GuildQuality

In our Newsletter from September, you’ll find ways to integrate GuildQuality to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, why we switched the recommendation question in surveys from yes/ no to zero to four, our Q3 Member Prediction Report, and more.

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For the last half-dozen years, we’ve used an email marketing software for all of our mass emailing. While the GuildQuality application handles our email surveying and system notifications, an Australian company called CampaignMonitor helps us with all the other stuff.

If we’re sending a notification to all of our members about how to use a new feature, CampaignMonitor powers it. If we’re notifying all of our Dallas prospects that we’ll be in town in a few weeks, CampaignMonitor powers that message. And this morning, CampaignMonitor sent out our latest member newsletter.

Here is the dashboard report for the newsletter’s first hour out in the wild.

(Click on image to enlarge)

Pretty much any email marketing software will do a few of basic things for you:

1) Enable you to send good looking emails to lots of people;

2) Manage your recipient list, allow people to subscribe, allow people to unsubscribe, and keep you from sending emails to folks who’ve unsubscribed; and

3) Track who opens the email, who clicks on links, and on which links people click.

A good email marketing software will do all this with style. CampaignMonitor’s reporting is exceptional. We’re contemplating a big overhaul of GuildQuality’s own customer satisfaction performance reporting for our builders, remodelers, and developers, and CampaignMonitor is one of the web applications we look to for inspiration.

Here are a couple more screen shots to give you an idea of the thought and polish that goes into their reporting, and the value one can get from a great looking report: (more…)

Mark spotted this sign from long-time member Weidmann Remodeling in Buckhead this morning. Most of our member sign sightings are in the Intown Atlanta area (because that’s where we live!), but we occasionally spot others on our travels. Check them all out here.

Thank you to all the builders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors that participated in the survey. As in the seven prior surveys, more than 100 of you shared your thoughtful, humorous, motivating, painful, and encouraging feedback about the state of residential real estate and construction in general and your businesses in specific. To view prior reports, click here. To view the presentation in full screen (recommended), click on “menu”  in the lower left-hand corner, then “full screen”.

GuildQuality member WicksteadWorks of Decatur, GA prepares to start a remodel in Virginia Highland near Piedmont Park (and along my route to the office).

In Fast Company’s “The Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media”, Scott Stratten writes:

Twitter by default is a self-centered tool. It’s about us. But it’s 100 times better if used as a conversational tool versus a dictation. I see people using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed for their blog or an ad-puker. So absent of personality, I wonder why they even try. Yes, they are in business, but if they believe that business is built on relationships, they need to make building them their business.

I thought this was an important thing to reiterate, as it’s easy to fall into the social media trap of only reckless self-promotion. And frankly, we’ve made it especially easy to self-promote with our Facebook and Twitter integrations. So don’t let your comment sharing deteriorate to “ad puking.”

People want to read things that help them become better people and get more out of life. Keep that in mind, and use our tools to share comments that you feel inform your audience. Sharing praise you’ve received about your company can inform folks about your business and help them make better decisions about buying, building, or remodeling a home. It can also be affirming for your current customers — you’ve reminded them why they chose you in the first place and let them know they are in good company. But be discriminant and thoughtful about it.

Here are three pieces of advice about using our social media tools:

1) Avoid relentlessly sharing every vaguely positive comment you receive in your survey feedback. You know which ones I’m talking about. The “Things were great” type comments. Pick only the gems.

2) Ask yourself, “If I were a past or prospective customer, would I want this comment taking up space in my Facebook or Twitter accounts?”

3) Don’t use social media; Engage in it. It’s a conversation, not a bullhorn. Ask questions, answer questions, propose ideas, share useful stuff.

Thanks to Leah Thayer for sharing the Fast Company article with me via Twitter.

In early October, we’re headed to Kohler, WI for the Remodelers Advantage Summit. There’s no better people than the Remodelers Advantage folks, and there’s no better place for remodeling professionals to have an event than Kohler.

Everyone great person I know in remodeling is either attending or they wish they were attending. I think this is going to be a wonderful event, and while attendance is strong, Victoria tells me there are a handful of spaces remaining. If you are a remodeler, custom homebuilder, or replacement contractor (or golfer, trap shooter, or epicure!) this event will have a lot for you. Join us!

Victoria also asked that I share some special incentives for GuildQuality members who are interested in a Master Your Remodeling Business Workshop or a Remodelers Advantage University membership. When you register for either one, use the coupon code “GQ” and get $100 off.

Leah Thayer answers that question in her most recent blog post about selling your byproducts. You have stuff left over after every job that you do. And I don’t mean just materials — you have (at the very least) information, experience, and relationships. What are you doing with that great stuff? Some of it, you might give away to build goodwill, provide better service at no additional cost, or attract new customers. Some of it you might sell.

Years ago, we realized we had all kinds of cool stuff left over after we surveyed customers: Their feedback! So we began repurposing customer comments for our members. This benefits them from a marketing perspective and it benefits us because our members love it.

Aside from the initial effort associated with building the infrastructure to make it happen, there’s relatively little cost to us in helping our members broadcast that feedback. We have the information and we’re using it to increase the value of our service. We were just leaving it around the shop floor. Now we’ve repackaged it and are giving it away as part of our regular service.

I’m a partner in a real estate development business called The I’On Company. We’ve been pretty successful in the development of a 244 acre neighborhood in Mount Pleasant, SC. As we sell our last lots, we’re asking ourselves, “What should we do with all this experience?” We’re not interested in starting another new community right now. But there are plenty of folks who are interested in learning how we did what we did. What if we host a workshop? What if we open our doors and books to people, share with them our vision for the community, development plan, strategy, marketing materials, best home plans, talented consultants, successes, failures, missed opportunities, and experience gleaned from 15 years of development? In addition to experience, we also have a mailing list of hundreds of industry professionals from all over the world — real estate folks we’ve met over the years who’ve shown an interest in how we built the neighborhood.

Our real estate development experience and connections are byproducts that, right now, are just laying around the shop floor. What could you be selling that’s laying around your shop floor. Think about it. Here’s some inspiration from some of the folks who got my wheels turning.

Someone just asked me about the options for republishing GuildQuality customer feedback on their own site and elsewhere on the web. After a brief conversation, I forwarded him an email explaining most of the options. While typing it out, it occurred to me that we don’t have a single blog post describing these options. I’m officially rectifying that. As of September 10, 2010, here are the four major ways you can republish, promote, amplify, syndicate, or celebrate your GuildQuality survey feedback:

1) Facebook/Twitter

GuildQuality integrates with both Twitter and Facebook, making the comments you publish automatically appear in your Twitter stream or on your Facebook Page. Here are the details for integrating with either Facebook or Twitter.

If you’d like to see how other folks are publishing stuff in Facebook, here are the Facebook search results for “GuildQuality” (you must be logged into your FB account). Here and here are a couple examples of members that use the Twitter integration.

2) RSS feed of your customers’ published comments

Click on the orange RSS icon above the comments on any GuildQuality Customer Report (here’s our own). By pasting that url into any kind of feed reader, the reader will display all the newly published comments. Here’s a blog post about using GuildQuality’s RSS feed to syndicate customer comments.

3) The GuildQuality Badge

To add the official GuildQuality badge to your site, all you need to do is copy and paste a few lines of code. The code is unique to each member, and automatically generated when a company joins GuildQuality as a premium member.

4) API

This is for advanced technology folks. The API enables you to re-purpose your customers’ feedback in any format you choose.

If you haven’t yet heard, Leah Thayer recently left her position as Senior Editor with Remodeling Magazine to start daily5Remodel, a “subscription-based daily eletter created specifically for remodeling professionals.”

Leah is one of the best people in the remodeling profession. If she was publishing a daily eletter on beekeeping, I’d subscribe. If that’s not sufficient endorsement, she just sent me this special promotion to share with our Guildmembers. Register for daily5Remodel.com by October 1 and you could win an iPad. Leah writes:

Looking for the daily delivery of remodeling industry news and intelligence, business best practices and peer-to-peer engagement? Weʼre happy to announce the imminent launch of daily5Remodel.com, a free (with premium model to come) website and subscription-based daily eletter created specifically for remodeling professionals. The editor and publisher is Leah Thayer, a former senior editor with Remodeling magazine and a big fan of GuildQuality. So much of a fan, in fact, that GQ members who choose to become Premium Subscribers will save 20% on a one-year or two-year subscription, which includes many additional benefits. Please join me in registering for daily5Remodel.com. If you do this by October 1, youʼll automatically be entered into a drawing for an iPad! Click here to register.

You can now publish customer comments directly from your survey responses to your company’s Facebook Page. This works the exact same way as our Twitter integration.

We tested it with GuildQuality’s own Facebook Page late last week, and it’s now live for everyone.

To start publishing comments directly to your company’s Facebook page:

1) open up a survey with a comment you’d like to publish;

2) click on the phrase “Click here to connect your GuildQuality and Facebook accounts”; and

3) then choose whether you’d like to publish to your own wall of your company’s page.

You only have to authorize GuildQuality to publish comments to your Facebook Page once. Thereafter, each time you click “publish” next to one of your customer’s comments, the comment will publish to your Facebook page and to your GuildQuality Customer Report (and to your Twitter account if you’ve connected that as well).

Watch this video to see how it works:

How to publish your customer comments to your company’s Facebook Page from GuildQuality on Vimeo.

In August, more than a third of all page views at GuildQuality.com were of our members’ Customer Reports. In all, 62% of all the pages we served up were specifically about one of our members. Customer Reports describe the quality of customer service provided by one of our builders, remodelers, contractors, or developers. Member and Project Profiles show examples of their work and company descriptions. Guildmaster-related pages include either the Guildmaster directory of award-winning contractors or interviews with one of the winners.

On October 4, we’ll make a significant change to GuildQuality’s “Recommend” question: We’ll change the answer option from “Yes” or “No” to “Zero to Four”.

Please read on to learn about our reasons for making the change and to get some answers to what I believe will be the most common questions.

If you have additional questions about this, feel free to post them in the comments, or contact us directly.
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