RENTON, Wash. -

When it comes to social media, Seattle-area General Motors dealer Brad Brotherton doesn’t just use it to learn more about his own customer reaction to his store’s products and respond to their comments.

The owner and president of Brotherton Cadillac Buick GMC also employs social media to connect with owners of vehicles from competing brands.

Brotherton — who puts a big emphasis on social media at his Renton, Wash., store — uses tools like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Yelp to spark a conversation with these shoppers with whom he might not otherwise have a chance to connect.

“When somebody says, ‘I hate my BMW’, we can go in and say, ‘Here at Brotherton Cadillac, we can certainly understand where you’re coming from. Would you consider looking at the GMC Denali or the new Terrain or the Buick LaCrosse?’" he said in the latest Faces of GM blog.

Brotherton added: “We can get into a conversation with them online. It’s not invasive. It’s just a way of connection to customer that wouldn’t necessarily find us any other way.”

Such advice was just an example of the strategies doled out by Brotherton in GM’s latest installment of its dealer success story series.

In the same vein of using social media to generate car sales, he also stressed that aggressively imploring the customer to make a purchase is not the way to go.

“Make sure you’re not yelling at your customer to come in and buy a car,” Brotherton said.

Instead, he advises dealers to create a conversation and build a relationship with customers. And then, that connection may end up resulting in a sale.

Brotherton has also found it useful to establish connections with friends of friends via social networking sites. For instance, the dealership has lent a helping hand to numerous charities over the years and is seeing virtual connections blossom thanks to its outreach.

Brotherton gets the chance to cross-promote online with these charitable groups, which offer links back to his store on their own sites.

GM gave the example of a woman named Jenni Hogan, who provides traffic reports on local TV.

Brotherton and Hogan — who has 34,000 Twitter followers — have teamed up and utilized Twitter for mobile “tweetups.” 

During these tweetups, a vehicle is driven to a specified location. People gather to donate charitable items, like the 17,000 toys donated for a recent Toys for Tots drive.

“There’s folks that I’ve met through those campaigns that would never know us otherwise,” Brotherton shared.

Continuing along, Brotherton takes a hands-on approach to managing social networking at the dealership. In fact, he tackles all the store’s marketing and social-media endeavors.

“Here at Brotherton, we’ve taken a real hard look at social media and how it can help our business to communicate with the customer and get this dialog going about what’s going on in the marketplace,” he noted. He later added: “We’ve got great people here. The managers we have allow me to be able to go out and be kind of the marketing and community outreach person for the dealership.

“It’s a lot of fun so you tend to focus on the things that are more fun to do,” Brotherton continued.

To read the full blog entry, visit www.facesofgm.com/2011/08/09/brad-brotherton-connecting-with-customers-one-tweet-at-a-time.

To view the Faces of GM video report on Brotherton, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6VkiJEi3rQ&feature=player_embedded#at=48 .

Brotherton’s YouTube channel can be seen at  http://www.youtube.com/user/brothertoncadillac.