GuildQuality

Even the best businesses get negative reviews. The trick is utilizing that feedback constructively to help your business grow. Negative reviews can be an ideal platform for you to demonstrate just how much you care about your customers. Yelp’s blog for business owners recently posted a video specifically about the positive side of negative reviews, take a look.

Many of our GuildQuality members leverage their customer feedback to strengthen their brand through our survey process which presents a great opportunity to let customers share more information. Their published comments find their way into consumer rating services like Google Places, and with the addition of GuildQuality Reviews, more robust, useful, informative commentary will make its way throughout the web. Don’t shy away from reviews! Encourage your customers and open the door to valuable commentary.

In our Newsletter from January, you’ll find our Q4 Member Prediction Report, tips on how to get the most out of your membership  a great feature about a miniature castle built in South Carolina and more.

Subscribe to our newsletter here.

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.

Subscribe to our newsletter here.

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.

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.

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.

Delivering a beautifully built new home, perfecting a kitchen renovation, or rebuilding the entire exterior of a home is no easy task. So it’s always amazing to me when our wonderful builders, remodelers, contractors, and developers actually deliver the kind of service and craftsmanship that leaves customers thrilled with their work. That they do it with such overwhelming frequency borders on the miraculous.

So here’s my challenge to you all: Don’t squander all that hard work and lose that relationship over something as trivial as a little oversight or a lack of communication. Instead, capitalize on that amazing accomplishment, and enjoy the benefits of a great relationship with each of your customers in perpetuity.

The significant majority of our members survey their customers multiple times, with the last survey occurring at or near the expiration of the warranty period. But what are you missing if you end your surveying with the expiration of the warranty? In the years that follow, your customers will…

1) forget about you;

2) have intended to send your information to their friend after that cocktail party, but forgotten about it, and hadn’t received anything from you that might serve as a reminder;

3) have a problem that you could easily fix, but are just going to suffer it because it’s too much effort to let you know about it and it’s such a little thing. Then little Sally has a birthday party and the parent of one of the guests (who is a homebuilder) points it out, and that conversation turns into a bigger conversation about building that second home at the lake, and your customer builds a second home (or a new kitchen, or a deck, or a carport — you get the idea) but they never spoke with you about it.

And all because you didn’t make it easy for them to stay in touch with you. How can we fix this? Simple:

Let’s modify your default survey scenario to add a few more extremely brief Long After Closing surveys. We’ll ask your clients if they’d still recommend you and if there’s anything you can help them with.

If you’d like some help setting this up, please let us know.

One of the most common enhancement requests we receive is for an easy way to print a high-quality version of the GuildQuality Customer Report. Printing a web page is tricky business, and every browser will do it differently, so coming up with a built-in solution to consistently render HTML on the printed page is a deceptively big project, so we’ve instead been focusing our engineering resources on other things.

However, I completely appreciate that a high-quality printed version of the Customer Report is a great addition to your marketing collateral. With that in mind, I wanted to share how I go about producing high-quality images of webpages. Hopefully you’ll find this useful for your Customer Report and other pages as well. Check out this video for a brief explanation, and if you like this method, download the “Screengrab” plugin for Firefox.

One additional thing I neglected to show in the video: If your customer report is very long, you might want to just print the first page. However, if you’d like to have the footer show up on a printed version, you should shorten your report — either by shortening the period of time displayed in the Customer Report, or by removing some customer comments.

Aug 10 Update: See how we’ve juiced this feature up to help with local search results or check out the most recent comments shared by our members via the GQ Twitter Client.

Before today, you needed to go through a few gyrations to automatically tweet the comments you’ve published on your Customer Report (click here to read more about publishing comments). No more! GuildQuality now offers a seamless integration with your Twitter account. If you use Twitter for your business, check out the video below to see how it’s done.

Log in to your account to get started, or read on for more information.

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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).

In our Newsletter from February, we announce a real-time feed of published member activity, how you can take advantage of the new feature, other products announcements and more.

Subscribe to our newsletter here.

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On December 3, GuildQuality hosted a webinar to review some of our marketing resources.

This webinar is for builders, remodelers, and developers who’d like to learn how to take advantage of our marketing resources and for those who need a refresher on the subject. We have a number of tools that help our members enhance their online presence and better articulate their quality of service for prospective customers.

In addition to reviewing our complimentary marketing services (like Customer Reports, Member Profiles, Listings, and our integration with a number of social media services), we also discuss prospect surveying.

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This morning, Dennis DuRoff posted my talk from yesterday on how and why GuildQuality uses social media. In it, I describe the various ways the GuildQuality blog, Twitter and LinkedIn help us to service our members and grow our business. I also talk about social media’s direct relevance to customer satisfaction in building and remodeling. how builders and remodelers are using Facebook, and how consumer rating sites like Kudzu and Google Local fit in to the picture as well. I close with a brief description of what GuildQuality does to help boost our members’ presence on the web and participation in the online dialog. The talk lasts an hour.

UPDATE: Following are the answers to questions asked by attendees, that we didn’t have time to answer during the webinar:

“How much time do you spend on all this social media stuff?” I am our company’s primary marketer, and it is safe to say that I’m also the face of the company. Including the time I spend writing our blog (which provides 95% of the content for our newsletters), I probably spend fourty five minutes a day on social media for GuildQuality. Most of that is our blog, a good bit is with Twitter, and the remainder is with LinkedIn.

“How do you link Flickr to Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter?” Facebook and Plaxo have some built in widgets that enable you to auto-feed your Flickr photos to your personal account. I don’t believe Facebook can do that yet for Company Pages or Groups. LinkedIn does not offer a way to connect to your Flickr account. You can set up your Twitter account to automatically post a tweet of Flickr uploads (or blog posts, or anything that can have an RSS feed) with Twitterfeed. Detailed instructions are here. Twitterfeed isn’t the only game in town, but it is what we use, and it’s worked fine for us. It is also worth noting that Flickr’s terms of use explicitly prohibit commercial uses, so if you intend to try and sell stuff with Flickr, make sure you read this.

Regarding Facebook Groups versus Pages (for your business presence on Facebook), one of the audience members added the following comment, essentially restating more emphatically my counsel to use Pages: “The skinny from those at Facebook is that much more energy (from the company) is going into Pages and Groups are fading to the background.”

“What are your recommendations for Security Settings for Professional and Personal Facebook and Linkedin Sites? How much should you reveal on public areas Etc?” On my profile pages, I avoid publishing anything that I don’t want anyone to see, and so I go ahead and make everything public. If you are interested in publishing things that you don’t want others to see, I encourage you to really think about whether or not you ought to publish it. GuildQuality does have a private discussion group on LinkedIn that is limited to our members, employees, and others that are “close” to us. Keeping it private keeps it from being dominated by people trying to sell their stuff (sales pitches seem to dominate the public groups on LinkedIn). Flickr and YouTube offer privacy settings that enable you to share some personal things (pictures and videos) only with authorized users. I stick to my “don’t post it if you don’t want someone to see it” strategy with those sites as well, though I ocassionally “privatize” pictures/videos in which my children or wife are looking just too darn cute for public consumption.

“What are costs of these sites?” Most of the social media sites I described, including Yelp, are free. Kudzu (another consumer rating site) offers some premium services for a monthly fee. Flickr charges $20 per year for a premium account (which you will definitely need if you want to use it regularly). You can have a GuildQuality account for as little as $30 per month, and the more folks you survey, the more you pay. Included with basic membership is a free Customer Report (if you choose to publish summaries of your feedback) and Listings and Examples of Work, both of which are visible on your public Guildmember profile page.

“What are good apps to use on the iPhone for all of these links?” I probably do 90% of my Twittering when I’m standing in line, in the dentist’s waiting room, etc. The iPhone’s web browsing capabilities make it easy to get your geek on wherever you are. Yelp has a nice iPhone enabled website. I use the Tweetie application for Twitter. Facebook and LinkedIn both have their own decent iPhone applications.

“How does one setup a company page on LinkedIn or Facebook?” First, you’ve got to have a personal account with Facebook or LinkedIn. Assuming you do, and assuming you are logged in, click here for Facebook and here for LinkedIn.