GuildQuality

The friendly people on the NAHB Education team have invited me to the IBS in Orlando to give a talk about social media and the emerging reputation economy. The talk is on February 8 from 10 to 11:30 and it’s entitled “Social Media and the Custom Home Builder.”

Here’s how their positioning it on the official IBS site:

Description: People are talking about your company on the Web — sharing feedback with friends, neighbors and even strangers. At the same time, potential buyers are searching for and reading these comments in order to make informed decisions about who to hire and who to buy from. You can choose to ignore the discussion, be a part of it, or better yet, ENCOURAGE and LEAD it. In this session, you’ll get an eye-opening look at how custom builders and remodelers are successfully using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to engage with their customers. You’ll also get proven tips and strategies for using the emerging role of social media in facilitating consumer purchasing decisions to attract new business.

Learning Outcomes:

Understand how to incorporate the prominent social networks into your overall marketing and communications strategy.

Learn sure-fire ways to ‘syndicate’ your message across all the major social media platforms.

Get insights into simple, effective and often free ways to use social media to strengthen your reputation and increase awareness of your company.

Know exactly how to get started with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to improve your engagement with buyers, influencers and allies.

We’re sponsoring the November daily5Remodel snapshots contest!

Here’s how it works:

Send a paragraph about one of your favorite remodeling clients: what they’re like, why they’re your favorites and what sort of projects you have done for them. People like pictures, so if you have pics of your happy clients (with or without you and/or your project team), be sure to include them!

Send all asap to leah@daily5REMODEL.com. In the subject line, type “Our Favorite Clients.” No purchase necessary to enter.

After candidates’ entries are posted, d5R readers will then vote for their favorite. The entry with the most votes will win a White 16G iPad 2.

We recently organized a day-long roundtable for some of Atlanta’s SaaS businesses.

There’s a vibrant startup community in Atlanta, and we’re pleased to be a part of it. But the majority of the discussion revolves around issues facing aspiring entrepreneurs, pre-revenue businesses, or businesses seeking investment. While that sort of conversation is interesting and often helpful, it’s generally not all that relevant to people who have an established SaaS businesses and are focused on accelerating growth, refining product, and improving service.

That was the motivation behind organizing our day-long roundtable. Our objective was to create a platform for established SaaS businesses to share experiences with similar, non-competing businesses. Our friends at Tourbuzz helped us put it together, and for the first Atlanta SaaS Day, we were joined by the founders and executives of three other great companies: Berke Assessment, bigWebApps, and SecureHealthPay.

We had such a productive time together that we’ve scheduled a 2nd Atlanta SaaS Day for December 15. At the end of this post, I’ll share more about that as well as how we might expand to include addition companies, but first, for those who might be interested, here’s how we put together the event, and what we covered during the day.

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I am pleased to announce the call for entries for the 2012 Guildmaster Awards. The Guildmaster Awards recognize exemplary customer service among our membership of quality-minded builders, remodelers, developers, and contractors.

The call for entries will close on January 15, 2012, and we will announce all the winners on or about May 1, 2012.

As in prior years, members who survey all of their customers (see the detailed qualifications for allowed exceptions), achieve a recommendation rate of greater than 90%, and have a high survey response rate will qualify to win an award. I urge you to read the complete details here.

The application page for the 2012 Guildmaster Awards is in the Marketing section of your account. Click here to apply.

For many years, our “Build the Guild” referral program has helped us expand our community of quality. We’re grateful for our members’ willingness to share their GuildQuality experiences with other quality-minded builders and remodelers. Their ambassadorship has been a huge contributor to our success: In the last twelve months, at least 25% of the companies who’ve joined GuildQuality have done so following a referral. I say “at least” because I’m confident that many more of our new members find us by way of a members’ referral and we simply never hear about it.

On Friday, we introduced GuildQuality Invites, to help us recognize and reward those wonderful members who are promoting GuildQuality, and also give some preferential treatment to those new members who find their way to us via an existing member’s reference. To learn more about the new invite system and the special benefits for both referring and referred members, visit the Invites section of your account.

We tweaked some things for the authenticated members who come back to our homepage:

1) In the upper right, you’ll notice a callout that makes it easier to log right in to your account;

2) In the Recent Activity column, we’ve added a button to help you see your own company’s recent public activity; and

3) We’ve changed the page’s “Call to Action” from simply encouraging a company to sign up for a free trial to encouraging the member (that’s you!) to invite your peers to test drive GuildQuality.

We’re able to recognize that you’re a member and serve up a member-focused homepage because we place a cookie on your browser when you log in to your account. So whenever you come back, we make it easy for you to “auto-authenticate” (i.e. not have to type in your username and password again) and login by simply clicking “Login”. The added bonus is we can modify our homepage to give you a more tailored experience.

“Will Customer Comments about Your Business Catapult or Crush You?”

View the recorded event.

GuildQuality recently partnered with improveit! 360, a web-based CRM solution used by a growing number of our members. This alliance was formed to make it easier for remodelers and replacement contractors to quickly and effortlessly compile information needed to survey their customers.

improveit! 360 automates the process of assembling the information required by GuildQuality to distribute surveys to customers, saving time and preventing duplicate efforts. Remodelers can schedule this process to automatically run at a specific time of day and be sent directly to GuildQuality for survey execution.

Results are processed faster so home improvement companies can correct service issues discovered through customer feedback and maintain a positive online reputation.

Southwest Exteriors was recognized today as one of Window & Door Magazine’s 2011 Dealers of the Year.  The full story can be found here.

A GuildQuality member since 2006, Southwest Exteriors has achieved a 98% recommendation rate and an 84% response rate to surveys.  We survey all of Southwest’s clients and sales prospects, and Scott Barr (owner) personally reads the feedback from every client.  As a result of this commitment to quality, Southwest enjoys one of the industry’s highest referral rates.

I think Geoff said it well when interviewed for the feature story, “The world would be a much better place if every business operated like Southwest Exteriors.”  Congratulations to Scott and the Southwest Exteriors team!

Calculated Risk reports that Redfin is bringing more transparency to the real estate brokerage industry.

Listings are as much advertisements for brokers’ services as they are advertisements for available homes, so it’s easy for the layperson to assume that a bunch of signs equals a bunch of sales. Redfin aims to eliminate this confusion by showing agents’ actual production data.

While there are plenty of worthy exceptions out there (an excellent agent is an invaluable resource) the real estate brokerage community has largely attempted to preserve it’s value by controlling the keys to the information castle. In contrast, the best agents out there have embraced service, innovation and professionalism as the path toward success. Their success, coupled with resources like Redfin, Zillow, and Craigslist, is compelling the rest of the industry to either follow them or find another job.

What other changes would you like to see in real estate brokerage?

As a side project, we’re messing around with maps. Here’s a heat map showing our members’ survey responses in the conterminous United States from the last five years. The larger the dot, the more survey responses in that zip code.

We engaged a contractor for this work. He did a great job showing a bright spark the moment a customer completes a survey, with the spark fading to a glowing ember. Press play and watch our surveying spread all over the country.

In all, this is about half of our survey responses. To narrow the geographic area, we excluded Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, and the Caribbean. And to keep the data set manageable, we excluded surveys conducted during free trials of our service, prospect surveys, and surveys conducted as part of market research projects.

This is a fun visualization that helps us to think about how we might introduce more maps both into your account and onto the public website. An example might include an interactive map on your public member profile page that shows where you’re working, pictures of your work, and reviews. And inside your private account, we could display a map with additional details, like satisfaction scores, comments, and project information.

Right now, we’re experimenting with how to bring an engaging member map back to the homepage, but I’m curious what our members think: How could maps be most useful to you, either inside your account or on your member profile page?

For more fun maps, check out the two that inspired this project: The Growth of Walmart & Costco and Kiva Lending.