Quality-minded home builders, remodelers, developers and contractors rely on our customer satisfaction surveying to help them provide exceptional service

Once again, GuildQuality is powering a Service Excellence Award for the Charleston Trident Homebuilders annual PRISM Awards. I believe the significant majority of our Charleston members are also members of the CTHBA — all of you should apply for a Service Excellence Award. The deadline for application is August 10, 2010.

Click here to download the PRISM Awards Application Package

Every member of our small crew pulls a lot of weight. From time to time, I forget the importance of lifting my head up from my own oar, and making sure that everyone’s clear on exactly where we’re rowing. A couple weeks ago, my brother gave me a helpful reminder in the form of a Jim Collins quote:

The number one responsibility of a leader is to catalyze a clear and shared vision for the company and to secure commitment to and vigorous pursuit of that vision.

I spent some time reflecting on that reminder, and shortly thereafter penned a lengthy letter to all of our people here at GuildQuality. After mulling it over for a few days, I thought it appropriate to share those thoughts with all of our Guildmembers and anyone else that has an interest in where GuildQuality is going.

I’ll call out one paragraph from near the end of the letter — mainly because it relates to what GuildQuality is doing right this minute with pictures of our members’ work:

With published feedback from their customers and photographs of their work — thousands of photographs — our members are sharing a powerful statement with those who depend on them for the care and creation of their houses. They are asking people to judge them not by what they say they’ll do, but to judge them by what they’ve done. Judge them by the feedback from hundreds of their customers. Judge them by the examples of their work. And judge them by the company they keep — the best builders, remodelers, contractors, and real estate developers in North America — all of whom are unique, and all of whom share a commitment to quality.

That paragraph, while specifically relevant to our latest site enhancement, shares the theme I intended to convey throughout the letter: That our mission is, was, and will continue to be to elevate the stature of our industry to a level commensurate with its importance.

For those that are interested, here’s the full version of the letter: (more…)

Visitors to GuildQuality’s website can now search the pictures of your work to find inspiration for their next remodeling project, custom home, or new home purchase.

Early this morning, we made it easy for you to tag each of your pictures with descriptive words and phrases to help visitors in their searching. Tags enable us to organize the images so that we can return the right ones when people are searching for some kitchen inspiration or considering building a custom home. Or maybe they’re thinking about a new pool or updating a bathroom.

Also worth noting, the tags you add to your pictures become the images’ alt attributes. These words help search engines understand what the picture is all about. Previously, our images had no alt attributes. With the addition of these tags, GuildQuality’s members’ pictures will begin to turn up in search engine results.

That was the good news. Here’s the bad news: While we “seeded the field” by tagging a bunch of pictures today, there are still more than 1,500 pictures that have yet to be tagged. Tagging yours will only take a few minutes, so click here to go the marketing admin section of your account, and start tagging!

Remember: If you don’t add tags, it will be harder for people to find your pictures.

My thanks go out to all the builders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors who participated in our most recent survey. More than 100 of our members offered their predictions about which way things would go for their businesses and the market in general.

Click on the menu button below to view the full screen version. Also, you can find all past member predictions reports here.

On Friday, I signed the last of the 2010 Guildmaster certificates. If you ordered some, and have not yet received them, expect them to arrive in the next couple of day.

Last week, GuildQuality hosted a webinar for our custom home builders, inviting them to learn more about Southern Living’s Custom Builder Program. For those that couldn’t attend, here’s the recorded version.

Southern Living Webinar to GQ Members from GuildQuality on Vimeo.

The picture above is a behind-the-scenes progress shot of the next enhancement of our public website.

Since January 1, our members have added more than a thousand pictures of new homes, remodeling projects, and communities to their GuildQuality Profile Pages. During that time, we also increased the number of images that our premium members can publish for free — first from 45 to 150, and then again to 375 a few weeks ago.

Here are some typical examples of those pictures.

But despite all these beautiful pictures, I feel like we’re kind of hiding them — they don’t yet have descriptions or tags, and people must make a few clicks from our home page just to get to the first picture. That will soon end.

We’re making these images more prominent and searchable on the home page. They’ll also be tag-able and index-able. We’ve long been sharing the customer feedback histories of our members. Our project profiles enable us to share more details about their work. With this enhancement, these descriptions of their work — new homes, remodeling projects, and communities — will become that much more engaging and useful to anyone who is interested in buying, building, remodeling, renting, or maintaining a home.

P.S. We’ve been making frequent improvements to our members’ profile pages for a long time now. If you’d like more background on profile pages, check out this post from a couple years ago.

On Wednesday, June 16, at 1:30PM EST, Brent Warren, of the Southern Living Custom Builder Program, will host a 45 minute webinar to share information and answer questions about Southern Living’s preferred builder program.

Please join Brent and me on the 16th to learn more about this great organization. Click here to register for the webinar.

About the program:

The Southern Living Custom Builder Program is a network of some of the finest custom homebuilders in the South. Southern Living magazine carefully selects custom home builders that transcend the pages of the magazine into a dream home. Members are chosen for their extensive experience and knowledge, reputation in the marketplace, customer service, excellence in architecture, and home building that tells a Southern story. Only the finest custom homebuilders are invited to be a part of this one-of-a-kind program.

Learn more here.

I’m involved in the development of a traditionally planned community called I’On, near Charleston, SC. Way back in 1997, Julie Cofer of Civic Communications helped us produce I’On’s first marketing piece: A neighborhood newsletter entitled Civitas. Last week, my brother and I were reflecting on our early marketing strategy for the community’s development, and he dug up the inaugural edition. We didn’t know what crowd-sourcing was back then, but that’s essentially what Civitas was.

Civitas was probably our most effective piece of marketing collateral. In addition to helping us market and sell the neighborhood (the most current edition of the journal was our sole brochure for two years), Civitas conveyed the spirit of the place we intended to build and helped us to attract the right sort of people. If you loved the kids’ poems and the silly classifieds, if you enjoyed reading about street design or the symbolism of the I’On seal, if you got excited about a peak behind the curtain at how and why we were building the neighborhood, then chances are, you’d enjoy living there.