Oh, Canada – We Stand on Guard, because you help us grow!
Canada has a fantastic community of great web developers and it’s a great place to be building a web services company. With people like David Crow around putting on events like DemoCamp, people like Sarah Prevette at Sprouter putting on their SproutUps, and Ray Luk, of Flow Ventures who organizes Startup Drinks which is now across Canada, the community gets to share their ideas. Supporters and cheerleaders like Rob Lewis at Techvibes certainly also promote some of the great things going on across our nation.
And we’ve found a few fantastic services here in Canada that we use regularly, so we thought we’d give them a shout out and let our users know!
As many of our customers know (because they get our bills), we are big fans of Freshbooks. We have been using their invoicing system for a two years now and even have a couple of our customers who are using it themselves including Toronto Home Theatre. The back end of our site is even integrated into their API (That’s geek talk for “being connected”) We think it’s a great application which contractors can use for their clients also – if you’re interested in trying it out, click here and sign yourself up – it’s free to get going. It can generate generate estimates, create invoices, do monthly billing and has many more features. They even have an iPhone app so when you’re out on the road visiting clients you can generate the invoice right on the spot.
At HomeStars we also hold a lot of events, from Best of Awards nights in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Hamilton, to smaller pub nights to bigger events like our Christmas party. For making sure we get everyone registered for these events we use a service called GuestList that we discovered at our local Democamp one that we presented at also. It’s a professional looking application which allows us to quickly make the events and keep an RSVP list. We have lots of further plans to build with this great little company. For our Best of Awards last year we also let people donate to World Vision Canada through the application and helped raise over $1700 to help Haiti relief efforts. If you’re having your own customer event, definitely take some time to check them out.
Canadian companies don’t just create great tools for end users, but great tools for our developers. Case in point, amazing Canadian success story Shopify opensourced some of their tools, and we have taken full advantage of their excellent talent and generosity, fueling both our commerce capabilities and our content management system. Cheers to Tobi Lütke and the entire Ottawa based Shopify team!
We’re always interested in the great developers in Canada and finding out what they are doing. We are also looking for developers of our own to keep building some of our own upcoming tools. (and we have some great ideas in the pipe we’re working on.
Quite often we get calls from companies who discover our site when one of their customers researches their company before hiring them and finds a review on our site. Sometimes it’s a great review with a happy customer extolling the virtues of a past job, and sometimes it turns out to be a story of a job gone wrong. And sometimes that review has been up for a while. So how to you find out about these things?
The internet is a broad forum for people to put out their opinions about all sorts of brands and companies, and if you’re a small business owner, you want to know what people are saying about you – to either respond and join the conversation, or make things right. When running a small business, you also probably don’t have much time. So here’s a few things you can do so you can make sure you know what people are saying about you online with very little effort.
Claim your HomeStars Listing – First and foremost, we suggest companies claim their listing on HomeStars. If you haven’t done this already, do it now. If your company is not listed, add it. HomeStars will send you an email when you get a new review. Keep an eye on that email account. See this icon on your listing? Click it to make sure you’re getting alerts on new reviews.
Set up a Google Alert for your Company Name – Google Alerts is a free email service run by Google which search either daily, weekly, or just on an ongoing basis for a specific search term. Remember to put quotes around the company name so the search finds just your company name (ie “Ashbury Renovation”). Google will then send you an email when it finds new content with your company name during it’s regular scans of the websites it monitors.
Claim any other listings you have on other review sites – Search your company name in sites like Yelp, InsiderPages, & Merchant Circle (last two in Canada yet). All of these sites have the ability also to claim your listing and alert you to new activity on your page.
Search your name on Twitter - Twitter is a much more instantaneous feedback tool where users can immediately post 140 character ‘posts’. Twitter has its own search function where you can look within the stream of millions of ‘tweets’ going out to look for particular terms. Because you don’t want to do that every day, a service like TweetAlarm, will send you an email daily when it finds a search you are looking for, similar to Google Alerts.
Monitor Message Boards – There are hundreds of message board and forums across the internet, and many have threads on home improvement. A service like BoardTracker looks through a large number of them and will find your company name and see whether anyone is saying anything about you and your company. They have an alert service similar to TweetAlarm and Google Alerts.
Good luck with the monitoring. Let us know how these work for you. Have you discovered comments about your company you didn’t know were there? Post in the comments below.
Social media should be an integral part of any company’s marketing strategy. You may not have time to do all the parts, but much of it requires more time than money. The days of print, Yellow Pages and flyer advertising are waning. Marketing is becoming about interaction, not broadcast.
Reviews are a one part of social media. They are a way of communicating with your customers, and having your customers voice be part of your voice into the community. Yes, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are part of that, but as Rainbow Landscape Design knows, from these icons on their website, HomeStars is key part of building community and trust. Their HomeStars page shows true customer engagement. They respond respectfully to every review, and even acknowledge when they haven’t done a perfect job with a customer. Every company isn’t going to be perfect, and they will actually build trust with the community by not having an absolutely perfect score, but by showing they are humans, running a business, caring about their customers and striving to be the best.
Is HomeStars part of your Social Media strategy as a contractor? If not, let us know and we can help.
Last week we held our Best of Vancouver event at The Hart House. Special guest speaker Mona Elesseily from Page Zero Media, a leading Search Marketing firm provided her key lessons on search marketing and how to make a meaningful impact for your business. We had a great turn out for our first event here and Shannon Wong, who manages our Vancouver office, did an outstanding job as host. One of our clients, Gary from Paragon Roofing – told us that he had $35,000 in roofing contracts through homeowners who had found him on HomeStars within only a few weeks of getting some reviews published from his clients.
Hello to the Homestars .com community! I’ve been a part of the Homestars team since January of this year and it’s high time I finally introduce myself as the Content Manager here at Homestars. Content Manager? What the heck does that mean? Well please allow me to explain.
As the Content Manager I am responsible for a lot of things, from blog and forum posts to twitter and facebook activity. I also write newsletters! But most importantly of all I read ALL of the reviews. I work very hard to ensure that the information on our site is useful for homeowners and that reviews are from authentic customers of the company for which they are written. This process is not always 100% but I do have a few tricks up my sleeve for validating reviews.
In a recent planning session here at homestars, we identified trust as one of the key factors that will impact the success of our website. We are now developing new features for the site that will allow for more transparency around the review process and investigations we do on a daily basis. We are committed to making this site a trusted source for homeowners and home contractors. If you ever have any questions regarding any of the things I have mentioned here, please email me at colleen@homestars.com. (or here @colleenhomestar)
In other news: FUN FACTS: Did you know that the saying ‘in a heartbeat’ has been used in over eighty-five reviews on Homestars .com? I did. The word ‘disaster’ also appears in over 220 reviews, while the phrase “would hire them again” shows up in over 350 reviews. I’ve got a million of them!
I will be blogging here more frequently from now on so check back to see what’s up. If you have anything you would like to see more of or any feedback for me please comment here or send me an email to address above.
This weekend HomeStars was in White Rock, BC, where Johan Sandstrom, aka the White Rock Reporter, stopped by and asked Nancy to talk about what we do here at HomeStars:
In Toronto the International Home Show is already going strong after starting Thursday night. HomeStars has a unique feature of this show where Mag Ruffman (aka ToolGirl) is presenting HomeStars 911, a question and answer with top HomeStars contractors. (check out Beverley Hills Home Improvement in Hamilton) Come by at Saturday at 3:30 and check out the show. Ask questions of your favourite HomeStars companies. We also have a booth with our infamous Dave from the National Show and will be giving out $5 Starbucks and Tim Horton cards for reviews on great home improvement customers. For up to the minute action on the show follow the show in on Twitter.
HomeStars is in Calgary for the Calgary Home Show, which is one of Western Canada’s biggest home improvement expos. While we we’re here we’re also celebrating the great work of contractors who’ve earned the trust and admiration of their customers who’ve written reviews on them on HomeStars. These are the Best Contractors of 2009 in Calgary. We invited our contractors out to share a few beers, some food and collect their prizes.
and Kyle from ClearView Plumbing, who is cleaning up the Calgary plumbing market:
Other winners who couldn’t make it were Cabinets by Sindora for Kichen and Bathroom – Cabinets and Design and Sortit FULLSTOP for Organizing Products and Services.
If you’re in Calgary and you want to come by and see us, we’re at the show for the next few days – Booth 1708. Don’t forget to write a review and get 50% off your Home Show pass.
As a consumer columnist Ellen gets a lot of calls about all sorts of issues, including a lot in the Home Improvement industry. There’s a wide range of complaints, some about products such as roofing materials and consumer goods, but many are about both big and small companies in the home improvement industry. She can’t tackle them all, and in this era, why should she? Consumer can just go on and write themselves on the companies in question? Tell their stories about their experience.
As readers know, HomeStars will publish your review if there’s a transaction, and if not, there’s always our forum to discuss other issues with companies.
Always nice to get good press from a prestigious publication like the Toronto Star! Thanks!
Over the holidays a moving company in Vancouver wrote in their blog about the Death of the Testimonial. While Google would take exception to that, having, allegedly, put in an offer for Yelp for $500M, the point that the moving company seems to have issue with is that, encouraged by our ‘overcaffinated sales rep’, old testimonials were appearing on his competitors pages.
But what’s wrong with an old testimonial? We’ve discussed in this blog about how when a testimonial is 10-15 years old, it not much use to a consumer, but the ones he’s referring to are maybe months old. As a user and reader, I do care how a company has done a few months ago. Even up to a year ago, especially if it’s with the same company management.
As users of HomeStars know, we are adamant about making sure the reviews are real reflections of homeowners experiences. If a company can find an old testimonial (but not too old) they can ask the person who wrote the testimonial to put it up on HomeStars. It does reflect the work of the company, and it’s important to a homeowner to know about the experience.
Perhaps the point he’s making is questioning whether it’s okay to ask a customer for a testimonial. We think it is. There’s no shame in asking for a referral or a testimonial. In the world of social media, I’ll judge people on their interactions with other people, and if companies interact well with their consumers, (and also respond to their reviews) those are the companies I want to do business with.
On the point of transparency, we try and be as transparent as we can be at HomeStars. Reviewers mostly opt to be anonymous, which we allow them to do, but many of them give their full names and addresses. We do our best to make sure that the reviews are real on our end. In our upcoming releases we’ll be allowing communication between homeowners through the site. So if you want to ask further details about a job or reviewer, that option will be available. It’s all part of opening up transparency, one of our mandates.
He’s right by saying readers should be skeptical of reviews. Of course they should. But volume counts. A company like Emerald Moving in Toronto now has over 90 reviews, and in his market, Vancouver, Rain City Moving has over 18. That’s some amount of testimonials, and likely to be real, or real enough for users.
So go ahead. Find some customers from last year. Ask them to write a testimonial for your company? You can even ask them to be transparent about the date of the job. It all helps other homeowners find the best companies to hire for their next move or home renovation.
Feel free to comment your thoughts. (City Move Blog doesn’t allow comments.., alas)
About HomeStars
Oh, Canada – We Stand on Guard, because you help us grow!
We have been using their invoicing system for a two years now and even have a couple of our customers who are using it themselves including Toronto Home Theatre. The back end of our site is even integrated into their API (That’s geek talk for “being connected”) We think it’s a great application which contractors can use for their clients also – if you’re interested in trying it out, click here and sign yourself up – it’s free to get going. It can generate generate estimates, create invoices, do monthly billing and has many more features. They even have an iPhone app so when you’re out on the road visiting clients you can generate the invoice right on the spot.
At HomeStars we also hold a lot of events, from Best of Awards nights in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Hamilton, to smaller pub nights to bigger
events like our Christmas party. For making sure we get everyone registered for these events we use a service called GuestList that we discovered at our local Democamp one that we presented at also. It’s a professional looking application which allows us to quickly make the events and keep an RSVP list. We have lots of further plans to build with this great little company. For our Best of Awards last year we also let people donate to World Vision Canada through the application and helped raise over $1700 to help Haiti relief efforts. If you’re having your own customer event, definitely take some time to check them out.
Canadian companies don’t just create great tools for end users, but great tools for our developers. Case in point, amazing Canadian success story Shopify opensourced some of their tools, and we have taken full advantage of their excellent talent and generosity, fueling both our commerce capabilities and our content management system. Cheers to Tobi Lütke and the entire Ottawa based Shopify team!
In Toronto the 
On the other side of the country, in North Vancouver, Shannon and I will be at the 
I’m really late on this post. There were the holidays and I was away taking a little time off. But as I left for down south 