When I was younger and dumber in my journey as an automotive digital marketer, I believed that a strong social media strategy combined with a decent budget and the occasional drop of a creative juice would be enough to build a killer product for car dealers. I was wrong.
Ever since founding Dealer Authority last year, I quickly came to a conclusion that I had not reached with my previous endeavors as a vendor. Some would say that it’s a no-brainer and when I look back, I wonder how I missed it. The fact of the matter is this: the best strategy, a huge budget, and tankers full of creative juices could never deliver the results without the right people making it happen.
We discuss strategy all the time. We research other companies in the automotive industry. We venture into realms outside of the industry to see what’s working out there. We attend the conferences, read the blog posts, and listen to the webinars. All of that’s great and we are pleased to have what is clearly a superior strategy to anything else offered in the industry, but the people that we’ve been honored to hire to run the show and make it happen – they’re the real juice. They’re the unfair advantage we have over our competitors and they’re the reason that our clients are seeing insane results.
From left to right in the image above, we have Brian “Beemer” West, Subi “Dubi Doo” Ghosh, Erika “With a K” Simms, Ray “I Can’t Pronounce My Last Name Either” Bulaclac. Scottie “Thelonious Monk” Pippen, Michael “Air” Jordan, and Clyde “The Glide” Drexler.
I asked them to strike a serious pose because social media is serious business, but in retrospect it was another mistake I’ve made. Asking them to put on jackets and stand in front of the camera doesn’t do justice to the passion each of them have for delivering greatness. Putting them in positions that aren’t natural to them doesn’t accentuate the fact that they pound on keyboards and obsess over wording to make sure that everything posted to any client’s social profile is unique and demands the attention of their local audience. These pictures do not reveal the daily communication, the comradery that allows them to dress as superheroes during meetings to keep them light and creative.
Knowing what I know about other social media teams in our industry, I am so ecstatic to have found the best people for the job. It’s like coaching the 1992 US Men’s Olympic basketball team, only without Christian Laettner. When you’re coaching the Dream Team, you just call a few plays and let them go out and score.
Disclaimer: Pippen, Jordan, and Drexler are not currently members of our team, but we have reached out to their agents. In the event that any of them are not offered a position, we reserve the right to add other qualified members to the team. Perhaps that qualified member is you!
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