WALTHAM, Mass. -

Dealership review site DealerRater recently revealed enhancements to its reputation tool, the DealerRater Certification program — the first of many “exciting changes” this year, the company shared.

First, the company has expanded its DealerRater Push product, a tool which helps dealers to build and balance consumer reviews.

Now, the tool has been expanded to include four more review websites, in addition to Google Places, “that dealers can configures and push consumer reviewers to,” officials explained.

These sites include Yelp, CitySearch, Insider Pages and Edmunds. 

These updates were implemented to help dealers more easily build positive review counts and balance their review mix across third-party review sites, according to the company.

“For every consumer that now posts a positive review of a Certified Dealer on DealerRater, DealerRater Push will prompt the reviewer to share the review on one of these five influential third-party sites, with the specific site pre-selected by the dealer,” officials noted.

Commenting on the expansion, Chip Grueter, president at DealerRater, noted, “Our Certified Dealer partners have been very successful in soliciting satisfied sales and service customers to write online reviews on DealerRater.

“With the expansion of DealerRater Push, Certified Dealers will build positive online reviews and have the ability to rotate and balance where they send consumer reviews to overtime, with the end goal of helping them to balance their reviews across the major third-party review web sites,” he continued.

And the company has also made some additions to its MyReviews employee-specific review pages that it contends will “allow dealers to better promote individual employees for competitive edge with new elements such as YouTube videos, as well as a contact form for consumers to connect with dealer employees.”

Per the first update the company highlighted, dealership employees will now be able to upload videos to YouTube that can be viewed by consumers when they visit a dealers’ employee review page on DealerRater.

Next up, dealers’ inventory can now be added to the page, giving rooftops’ another way to market listings to consumers on the Web.

And if consumers see a unit they are interested in, the employee review pages will now feature consumer contact forms, as well. Shoppers are now able to post a message on a contact form that is emailed to the individual employee and/or copied to other dealer staff, based on the choice of a dealer, the company explained.

Dealers may now optionally disable this feature as well if they wish, they added.

Lastly, the company highlighted that the employee review pages now include a “consumer-driven employee tagging process.”

“When posting a review of a Certified Dealer, consumers are now prompted to select the dealer employee name(s) associated with the review, eliminating the prior need for dealers to associate or ‘tag’ their individual reviews to specific dealer employees,” officials explained.

“We work diligently to provide Certified Dealers with a comprehensive tool kit for expertly managing and leverage their online reputation,” said Grueter.

“These latest enhancements to our Certification Program are the first of many exciting changes in the area of product development planned for 2012,” he added, stressing that dealers should be on the lookout for more updates from the company in the near future.