People in the car business have been the focus of more jokes about dishonesty and greed than any other professionals outside of lawyers and politicians. Buyers instantly put up their best defenses when shopping for a car because of horror stories and bad experiences that have been spreading since the 1970s. Thing are different today. There are still those who try to get one by you, but social media has forced the majority of car dealers to embrace transparency in a digital age that no longer allows the actions of any business to go unnoticed. In many ways, the automotive industry went from being a…

In many ways, Facebook has lost some of its luster as a business tool. It isn’t that it’s not possible to properly market a business on the platform. It’s that the complexity of the EdgeRank algorithm mixed with the touchiness of the advertising formats has many turning autopilot onto their pages instead of investing time or money into them. They just weren’t seeing a return on investment the way that they had hoped. It seems to be an ebb and flow of sentiment. General Motors, for example, decided to dump their investment into Facebook advertising last year before returning to the platform this year….

Tech geeks around the world love mods. Any time we have the opportunity, the resources, and the know-how to take something amazing and squeeze out more performance, we do it. There’s a reason why it used to take a special type of computer to run Crysis. The same holds true for motor heads. Squeezing out a few extra horses from a modified engine has helped to bring the highest levels of technology to garages across the globe and continues to give us more parts to the Fast and the Furious movie series. When Chevrolet unveiled the 2014 Corvette C7 Stingray, the excitement didn’t just center around the first…

Every few months, it seems that Klout makes changes to try to bring its importance to a higher level and push itself into the mainstream consciousness. Every few months, the changes that Klout makes push them further into obscurity and away from mainstream consciousness because they try too hard to appeal to the people that simply don’t care. When they do this, they reduce the very thing that could actually make them better known and talked about more often: overall usefulness. The last algorithm change seemed to set “caps” on how “influential” people could be based upon their position in the real…

The days of “focus on what you’re good at” are behind us. It’s no longer adequate for businesses to stay isolated and let technology get built around them. They want to get involved. Starbucks, for example, is in the business of coffee, but that didn’t stop them from investing $25 million in Square, a mobile payment company. Will it help them make better coffee? No. Will it potentially improve their bottom line by streamlining the way that many customers will be able to buy their coffee at 7,000 US stores? Maybe. Partnerships and agreements are not always enough, though. In the past, there would have…

General Motors couldn’t have picked a worse time to pull out of paid advertising on Facebook when they announced their decision the week of the Facebook IPO. Now, the two companies are in talks to bring paid ads back into the mix at a crucial point in Facebook’s growth as a public company. WSJ reports that Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg spoke with GM Chief Executive Daniel Akerson about the issue with transparency at the heart of the matter. General Motors wasn’t sure if their $10 million spend in 2011 (a fraction of their multi-billion dollar advertising budget) was having a positive…

So, after a couple of weeks, the truth has come out about GM’s sudden Facebook ad maneuver. Or at least some of the story. It appears that there was something of a power struggle between Mark Zuckerberg and GM. And for once, kudos to Mr. Zuckerberg for standing his ground. He seems to remember what his social media baby is all about. And it’s not necessarily just about social media marketing. It seems that GM wanted to place full page ads on Facebook, an idea which was rejected. So like a spoiled child, GM took their ball and went home. GM’s maneuver forces a number of issues into the limelight regarding…

Just ahead of the much-discussed Facebook IPO, General Motors announced that they plan to cease advertising on the social networking site. They will continue to market on Facebook through the free Facebook pages but will not be paying Facebook for ads. Their reason is something that most ads executives have considered at one point or another when looking at Facebook: will it help sell more products? General Motors determined that it was not helping them sell more cars. While their $10 million annual spend on Facebook was a tiny fraction of both their advertising spend ($1.8 billion) and Facebook’s…

Infotainment has become an important area of research and development in the automotive industry. Many consumers want it, but most automakers are still playing catch-up. Ford and Microsoft introduced SYNC nearly four years ago and other automakers are still lagging behind this system in terms of features and availability. Ford will soon offer SYNC throughout its lineup, and already the system has been installed on more than 3 million vehicles….