hammering that bit home. Again, when you publish things, make sure that you are reviewing them. Make sure that somebody gives them a look over. I saw yesterday that, I forget the company, but they were talking about the fact that they were going to create a diversity committee at their company. And the diversity committee was five white straight guys, which was not diverse. Make sure that you do have people from different backgrounds. If you have them within your dealership, look things over and just make sure that it's not going to, something you may not think about that they have a view of, that it's not going to impact you negatively with a demographic. And again, make sure that folks do know what your brand identity and voice is. I mean, your dealership may be playful. You may be setting yourself up as the experts in everything in your field. You may be setting yourselves up as the experts in how to or maintenance. You know, make sure that they know what that brand identity is and how it's said so that you can have a level of consistency amongst your brand and which helps with your reputation. And again, educate your team, but also regularly review the response and escalation process. If you have had issues over the last quarter or over the last month, look at what you did. Look at what the outcome was and determine, was everything that we did right? Did it create more problems? Did it solve the problem? Do we need to make tweaks to our processes? And if there is something that's, you know, you're doing something and it really is just not working well, fail fast, kill it, walk away from that. Apologize, step back and move on to the next project. Move on to the next marketing plan that you're putting out there. There are generally best practices that are published. I mean, Google has best practices. Facebook has best practices. Make sure folks know what those are, but also be aware that they do change. And when I say that Google will pull the rug out from under you, there is a chance of that. Google makes thousands of updates a year. They make probably less than 10 very big updates a year. But if you're not doing things the right way with your website, that might see you drop and get less organic traffic. So make sure you know what those policies are. And if you're doing paid search, you obviously need to know what the paid search policies are and practices are. And I talked about reviews earlier, so I wanted to throw this in here as well. Make sure that you are building your brand organically. I mean, nudging folks isn't a bad idea as well. You know, you can have signage in your dealership reminding folks to review online. As you're giving them the invoice, you could have links to the review sites on the invoice. You can have your sales folks ask them to, hey, would you mind reviewing? If you want to put them in email signatures, put in a link to your Yelp, to your Google My Business in your email signatures of your sales folks. So that reminder is there for folks to do that. If you have a re-engagement email series that you do, where you reach out to folks that have come in or reached out as a lead to you, and you reach out a month later or a week later to say, hey, we've still got this unit that you're interested in. We've got this other unit in. Make sure that you have those links in there. If you're doing service emails, you're sending out an email about, hey, you bought this unit six months ago. If you want a service, we have a service department. Put the links in there with the review links in. Any kind of follow-ups, make sure you have those review links. Now, one little, I wouldn't call it a cheat, but one little thing you can do with this, you can always make it in the emails, two links. One that says, are you satisfied? Yes. Are you satisfied? No. The yes takes them to Google My Business or Yelp. The no opens up an email form to your customer service department where they can explain why they have an issue. That way you can mitigate some of those negative reviews by having them work with your customer service department, whereas the positive ones go straight up there. One thing I do want to talk about as well, and touch on this a little bit, is common sense. There is generally a lack of that in the world these days, but it's something that does need to be instilled. This gets into that whole thing that I talked about earlier about, make sure that you have folks proof and look things over, because you don't want to do things like this. You're trying to get your open rate on your emails up. Threatening to kill someone through content is never going to work. It's never a good thing. Yes, that's great that went straight into my spam filter, but why would someone think that that was a good idea? It just was not. That said, it gets worse. Someone actually sent this F-bomb email title and said, yes, that subject line was terrible and a blatant attempt to grab your attention. We're not proud of it. Why would you even do it in the first place? You might get an open rate as people like, what the heck is this? People aren't going to do business with you. Why would I come out and buy a unit from you or in this guy's business, buy a t-shirt from you when you're being obtrusive in our first interaction? That's just awful. That's a reputation hit that you're just never going to recover from. This on social, I put this one in because it keeps coming up. Brands keep doing stupid stuff like this. The example on the left is Marcus Reuss, a German soccer player. He was working with Puma and they had this couldn't do it without you. They thought it'd be a really nice way to engage the fans. What happened was anybody that would retweet this would get their username put up top. Naturally, one of the first people had the username cocaine, and it came in cocaine couldn't do it without you. That was taken down. The whole thing was taken down within about an hour of it going live. The Patriots did the exact same thing. You can see the expletives that are in there, the horrible words. Arsenal football club, exactly the same thing. It's just, have you not met people? Do you not understand how people are? You have to be very careful how you interact with folks and what control you give them over interacting with your brand. Even when you're doing ads, and this gets into what I was talking about where having folks review things. This particular brand said, you do the girl boss thing, we'll do the SEO thing. They probably thought, oh, it's affirming. We're saying that women can be CEOs, they can run businesses. It also came off as, don't worry, I put a little head about doing the marketing. We'll do that for you. Make sure you have people from different demographics review any kind of advertising, any kind of content that you're putting out there. It's only common sense. What about when you can't avoid these issues? What do you do then? Somebody's come out there, they've tweeted about you, they put out a review. How do you respond? Well, firstly, it's be open. Admit whatever mistakes happened. Be honest about what went wrong. This is assuming that things went wrong. There are many instances when it's a whole perception thing. If somebody posts something on Yelp about how they're upset about a particular issue, make sure you just go in there and respond and say, hey, I'm the salesperson you saw. I'm sorry that you had this experience, but here's what actually happened. When you are interacting with folks, especially if it's publicly, identify what steps you're taking. Ask to take it private. Give them your email. Give them your personal phone number on a DM. Don't post that on Twitter. Say, hey, call me. Let's talk about this situation. Let's see how we can resolve that. Always make sure that you've at least said something in public so folks don't think you're ignoring these folks that have an issue. You can always go back later and say that you took these steps. What you may actually find is that when you have somebody who has publicly gone out there and complained about your dealership, about your business, and you have taken the time to respond to them, to help them with that issue and resolve that issue, they will actually be, in the most part, better brand advocates for your dealership. They will refer more people to your dealership than someone who just had a good experience at your dealership. So it does pay to respond to these. That said, there are always going to be times when you just have somebody who is never going to be satisfied, whether it's justified or not justified. And you have to know when to walk away from those. Again, that doesn't mean ignore them. Try and take some steps with them. But eventually, you will just have to step away from that. And that's fine to do, as long as you are then taking all those other steps to help grow your business. Now, the example I have here, it was a restaurant who somebody ordered a 30-pound bottle of wine, and they got a 4,500-pound bottle. If this actually happened, this was great for them, great publicity for them. I'm more likely to believe if it did happen, it was probably one of the owners that accidentally did this, given how blase they are about it. But look at what happened. They admitted these mistakes, and they said, good on you, everything's fine. Look at the publicist that they got, 9,500 retweets, another 3,000 quoted tweets, 62,000 likes, articles written about their restaurant. And I'm sure more folks then went to that restaurant in the hopes that this would happen for them. You do this for your dealership. You can not necessarily get this kind of virality, but you can at least improve your brand. And that's really what this whole thing has been about. Again, I would really like to thank AED for having me here presenting on this, as we've gone through those employee mistakes, those company mistakes, the technological mistakes, and how to avoid them all. And I hope that you found it at least mildly amusing in places, and also informational and helpful. And I think we're going to get into the questions now. Let me jump over to the Q&A if we had any. We actually currently don't have any questions. So if you do have any, please feel free to pop them in there. If not, I'll be turning it back over. Great. Thank you so much, Simon. And if someone does have a question, maybe after or later today, or after watching the recording, can they reach out to that email right there? The marketing at traderinteractive.com, I believe it was? Absolutely. Great. Or I'm sorry, equipmenttrader.com. Perfect. All right. Well, Simon, thank you so much for your time today. And anybody else, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. And thanks for joining us today. Thanks again, everybody.

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