Car Dealers Are Being Scammed By Review Posting Services

Car dealers are being scammed because of their desire to catch up with the Internet Reputation Management (IRM) bandwagon.

The scam I am speaking of involves companies telling dealers that they will "post" reviews for the dealership as a paid service.

Whether these reviews are fabricated or actual comments from customer emails, in-store surveys, or phone surveys will vary from case to case.

In any case, Google Places is designed for a person, not an agent, to post a review about their experience with a business listed on Google Places. For many dealers, their reviews on Google Places are accurate but a growing number of dealers I test are being sucked into this dangerous scam.

Kelly Is a Busy Bee

Take a look at these actual reviews from a dealer in New York:

The review above from Kelly may look authentic, until you click on Kelly's Google Profile. That hyperlink on her name displays this activity on Google Places:

Kelly has been busy posting reviews for a number of stores in New York. Obviously this is an agent working for a review posting company and not a single person who buys dozens of cars a day.

Why Is This Bad?

It is bad on a number of fronts. First and foremost, it places your Google Places account in jeopardy of being delisted. In one case I personally know, the dealership main URL was demoted to Google Page 3, as a punishment!

Secondly, it invites consumers or competitors to make consumers aware of the fake reviews. Take a peek at this post by a consumer who figured out the dealer was using a posting service:

Once your online reputation and credibility is damaged, it is very hard to recover. There is NO REASON why a dealer should not be able to get 10-20% of their happy customers to post a review on Google Places when they are at the dealership.

There is no excuse to put your online reputation at risk. It is short sighted and dangerous. Please take a minute to MAKE SURE that your store, and any store in your organization has not hired this type of company. Click on the user profiles of the reviewer, and make sure they are not part of an IRM company that violates Google TOS.

See you at DMSC and NADA next week!

Brian

Brian Pasch, CEO

PCG Digital Marketing
Text PCGedu to 75674 get information on our upcoming conferences
Brian Pasch

Tags: automotive irm, irm, online reviews, reputation management

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Comment by Brian Pasch on January 28, 2012 at 8:06am: Confirmed, NextSteppe was charging dealers $299 a month to take reviews collected on their website and post them to Google Places using "agent" group accounts.

Comment by Brian Pasch on January 28, 2012 at 8:02am: Looks like the CLEANUP crew at NextSteppe missed some of these still hanging around. It's so interesting how all those fake reviews were on websites hosted by NextSteppe.

Comment by Brian Pasch on January 28, 2012 at 7:59am: Take a look at the CLEANED Huntington Honda Google Places page. Surprisingly all the AGENT POSTED reviews are gone, including our girl Kelly. Looks like their website provider decided that this might be a BAD move to offer this to customers. That, or Google Places team didn't like the model.

Comment by Brian Pasch on January 28, 2012 at 7:55am: What is interesting to see that ALL the fake reviews that I documented in this post are now gone. I guess NextSteppe (automotive website company that offered this posting service) got a call from some of their clients or my not to the Google Places team was very effective on this scam.

Comment by Aj Maida on January 27, 2012 at 4:35pm: Shortcuts get you no where!!!! On another note Kelly must have some credit score!!!!!

Comment by Coleen Luque on January 26, 2012 at 10:53pm: Hi Brian,

Great post! This doesn't surprise me - unfortunately.

Comment by John Isaac on January 26, 2012 at 5:35pm: It appears that Google is truly going to be the game changer, not MyDealerReport, DealerRater etc. because the punishment is not great enough with us apparently. When Google truly implements punishment the scammers will be out of business. And it will make the world a better place.

Comment by Jordan Scott on January 26, 2012 at 4:58pm: Great topic, this company actually knows how to write a fake review.

In our area a dealer has evidently got their staff on board to write reviews. All the reviews are generic, and don't mention anyone's name. They mention , "the beautiful new building" (reno'd well over a year ago), sales events, and cool cars "that I did not buy, but just had to see".

If someone is satisfied, they write their experience in detail. If someone is unsatisfied they write their experience in detail. Fake ones are short and always seem to end in "Ill return again", "friendly & helpful", "quick and easy".

Soo disappointing for dealers who play everything by the book.

Comment by Roberto Barca on January 26, 2012 at 4:52pm: Hey Brian, Hope all is well! I have not chimed in on here in a while but this post relates to a situation that caused me some extra work, so though I would share my experience :) I could not agree more and had one of my dealer clients discontinue one of these "review services" several months ago. Furthermore...this dealer was not very big on the "social media" front yet and they actually allowed the review service company to create their facebook page and so on. Once I called the review company to have them relinquish those pages to us, their response was "Sorry, the girl who created that page is no longer with us so I don't have the login info for it!" It created more work for me as I needed to work with the social sites to get these pages removed and allow me to use the url for the new/legitimate page...no easy task as Facebook is not the best when it comes to customer support. In short, my message to all dealers: NEVER, ever relinquish total control to some strange company, make sure that your digital marketing company / consultant is registering the "pages" with your complete knowledge and complete transparency as to all login info.

Comment by Joseph Hobbs on January 26, 2012 at 4:08pm: I have had those service call... but would never take them up on it.....We have started to ask for reviews ....we are getting more & more reviews on line ...Google places etc... but have notice that customers some times copy other reviews & just change some of the wording ( kind like College lol)....so they look like phony reviews just another thing to worry about....