The winners of Dealer Marketing Magazine’s Technology Awards were revealed this month, and DealerKnows played a big part.

Joe Webb, founder of DealerKnows, had been one of the judges in past years for these awards, but was tasked by the team at Dealer Marketing Magazine (DMM) to oversee the entire program for 2014.

More than ever, organizations, individuals, and vendors are finding ways to reward themselves with designations and awards. While other automotive industry awards are bought and paid for, pay-to-play, or voted on for strategic means and gains, DMM chose DealerKnows to ensure their Technology Awards remained completely unbiased. Opposed to conducting the voting themselves, DealerKnows chose to call upon the newly formed Automotive Peer Review board to do the voting for them. This way, reputable dealer executives within stores themselves were reviewing the technologies and voting without outside influence.

Joe Webb and Bill Playford of DealerKnows created the criteria for the judging, the categories, a detailed (and humorous) Q&A section for the judges to complete, as well as webpages, algorithms, and security measures to protect the legitimacy of the DMM Technology Awards. They also developed requirements for vendors to even be nominated. (Two separate dealers required for each nominated vendors among other factors.) Vendors were then contacted and asked to submit data, information, insight, results, and details about their technology/services. See the winners of the 2014 Technology Awards below.

DealerKnows would like to that the voting members of the Automotive Peer Review board as they helped keep the awards above board.

The Automotive Peer Review board tasked to vote included

as well as

Bill Simmons – General Manager/Partner – Haley Toyota

Daniel Fontaine – eCommerce Director – Colonial Automotive Group

AJ Maida – Director of Digital Marketing – Papa’s Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram

Aleksandra Banas – Digital Marketing Manager – Lexus of Edmonton

The criteria for which the nominated vendors were judged were:

1) Is it a novel solution?
2) Does it solve a problem?
3) Is the product or service easy to use?
4) Is the product or service valuable?

Once again, CONGRATULATIONS to the winners in each category of the 2014 Dealer Marketing Magazine Technology Awards:

Call Management – CallRevu
Chat – ActivEngage
Conversion Tools – HookLogic
Digital Marketing – String Automotive
ILM/CRM – VinSolutions
Inventory Management – Auction123
Mobile – CarStory
Reputation Management – Dominion Dealer Solutions
SEM/PPC – LotLinx
SEO – National Positions
Service Marketing – DMEautomotive
Social Media – KateFrost, Inc.
Video Marketing – cDemo
Websites – DealerOn
[blockquote name=”Brett Stevenson” organization=”Dealer Marketing Magazine”]We would like to thank both Joe Webb and our dealer-judges for a job well done, and we invite our dealer readers to look closely at the vendors that won their category.[/blockquote]

Congrats to all winners and thank you to the judges for their significant time spent voting, as well as to the great folks at Dealer Marketing Magazine for entrusting their awards to DealerKnows.