GuildQuality

In our Newsletter from May, we announce our 2010 Guildmaster award winners, feature our Q1 Member Predictions Report, announce a new partnership with James Hardie Preferred Remodelers and more.

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Sept 7, 2010 Update: I still recommend Dlvr.it for auto-posting your blog to Facebook and Twitter, but since writing this post we’ve enabled you to seamlessly connect your GuildQuality account to both Twitter and Facebook without going through the gyrations described below.

Dlvr.it is a simple (and free) web service that enables you to “distribute your blog to twitter, facebook and more.” In past posts, I’ve described how you can auto-post your published customer comments or blog posts to Twitter or your Facebook fan page. At the time I wrote those posts, dlvr.it didn’t exist, so I suggested an alternate feed distribution tool. While the service I suggested mostly worked, it wasn’t completely reliable. If you wanted to be sure your home buyers’ comments were being fed to your Facebook fan page or a your blog posts about your recent remodel projects were being auto-tweeted, it wasn’t the perfect tool.

In contrast, after testing it for a month or so, dlvr.it seems to work flawlessly. So this morning, I ported all our feeds over to dlvr.it and we’re now off to the races. You can see where we’re using it at GuildQuality’s Twitter account, our Facebook Fan Page, and an alternate Twitter account I set up that publishes all of the activity in our member stream (limit of 3 posts every 15 minutes).

More people than ever are visiting GuildQuality.com. This week we saw a few records here at GQHQ:

1) Most visitors to our website in a single day (traffic on Wednesday surpassed the old record set on November 5, 2008);

2) Most visitors to our website in a single week (traffic this week surpassed the old record set three weeks ago); and

3) Most visitors to our website in a single month (traffic in May surpassed the old record set in March).

While much of this traffic comes from within our industry (home builders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors), the majority comes from people seeking to build, buy, renovate, improve or rent a home. In May, more than 65% of the pages viewed on our site were pages celebrating the work that our members do: member profiles, customer reports, Guildmaster interviews, or project profiles.

This is great news for GuildQuality and for our wonderful members.

A few weeks ago, the good folks over at Startup Atlanta invited me and a handful of other real estate/construction/technology entrepreneurs to give a presentations about our companies, and answer questions from the crowd. Daniel at Friendly Human snagged me for this “exit interview”. Somehow, he managed to elicit a coherent statement about who GuildQuality is, what we do, and why we do it. What a pro!

A couple months ago, we increased the number of free project profiles our members could publish from 1 to 10. We just raised it again to 25. So publish away!

We’re thrilled that you’re sharing so many beautiful pictures of remodeling projects, new homes, and communities. We’re increasing the limit for two reasons: 1) I think these pictures are great and I’d like to see even more; and 2) We’re working on some improvements to the site that relate to project profiles, and the more that are in there, the better it will be for both our members and visitors.

A few weeks ago, we quietly introduced a Partnerships page on our website. Our partnerships allow us to promote the members that work with (or are a part of, subscribe to, have won an award from, etc) a company, association, or organization with which GuildQuality has a strong relationship.

Our relationships with these partners take a few different shapes: In exchange for promoting us to their builders and/or remodelers, we do at least one of the following:

• - Provide the Partner with summary performance information for each member;
• - Provide the Member with some preferred services (like customized peer group performance reporting);
• - Promote the Partner to GuildQuality’s membership.

We don’t always know if our members are affiliated with one of our partners, so if you aren’t on one of these maps, and you think you should be, let us know. We’ll add that partner to your profile page and you’ll appear on that partner’s map.

If you know of an organization that would be a great partner for GuildQuality, please ask that they contact me directly via geoff at guildquality dot com.

P.S. At present, you can navigate to the partnership page via our website’s footer. I expect we’ll give it a more prominent position, but it will continue to sit down there until we can figure out a graceful and relevant location for it on our homepage.

What a great group of remodelers! Qualified Remodeler profiled 55 members among the 2010 Guildmaster Award Winners in their latest issue. From the article:

Today, during a housing downturn and slower economic times, satisfying customers can very well mean the difference between success and failure. If your phone has stopped ringing, it may have less to do with your success as a marketer than it does the lingering effect of past customers who are not willing to hire you again or those who would not be willing to refer you to a friend.

Qualified Remodeler goes on to share 55 quotes from each of the Guildmembers about their single best practice. Not surprisingly, the overarching theme in all those quotes is an unwavering dedication to delivering exceptional customer service.

I received this email yesterday from Dennis Duroff, and with his permission, I’m sharing it here for our home builder members:

To the chagrin (though not to the surprise) of many of our remodeler members, a number of our home builders have entered their market. The Atlanta Journal & Constitution’s Michelle Shaw wrote a story about the trend in last week’s AJC.

Of the four contractors she interviewed for the story, two were Guildmembers: Dale Contant of Atlanta Design Build and Mark Buelow of Distinctive Remodeling.

All the contractors interviewed (including the builders-turned-remodelers) expressed the same sentiment: Remodeling and homebuilding are two very different professions, requiring different skills and interests. No surprise to our members, but it’s clearly a surprise to many clients and their contractors.

Special thanks to Bill Smithers of CB USA for inviting us to present yesterday to his membership.  The topic of the presentation was “Winning in the Reputation Economy”, with a focus on how high customer satisfaction scores drive profitable growth.  We were joined on the call by Chip Gruver of Gruver & Cooley, a GuildQuality member since April 2009 and CB USA board member.  Chip shared how his company uses client feedback to continuously improve, celebrate excellence, and differentiate their business in the market.  To view the recorded event, click on the embedded video below.  We had a little bit of technical difficulty at the beginning, so it will take 15 seconds to start after you hit play. 

Webinar for Custom Builders USA Members from GuildQuality on Vimeo.

HüsBand – Sister Jack

HüsBand | MySpace Music Videos

Heather, Jerrod, Mark, and I will be attending the Remodeling Leadership Conference in Alexandria from May 13 to 15. I’ll be coming up a day early for the rocking “Remodeler’s Night” pre-party at Flanagan’s Harp & Fiddle, featuring the righteous tunes of HüsBand. That’s GuildQuality member Jonas Carnemark, of Carnemark Systems & Design, on guitar.

If you’re in DC on the 12th, join us. Doors open at 7:30.