The SEMA Action Network issued the following clarification regarding a recent April Fool's Day prank involving an alleged The New York Times article indicating that legislation was being drafted in the U.S. Congress to create a federal tax on collector cars.

SEMA Action Network Members:

Some of you may have received notice of an alleged The New York Times article indicating that legislation was being drafted in the U.S. Congress to create a federal tax on collector cars. Hopefully, most of you know by now that the article was an April Fool's Day prank. The author has indicated his regrets for any confusion or embarrassment to automobile collectors and enthusiasts caused by the prank. Below, we have included the full text of his letter revealing the hoax.

Please contact me if I can be of additional assistance.

Steve McDonald
Vice President, Government Affairs
Specialty Equipment Market Association

SENATOR SCHUMER “TAXING CLASSIC CARS” THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE REVEALED AS ONLY AN APRIL FOOL’S PRANK

The Shelby American Automobile Club’s (SAAC) annual April Fool’s gag reached a much wider audience than anyone could have predicted. Initially a four-page newsletter was e-mailed to every member. It contained stories about a perpetual motion ’68 Shelby, a ’69 GT350 that supposedly got 40 miles per gallon and a bogus front-page recreation of The New York Times, dated March 28, that had two stories. One was a hoax about purported tax legislation being prepared by Sen. Charles Schumer, which would tax every collector car, antique, hot rod and race car in the country. This was, of course, concocted out of thin air. But it was, on the surface, believable and it hit numerous hot buttons of car owners.

As soon as some SAAC members read this, they immediately went into full “Paul Revere mode,” posting the article on a wide variety of Internet car forums. Once on those forums, readers swarmed like angry killer bees, both posting angry comments about the unfairness of the concept and spreading parts and pieces of the original article in e-mails and postings. It was the classic definition of something “going viral.”

When readers on some forums recognized the whole thing as an April Fool’s joke and posted this, other readers seemed to look right past the warnings. We now know how Orson Wells must have felt after his 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast resulted in traffic jams as panicked people tried to flee New Jersey.

While we enjoy a good April Fool’s prank as much as anyone, we never envisioned that this one could spread so quickly or so widely beyond the Shelby American Automobile Club. We deeply regret if taking this story seriously has caused anyone any undue distress or embarrassment. To keep more of that from happening we would greatly appreciate it if you could forward this message to as many car enthusiasts as possible. If they forward it to others who can forward it to even more people, maybe this second message will catch up with and overpower the first one.

And, finally, please do not contact Senator Schumer’s office. He already has his hands full with real issues of importance.

Best regards,

Rick Kopec
Shelby American Automobile Club

Cadillac's all-new flagship model recently went on another test drive, and the covert team of shooters at Brenda Priddy & Co.  managed to snap some up-close shots of the XTS.

According to Brenda Priddy, GM has gone to great lengths to camouflage this XTS almost exactly like the previously spotted ATS prototypes. While the ATS test cars have heavy padding underneath the vinyl to make them look bigger, the XTS camouflage looks to have no padding at all. This makes for very similar-looking test cars.

Riding the long-wheel-base version of the Epsilon II chassis, the XTS will go into production in March 2012 at the Oshawa plant, says Priddy. Front-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive models will be available.

Under the hood, the 3.6L V6 will be standard, and Priddy is sure that a turbo-charged V6 should be available for an upmarket model. A 3.0L, twin-turbo V6 is the rumored choice.

Photo: Brian Williams for Brenda Priddy & Company

Cadillac's all-new flagship model recently went on another test drive, and the covert team of shooters at Brenda Priddy & Co.  managed to snap some up-close shots of the XTS.

According to Brenda Priddy, GM has gone to great lengths to camouflage this XTS almost exactly like the previously spotted ATS prototypes. While the ATS test cars have heavy padding underneath the vinyl to make them look bigger, the XTS camouflage looks to have no padding at all. This makes for very similar-looking test cars.

Riding the long-wheel-base version of the Epsilon II chassis, the XTS will go into production in March 2012 at the Oshawa plant, says Priddy. Front-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive models will be available.

Under the hood, the 3.6L V6 will be standard, and Priddy is sure that a turbo-charged V6 should be available for an upmarket model. A 3.0L, twin-turbo V6 is the rumored choice.

Photo: Brian Williams for Brenda Priddy & Company

After a year of debate, Congress has approved legislation to repeal the costly 1099 reporting requirement included in last year’s health care law. SEMA has sent a letter to the White House asking President Obama to sign the bill into law.

Under the legislation, businesses will no longer be required to issue 1099 forms to all vendors from whom they buy more than $600 worth of goods or services in any year, beginning in 2012. The provision garnered widespread opposition on Capitol Hill, and President Obama called for its repeal during his State of the Union address. The requirement was intended to prompt vendors receiving 1099 forms to declare and pay taxes on the income. SEMA contended that it would fail to generate much under-reported income but would succeed in punishing businesses that already comply with U.S. tax law.

SEMA was an active leader in the effort to repeal the 1099 provision, working on its own and with a number of other small business organizations. In asking President Obama to sign the bill into law, SEMA President and CEO Chris Kersting noted that “Small businesses remain the most important economic engine driving America’s expanded recovery. Eliminating the 1099 reporting burden will allow our companies to focus on producing tangible goods and services rather than wasteful paperwork.”

For more information, please contact Dan Sadowski, Congressional Affairs Manager at dans@sema.org.

SEMA News—April 2010

Twitter

Power Tools for Business Users

By Joe Dysart

“Twitter can be a virtual goldmine of information for brands,” said Hollis Thomases, author of Twitter Marketing: An Hour A Day. “To help you monitor conversations and parse through data, Twitter and other third parties provide tools that let you search on particular keywords and receive alerts when someone mentions you. The results can help you understand how people use Twitter and how you tweet in relationship to those tweets—which helps you define and create a Twitter strategy.”

For would-be power users, here’s a cherry-picked selection of some of the best tools for business, recommended by Thomases and other social media marketing experts:

Measure the Impact of Your Tweets: Everyone has their good and bad days on Twitter. Tweet Effect enables you to help spot which of your Tweets were home runs by highlighting the posts that generated more followers for you and which caused people to say goodbye.

Measure Your Overall Influence on Twitter: There are a number of tools that will slice and dice your influence on the social network. Twitter Grader is one of the easiest to use. Just type in your Twitter username, click the grade button and you’ll see how you stack up. TweetLevel, a similar tool, ranks your company’s status on Twitter using four metrics: influence, popularity, engagement and trust. Twinfluence offers similar analytics, as does TweetReach.

Do a Comprehensive Analysis: For a more in-depth look at how you’re doing on Twitter, check out Twitalyzer, which offers an entry-level service and a paid-level service. “This grading program ranks based on such factors as generosity, clout, velocity, influence and signal-to-noise ratio,” Thomases said. “Twitalyzer gives you countless other statistics and graphs depicting those factors changing over time.”

The good news with this service is that its creators just released a new version in January—Twitalizer 4.0—which was also accompanied by price breaks. Other facets of the facelift include easier-to-read charts and graphs, greater ability to customize, tighter integration with Google Analytics and daily reporting for dozens of key metrics.

“Twitalyzer is really just two guys, Jeff Katz and Eric Peterson, both of whom have spent a fair amount of time working in the digital management space,” said Twitalyzer CEO Eric Peterson. “For the past two years, we have spent our evenings, weekends and free moments devising new ways to help businesses and organizations understand and optimize their efforts in short-message media.”

Quickly Discern Which Followers Are Most Influential: It’s nice to be popular and be followed by many on Twitter. It’s nicer when those followers are influential people who can give real legs to your brand. Topify identifies these people for you by giving you in-depth information on each person who decides to follow you on Twitter, including the size of his or her own following, a bio, his/her last five tweets and similar statistics. The information automatically arrives by e-mail to you each time a new follower signs up.

Multi-Post to Many Social Networks Simultaneously: Given that many Twitter marketers are also trying to reach out to customers on other social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s no surprise that there’s a tool to enable you to send the same post to all of your social networks simultaneously. Hellotxt is among the most ambitious. It allows you to simultaneously post to more than 50 social networks with a simple button click. Natter, meanwhile, is targeted to users interested only in monitoring and posting to the two biggest social networks, Twitter and Facebook.

Set Up Shop for Team Tweets: CoTweet enables a number of company employees to tweet from a single company account on Twitter, making it easier to solidify your brand. ChatterBox and TweetFunnel offers similar capabilities.

Do an Instant Twitter Poll: TwtPoll enables you to easily put together a multiple-choice question poll on Twitter. “A Twtpoll can be set-up and launched in seconds, and you can embed the survey and survey results in a website,” Thomases said.

Showcase Twitter Posts on Your Website: Keep more eyeballs glued to your homepage with Twitter Widgets, customizable tools that display your latest posts from Facebook, Blooger, Typepad and other social media tools. A similar tool, Jotabl, allows visitors to your website to get in on the action by displaying their tweets in a social media box on your homepage or anywhere else you’d like to place it.

Admit It, Size Matters: Get more into your posts by shrinking the length of the links you use. There are a number of services that will do this for you. Goo.gl, from search titan Google, seems among the most reliable. (Something tells me that company and its link-shrinking service will be around for awhile.) Other champions of shorter is better include Bit.ly, t.co, TinyURL and v.gd.

Break the 140-Character Tweet Barrier: One of the great charms—and great annoyances—of Twitter is that every tweet must be 140 characters or less. BiggerTwitter allows you to sidestep truncation by allowing you to easily drop a link in your tweet for thoughts that need more than 140 characters to make sense.

Post Multi-Lingually: Babller enables you to read and post on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in a number of languages. Be sure your customer service (phone, e-mail, support people) can handle all the new business you’re looking to generate in a foreign language.

Get the Big Picture: If you’re looking to sift for megatrends on Twitter, including what people are tweeting about most at any given moment, Tweetmeme is your ticket.

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan, New York. Contact: 631/256-6602; joe@joedysart.com; or www.joedysart.com

SEMA News—April 2010

Twitter

Power Tools for Business Users

By Joe Dysart

“Twitter can be a virtual goldmine of information for brands,” said Hollis Thomases, author of Twitter Marketing: An Hour A Day. “To help you monitor conversations and parse through data, Twitter and other third parties provide tools that let you search on particular keywords and receive alerts when someone mentions you. The results can help you understand how people use Twitter and how you tweet in relationship to those tweets—which helps you define and create a Twitter strategy.”

For would-be power users, here’s a cherry-picked selection of some of the best tools for business, recommended by Thomases and other social media marketing experts:

Measure the Impact of Your Tweets: Everyone has their good and bad days on Twitter. Tweet Effect enables you to help spot which of your Tweets were home runs by highlighting the posts that generated more followers for you and which caused people to say goodbye.

Measure Your Overall Influence on Twitter: There are a number of tools that will slice and dice your influence on the social network. Twitter Grader is one of the easiest to use. Just type in your Twitter username, click the grade button and you’ll see how you stack up. TweetLevel, a similar tool, ranks your company’s status on Twitter using four metrics: influence, popularity, engagement and trust. Twinfluence offers similar analytics, as does TweetReach.

Do a Comprehensive Analysis: For a more in-depth look at how you’re doing on Twitter, check out Twitalyzer, which offers an entry-level service and a paid-level service. “This grading program ranks based on such factors as generosity, clout, velocity, influence and signal-to-noise ratio,” Thomases said. “Twitalyzer gives you countless other statistics and graphs depicting those factors changing over time.”

The good news with this service is that its creators just released a new version in January—Twitalizer 4.0—which was also accompanied by price breaks. Other facets of the facelift include easier-to-read charts and graphs, greater ability to customize, tighter integration with Google Analytics and daily reporting for dozens of key metrics.

“Twitalyzer is really just two guys, Jeff Katz and Eric Peterson, both of whom have spent a fair amount of time working in the digital management space,” said Twitalyzer CEO Eric Peterson. “For the past two years, we have spent our evenings, weekends and free moments devising new ways to help businesses and organizations understand and optimize their efforts in short-message media.”

Quickly Discern Which Followers Are Most Influential: It’s nice to be popular and be followed by many on Twitter. It’s nicer when those followers are influential people who can give real legs to your brand. Topify identifies these people for you by giving you in-depth information on each person who decides to follow you on Twitter, including the size of his or her own following, a bio, his/her last five tweets and similar statistics. The information automatically arrives by e-mail to you each time a new follower signs up.

Multi-Post to Many Social Networks Simultaneously: Given that many Twitter marketers are also trying to reach out to customers on other social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s no surprise that there’s a tool to enable you to send the same post to all of your social networks simultaneously. Hellotxt is among the most ambitious. It allows you to simultaneously post to more than 50 social networks with a simple button click. Natter, meanwhile, is targeted to users interested only in monitoring and posting to the two biggest social networks, Twitter and Facebook.

Set Up Shop for Team Tweets: CoTweet enables a number of company employees to tweet from a single company account on Twitter, making it easier to solidify your brand. ChatterBox and TweetFunnel offers similar capabilities.

Do an Instant Twitter Poll: TwtPoll enables you to easily put together a multiple-choice question poll on Twitter. “A Twtpoll can be set-up and launched in seconds, and you can embed the survey and survey results in a website,” Thomases said.

Showcase Twitter Posts on Your Website: Keep more eyeballs glued to your homepage with Twitter Widgets, customizable tools that display your latest posts from Facebook, Blooger, Typepad and other social media tools. A similar tool, Jotabl, allows visitors to your website to get in on the action by displaying their tweets in a social media box on your homepage or anywhere else you’d like to place it.

Admit It, Size Matters: Get more into your posts by shrinking the length of the links you use. There are a number of services that will do this for you. Goo.gl, from search titan Google, seems among the most reliable. (Something tells me that company and its link-shrinking service will be around for awhile.) Other champions of shorter is better include Bit.ly, t.co, TinyURL and v.gd.

Break the 140-Character Tweet Barrier: One of the great charms—and great annoyances—of Twitter is that every tweet must be 140 characters or less. BiggerTwitter allows you to sidestep truncation by allowing you to easily drop a link in your tweet for thoughts that need more than 140 characters to make sense.

Post Multi-Lingually: Babller enables you to read and post on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in a number of languages. Be sure your customer service (phone, e-mail, support people) can handle all the new business you’re looking to generate in a foreign language.

Get the Big Picture: If you’re looking to sift for megatrends on Twitter, including what people are tweeting about most at any given moment, Tweetmeme is your ticket.

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan, New York. Contact: 631/256-6602; joe@joedysart.com; or www.joedysart.com

SEMA News—April 2010

Twitter

Power Tools for Business Users

By Joe Dysart

“Twitter can be a virtual goldmine of information for brands,” said Hollis Thomases, author of Twitter Marketing: An Hour A Day. “To help you monitor conversations and parse through data, Twitter and other third parties provide tools that let you search on particular keywords and receive alerts when someone mentions you. The results can help you understand how people use Twitter and how you tweet in relationship to those tweets—which helps you define and create a Twitter strategy.”

For would-be power users, here’s a cherry-picked selection of some of the best tools for business, recommended by Thomases and other social media marketing experts:

Measure the Impact of Your Tweets: Everyone has their good and bad days on Twitter. Tweet Effect enables you to help spot which of your Tweets were home runs by highlighting the posts that generated more followers for you and which caused people to say goodbye.

Measure Your Overall Influence on Twitter: There are a number of tools that will slice and dice your influence on the social network. Twitter Grader is one of the easiest to use. Just type in your Twitter username, click the grade button and you’ll see how you stack up. TweetLevel, a similar tool, ranks your company’s status on Twitter using four metrics: influence, popularity, engagement and trust. Twinfluence offers similar analytics, as does TweetReach.

Do a Comprehensive Analysis: For a more in-depth look at how you’re doing on Twitter, check out Twitalyzer, which offers an entry-level service and a paid-level service. “This grading program ranks based on such factors as generosity, clout, velocity, influence and signal-to-noise ratio,” Thomases said. “Twitalyzer gives you countless other statistics and graphs depicting those factors changing over time.”

The good news with this service is that its creators just released a new version in January—Twitalizer 4.0—which was also accompanied by price breaks. Other facets of the facelift include easier-to-read charts and graphs, greater ability to customize, tighter integration with Google Analytics and daily reporting for dozens of key metrics.

“Twitalyzer is really just two guys, Jeff Katz and Eric Peterson, both of whom have spent a fair amount of time working in the digital management space,” said Twitalyzer CEO Eric Peterson. “For the past two years, we have spent our evenings, weekends and free moments devising new ways to help businesses and organizations understand and optimize their efforts in short-message media.”

Quickly Discern Which Followers Are Most Influential: It’s nice to be popular and be followed by many on Twitter. It’s nicer when those followers are influential people who can give real legs to your brand. Topify identifies these people for you by giving you in-depth information on each person who decides to follow you on Twitter, including the size of his or her own following, a bio, his/her last five tweets and similar statistics. The information automatically arrives by e-mail to you each time a new follower signs up.

Multi-Post to Many Social Networks Simultaneously: Given that many Twitter marketers are also trying to reach out to customers on other social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s no surprise that there’s a tool to enable you to send the same post to all of your social networks simultaneously. Hellotxt is among the most ambitious. It allows you to simultaneously post to more than 50 social networks with a simple button click. Natter, meanwhile, is targeted to users interested only in monitoring and posting to the two biggest social networks, Twitter and Facebook.

Set Up Shop for Team Tweets: CoTweet enables a number of company employees to tweet from a single company account on Twitter, making it easier to solidify your brand. ChatterBox and TweetFunnel offers similar capabilities.

Do an Instant Twitter Poll: TwtPoll enables you to easily put together a multiple-choice question poll on Twitter. “A Twtpoll can be set-up and launched in seconds, and you can embed the survey and survey results in a website,” Thomases said.

Showcase Twitter Posts on Your Website: Keep more eyeballs glued to your homepage with Twitter Widgets, customizable tools that display your latest posts from Facebook, Blooger, Typepad and other social media tools. A similar tool, Jotabl, allows visitors to your website to get in on the action by displaying their tweets in a social media box on your homepage or anywhere else you’d like to place it.

Admit It, Size Matters: Get more into your posts by shrinking the length of the links you use. There are a number of services that will do this for you. Goo.gl, from search titan Google, seems among the most reliable. (Something tells me that company and its link-shrinking service will be around for awhile.) Other champions of shorter is better include Bit.ly, t.co, TinyURL and v.gd.

Break the 140-Character Tweet Barrier: One of the great charms—and great annoyances—of Twitter is that every tweet must be 140 characters or less. BiggerTwitter allows you to sidestep truncation by allowing you to easily drop a link in your tweet for thoughts that need more than 140 characters to make sense.

Post Multi-Lingually: Babller enables you to read and post on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in a number of languages. Be sure your customer service (phone, e-mail, support people) can handle all the new business you’re looking to generate in a foreign language.

Get the Big Picture: If you’re looking to sift for megatrends on Twitter, including what people are tweeting about most at any given moment, Tweetmeme is your ticket.

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan, New York. Contact: 631/256-6602; joe@joedysart.com; or www.joedysart.com

SEMA News—April 2010

Twitter

Power Tools for Business Users

By Joe Dysart

“Twitter can be a virtual goldmine of information for brands,” said Hollis Thomases, author of Twitter Marketing: An Hour A Day. “To help you monitor conversations and parse through data, Twitter and other third parties provide tools that let you search on particular keywords and receive alerts when someone mentions you. The results can help you understand how people use Twitter and how you tweet in relationship to those tweets—which helps you define and create a Twitter strategy.”

For would-be power users, here’s a cherry-picked selection of some of the best tools for business, recommended by Thomases and other social media marketing experts:

Measure the Impact of Your Tweets: Everyone has their good and bad days on Twitter. Tweet Effect enables you to help spot which of your Tweets were home runs by highlighting the posts that generated more followers for you and which caused people to say goodbye.

Measure Your Overall Influence on Twitter: There are a number of tools that will slice and dice your influence on the social network. Twitter Grader is one of the easiest to use. Just type in your Twitter username, click the grade button and you’ll see how you stack up. TweetLevel, a similar tool, ranks your company’s status on Twitter using four metrics: influence, popularity, engagement and trust. Twinfluence offers similar analytics, as does TweetReach.

Do a Comprehensive Analysis: For a more in-depth look at how you’re doing on Twitter, check out Twitalyzer, which offers an entry-level service and a paid-level service. “This grading program ranks based on such factors as generosity, clout, velocity, influence and signal-to-noise ratio,” Thomases said. “Twitalyzer gives you countless other statistics and graphs depicting those factors changing over time.”

The good news with this service is that its creators just released a new version in January—Twitalizer 4.0—which was also accompanied by price breaks. Other facets of the facelift include easier-to-read charts and graphs, greater ability to customize, tighter integration with Google Analytics and daily reporting for dozens of key metrics.

“Twitalyzer is really just two guys, Jeff Katz and Eric Peterson, both of whom have spent a fair amount of time working in the digital management space,” said Twitalyzer CEO Eric Peterson. “For the past two years, we have spent our evenings, weekends and free moments devising new ways to help businesses and organizations understand and optimize their efforts in short-message media.”

Quickly Discern Which Followers Are Most Influential: It’s nice to be popular and be followed by many on Twitter. It’s nicer when those followers are influential people who can give real legs to your brand. Topify identifies these people for you by giving you in-depth information on each person who decides to follow you on Twitter, including the size of his or her own following, a bio, his/her last five tweets and similar statistics. The information automatically arrives by e-mail to you each time a new follower signs up.

Multi-Post to Many Social Networks Simultaneously: Given that many Twitter marketers are also trying to reach out to customers on other social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s no surprise that there’s a tool to enable you to send the same post to all of your social networks simultaneously. Hellotxt is among the most ambitious. It allows you to simultaneously post to more than 50 social networks with a simple button click. Natter, meanwhile, is targeted to users interested only in monitoring and posting to the two biggest social networks, Twitter and Facebook.

Set Up Shop for Team Tweets: CoTweet enables a number of company employees to tweet from a single company account on Twitter, making it easier to solidify your brand. ChatterBox and TweetFunnel offers similar capabilities.

Do an Instant Twitter Poll: TwtPoll enables you to easily put together a multiple-choice question poll on Twitter. “A Twtpoll can be set-up and launched in seconds, and you can embed the survey and survey results in a website,” Thomases said.

Showcase Twitter Posts on Your Website: Keep more eyeballs glued to your homepage with Twitter Widgets, customizable tools that display your latest posts from Facebook, Blooger, Typepad and other social media tools. A similar tool, Jotabl, allows visitors to your website to get in on the action by displaying their tweets in a social media box on your homepage or anywhere else you’d like to place it.

Admit It, Size Matters: Get more into your posts by shrinking the length of the links you use. There are a number of services that will do this for you. Goo.gl, from search titan Google, seems among the most reliable. (Something tells me that company and its link-shrinking service will be around for awhile.) Other champions of shorter is better include Bit.ly, t.co, TinyURL and v.gd.

Break the 140-Character Tweet Barrier: One of the great charms—and great annoyances—of Twitter is that every tweet must be 140 characters or less. BiggerTwitter allows you to sidestep truncation by allowing you to easily drop a link in your tweet for thoughts that need more than 140 characters to make sense.

Post Multi-Lingually: Babller enables you to read and post on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in a number of languages. Be sure your customer service (phone, e-mail, support people) can handle all the new business you’re looking to generate in a foreign language.

Get the Big Picture: If you’re looking to sift for megatrends on Twitter, including what people are tweeting about most at any given moment, Tweetmeme is your ticket.

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan, New York. Contact: 631/256-6602; joe@joedysart.com; or www.joedysart.com