Small Is Beautiful

Nancy and I were chatting about the issue of company size in the home improvement services sector. Many of these companies are small, but bigger than small would suggest. They're bringing in $1 million, $5 million, $10 million a year. They spend, collectively, a hefty chunk on marketing.

I thought about it a bit later in connection with the reputation issue. The big difference with a small company is that you have the means to be proactive and nimbly address process issues or problems with isolated individual incidents of customer dissatisfaction.

It seems like it's easier for big companies to do PR because they have whole departments for that. But between consumers' highly tuned BS-meters and antipathy built into the approach many members of the media take to business journalism, problems can spiral out of control. A few folks in the media can even do a pretty good job of orchestrating (at least a short-term) "takedown."

Imagine if your job was with PR with this grocery chain, for example. They were fined for a mouse problem at their warehouse. Those of us who know the stores and regularly drive by the warehouse might say "ewww" and that's the end of it. But it doesn't help that the person deciding which photo to show next to this story in the print edition of The Toronto Star decided to put up a shot of a truck with the company tagline - "We're fresh obsessed" - plastered across it. (Can you say "sarcasm"?) If you were in the PR department for that company you'd probably be wondering who (internally or externally) was waiting in the weeds to make you go eeeek! next week.

An advantage of small is that your advocates will be vociferous and will spread the positive word about you. But it takes effort. No PR department is going to put out your brush fires.

Labels: online reputation

Posted by Andrew Goodman
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The North Amercian Challenge: Who can write and share faster?

Many people have written us asking if our service existed in their town - from Atlanta Georgia to Winnipeg Manitoba. HomeStars initially started in Toronto and expanded to Vancouver and Boston, but we realized we couldn't build slowly, city by city.

So we took up the challenge and spent hundreds of hours on our expansion plans. It was a real technical challenge to create wide yet local service you can use ANYWHERE (well, in North America) - and we are excited to tell you we finally did it!

Now we need your help to grow.

Type in your city in the search near box and access home improvement companies that are within a few miles of your home. And more importantly, rate a company you hired or purchased from. You will be contributing useful knowledge for others in your community (at the ground floor in most towns)!

Your wondering how that works when we only have a few big cities listed on the site. While we are officially open in these 10 cities, you can still access your own neighborhood in the search bar. Try it! Add a city, or zip / postal code. Whether you are in Austin Texas, Tulsa Oklahoma or Naples Florida there are thousands of local home improvement companies to find and rate.

Our team has come up with a challenge for our readers - see which person can write and share the most, and truly build community participation the fastest in 2008. I've been thinking of how to reward such a connector and I'll save that for an upcoming post. In the meantime;

- Have you done some work on our home? Some examples: Fixed the floors, replaced your cabinets, bought new lighting - and can share your good or bad experience?
- Do you know lots of homeowners in your community?
- Do you know lots of people in North America?

If you answered yes to any of the above, jump in and help build this free online resource for the home.

We’ll start to feature the biggest contributors every month.

What do you do next?

Step 1 Register (it's free)
Step 2 Tell your friends nationwide about HomeStars;

Bonus: each Tell a Friend also is an entry in our Home Depot $1,000 Shopping Spree which closes January 31.

PS - our team is very concerned about privacy and there are strict safeguards to protect emails. We wont spam and we won't share with any other company. We really hate spam too!

Posted by Nancy Peterson
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Fake reviews - should we out these companies?

I have come out of my cave and will start getting more active on this forum. I'm not one to write on a blog - but I do answer our contact us as I really enjoy the 1-1 dialogue with people. I have to get with program though and jump into the open conversation.

All of us at HomeStars take turns reading reviews before they are posted (ok - Andrew may need a turn ; ) ). It helps ground us in the reason we are working so hard to build this company. People use HomeStars to help them make decisions and it really brings the quality down when there are fake posts and poor quality reviews. Who cares that you bought a new widget at home depot and the staff were not so helpful. We want to know about the guy that started your basement reno, took a deposit for $4,000 for initial materials and then didn't show up the next day (and it's 4 weeks and 40 phone calls later). We need to shine the light where there is darkness. Our readers also want to know about the dream contractor you hired, who delivered on time and on budget.

But I'm always amazed at how companies think they can publish fake reviews. We've caught many, and yet some companies will try again - hoping we will be asleep at the switch (although we aren't perfect so we do get your help sometimes).

Should we raise awareness of these flagrant fakers? Should we put them in the penalty box like tripadvisor and ban them from search results for a while? Should we post a "FAKE review removed" button on their company listing in neon? And for how long should they be in the penalty box - a month, a year, for all time?

Your suggestions are welcome.

Labels: companies, fake reviews

Posted by Nancy Peterson
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