Boston Toyota Dealer Wins Praise

ACTOn TOyOTA OF liTTlETOn Flipping the paradigm with Flip Video: dealership Empowers Employees’ Creativity By Dan Miller july/august2010 july/august2010 H ow does Craig Belowski use social media to promote interestingly enough, a woman who became Downing’s Acton Toyota of Littleton, Mass.? Actually he doesn’t. The girlfriend. Downing is at work on a follow-up to that general sales manager’s employees do and they promote success: a comparison of the Prius and the Honda Insight 5 themselves. And, along the way, that comes back to the in the milieu of the long-running Mac vs. PC television 6 benefit of the dealership. commercials. toyotatoday toyotatoday It’s an innovative strategy that’s been a long time in Downing and his similarly inventive colleagues are helped the making. by a tech-savvy college student Belowski hired to produce “We started a couple of years ago with a MySpace page, videos during the summer months. The dealership also made then set up a Facebook page and opened a MyTube account,” a modest investment in video equipment, including two says Belowski, who was empowered by General Manager point-and-shoot Flip Video camcorders that have become de A Star is Born Mike Hills to explore all options. “But it wasn’t until about a rigueur among YouTube aficionados. Craig Belowski (foreground), general sales manager at Acton Toyota, empowered sales consultant Tom Downing (with guitar) to use YouTube to spark his creativity and create a buzz about the Littleton, Mass., dealership. Downing responded by starring in a Prius-themed music video year or so ago that we got smart about this and came up with By all appearances, dealership personnel like Downing that’s generated more than a thousand views online. the idea of empowering the people in the store. Now, we are having fun with this. But does it sell cars? Photo by Dave Kadlubowski have several salespeople who have Google profiles, LinkedIn “Probably not directly,” says Belowski. “But it definitely accounts and Facebook pages. When they talk about the helps people find our website. If you do a search for Acton dealership, they each might have 50 friends who read about Toyota, the top links all lead back to us because of all our Acton Toyota of Littleton Connect Communicate it. Then each of them might tell 50 of their friends. It’s much social media activity. more likely to go viral than if we were to post only on our “It’s also good for employee morale. And it shows the Facebook page.” customer that our people are passionate about their jobs. Belowski admits not every member of the staff has You’re much more likely to buy from someone who’s warmed up to the idea. But those who do more than make passionate about what they do.” up for those who don’t. “This approach just fits with the way we do business,” Take, for example, Tom Downing. The sales adds Belowski. “Our people create our process. Our consultant parodied a folk song with lyrics that call out customers create our process. It’s more organic. There is no the features of the Prius, then used it as a soundtrack for one way to do everything. If you let everyone get involved in a low-budget music video. The creative effort generated the process, it has more life to it. Customers see that and say, more than a thousand views on YouTube, including, ‘I want to be a part of that.’”

Boston Toyota Dealer Wins Praise

by Brian Pasch on Aug 04, 2010

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