Sunnyvale, CA (June 1, 2012) – Digital Air Strike, the nation’s leading automotive digital marketing company, today announced they have developed the first comprehensive program to help car dealers adapt to the migration from Google Places business pages to the new Google+ Local pages. Comprehensive changes were rolled out by Google on May 30th, 2012, and have been accompanied by general user confusion and page inconsistencies. Digital Air Strike has already created a social media and reputation management program to leverage the new features and will be hosting webinars to help dealers and industry stakeholders adapt to and benefit from these changes.
Within 24 hours of the migration to the new Google+ Local pages, Digital Air Strike had analyzed the changes, audited the impact on their clients, fixed any issues the new Google+ Local Pages caused for clients and created a training webinar to help educate the automotive industry.
“Changes like this often occur suddenly, and without prior notice, but the merging of Places with Google+ is not surprising,” said Tom Mohr, co-founder, President and CEO of Digital Air Strike. “Google has been taking incremental steps to integrate local search with social media since Google+ was rolled out last year and these changes are consistent with Google’s strategy to date.”
The migration to Google+ Local from Google Places impacted many areas including: Moving from rating businesses on an aggregate five star scale to a 30 point Zagat Ratings system, changing individual review ratings from a five star scale to new 0-3 numerical rating system, requiring consumers to be Google+ users in order to write new reviews, adjustments to features with Google Maps and mobile devices and significantly increasing the integration of social data overall, including in search results.
“Google+ Local pages elevate certain features of their review functionality which will likely lead more consumers to become regular users of Google+,” said Alexi Venneri, Digital Air Strike co-founder, CMO and COO-Social Media. “In light of these changes, dealers who have already invested in building a Google+ presence now have a significant advantage and dealers that have not focused on Google+ need to quickly adapt to ensure their lead traffic is not negatively impacted.”
Digital Air Strike continually monitors over 50 social media and review sites and makes necessary adjustments to their clients’ social media strategies based on the changing nature of these sites. Digital Air Strike was also the first automotive digital vendor to build Google+ Pages for dealerships nationwide, within 24 hours of Google+ being made available for business page creation.
A special Digital Air Strike webinar detailing the changes to Places and Google+ and how this impacts both social media and reputation management programs will be broadcast at 1pm (PST) on June 4, 2012. To sign up for the webinar and receive ongoing updates visit: www.digitalairstrike.com/google+
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About Digital Air Strike
Digital Air Strike provides the industry’s most complete automotive social media and digital marketing solution. The company developed a turn-key program that includes fully managing dealership social media sites, online reputation and digital lead responses. The company offers multiple tiers of service ranging from targeted social media and review site management to comprehensive multi-vehicle quoting with behavioral targeting capabilities. Digital Air Strike’s expertise spans all manufacturer brands and has a proven track record of helping automotive dealers, dealership groups and manufacturers engage with more consumers while delivering increased website traffic. Additional information is available at www.DigitalAirStrike.com and www.facebook.com/digitalairstrike.
Media Contact:
Charlie Vogelheim I cvogelheim@digitalairstrike.com I 949.929.0716