We just finished pushing out two great new features that were popular requests from our beta community.  Both new features provide a great step forward for BearHug and improve the product even more for our growing fan base.

ThinkTank

Every community is full of ideas.  Tapping into this knowledge is critical for community-driven organizations.  ThinkTank is an intuitive and powerful way to allow your community to submit their ideas and vote on their favorite ideas submitted by your community.  The best ideas float to the top and lets you see what is most important to your community.

ThinkTank ideas are moderated, just like Answers and FirstRate.  Anyone can vote – no registration is required (we use special code/magic to keep people from voting multiple times).

Visitors can vote for any idea directly from the listing page or they can zoom into the details of the idea.  Community members may respond to any idea and further the conversation.

Customized Widget Tabs

One of the first requests that we received had to do with customizations available to our tab widget.  Well, we put on our thinking caps and came up with an awesome management tool that lets you specify size, color, placement, text, and default behaviors.  Go crazy!!  We had even more ideas, but didn’t want to wait any longer.  Starting immediately you can choose all kinds of options for your widget.  Whether you want it on the top, bottom, left, right, etc., your options are now far and wide.  We hope this makes it even easier for you to use BearHug with your community.

These ideas were both requested by our user community.  We hope you’ll continue to share your ideas and ways we can improve BearHug.  In fact, with this release, you can submit them directly through ThinkTank!

Today is a great day at Live Oak 360.  After months of development, thousands of lines of code, hundreds of conversations, and lots of tweaking and tuning, BearHug is making its official debut to the world.

How did we get here?

After a lot of listening, we realized it’s all about the community.  More specifically, your community.  Every organization exists to serve its community.  For you, that could mean customers, partners, employees, neighbors, etc.  The BearHug modules we have created allow you to communicate in every direction:

Pulse – broadcast messages outbound to your community

Answers – allows cross-communcation within the community

FirstRate – allows the community to give you feedback through ratings and reviews

Overheard – allows you to listen to your community on other social networks

We took a look at our own business and the challenges we faced.  No other solution came close to providing what we offer today – and we’ve wrapped it up into a nice package where everything fits nicely in one bundle.

How are we different?

First and foremost, this is your community.  This isn’t a collection of conversations that you have to pay to access.  If you want to leave, you can take your data with you.  Your community is owned by you.  Moderated by you.  Controlled by you.  The data is yours.  The conversations are yours.

You create your community so there’s no confusion over how it got started, if you’re listening, or if you’re lurking in the shadows.  Your brand is front and center and all roads lead to you.  Your community will love you for it.

How will we evolve?

BearHug is a very feature-rich platform, however we have a long way to go before we’re ready to kick back and relax. Data integration through open APIs are important.  So are deeper analytics.  We can’t share everything today, but there are some very cool things just around the corner.

So, for now, stretch out your arms and embrace your community!

Today we are launching the 1.1 release of BearHug.  There are a ton of new features and enhancements that are based on our own needs and from comments received from our early adopters.  Nothing delights us more than getting feedback from our customers and being able to solve their problems.  So many new ideas poured in that it was difficult to choose just exactly what was going to be in this release, but in the end, I think you’ll be very pleased.

1. Custom Domain Support – branding is everything and we want to make it easy to incorporate the BearHug functionality into your brand.  Instead of yourname.bearhugapp.com you can now use any domain you want!  Whether you choose myappsupport.com,support.myapp.com, or inside.mycompany.com, it’s as simple as telling us what you want and a little DNS change on your end.  Provisioning is immediate and you’re off to the races (note: this feature is only available on paid accounts).

2. Private Access – several people have indicated that they want to use BearHug in an internal setting so that the public cannot see the activity.  Whether this is for employee onboarding, intranet, training, internal products, or departmental use, we’ve got you covered!  Just change your settings to “private access” and a username and password will now be required to gain access (note: this feature is only available on paid accounts).

3. BearHug Dashboard – as we began to add more functionality and applications to the BearHug platform, we needed a place to summarize the action and give your customers a good place to get started.  Our new Dashboard provides that home.  In an upcoming release, we’ll give you the ability to have product-specific dashboards for that extra level of customization.

4. FirstRate App – a number of companies have proven that customers love to share feedback (positive & negative) and that prospective buyers are relying more and more on ratings and reviews to influence their buying decisions.  While a number of solutions exist for ecommerce and enterprise platforms, small businesses are being left out.  Today we’re adding FirstRate to our BearHug platform to make it simple for customers to provide ratings and review information on your products and for you to interact with them regarding their comments.

5. Team Profiles – a big part of BearHug’s philosophy is that we want your customers to get to know you.  To do that, we introduced the Team Profiles app.  This lets your team members (who opt-in to sharing) publish their photo, bio, social media links, email, blog, etc.  It’s all part of building lasting relationships with your customers.

6. Textile Formatting – plain text is boring and HTML can be hard for non-techies.  We found a compromise by implementing the Textile formatting system.  No clue what that is?  Don’t worry, with one click, we show you the styles available.  It has a learning curve of about 2 minutes.  You’ll be a pro in no time.

7. “Status” app is now “Pulse” – we realized that “Status” meant different things based on who was using BearHug and depending on their industry.  When we got down to the nuts and bolts of what the functionality really provided, we realized it was all about providing a Pulse of the organization.  Tadaaaa!

8. Product-Level Pulse Updates – if your updates are related to specific products or categories, you can now specify that during the update.  We’ll be adding some additional customization around this in the near future.  For now, this will get you rolling in that direction.

9. Huge Interface Enhancements – our last release was a little rough on the interface.  We had some time to get some additional love from our designer and overhaul some areas that needed attention.  You should see a much richer experience with cleaner navigation and clearer direction.  We’re not done yet, but this is a huge step forward.

10. Tags for Products – in our 1.0 release, we had one set of tags for an entire company.  This worked great until you had product-specific tags.  This was just plain wrong, so we changed it.  Now you can have tags related to “All Products” (such as billing, support, maintenance, sales, etc.) and specific tags for each product.

11. Custom Status Text & Labels – our original text and labels were pretty tech-centric.  This new release gives you the flexibility to change the recurring messages and text labels to anything you’d like.  Rather than saying, “24 hours of uptime” you can now say, “Nothing new to report” or whatever you’d like.  Don’t want to call it “Resolved / All Ok” you can now say “Green Status” or whatever floats your boat. Totally customizable in seconds and now perfect whether you’re a small software shop, a tackle shop, or NASA.

There are a number of other small changes, enhancements, improvements and bug fixes.  We believe that our 1.1 release shifts BearHug into high gear and we hope you agree.  Please share your thoughts by asking us a question or even better, by sharing a rating & review through FirstRate.

While walking through a shopping center with my wife last week, the image to the right caught my eye.  On the front of every door to this particular store, in giant, bold letters, were the words, “NEVER UNDERSOLD.  PERIOD.”  My first thought was, “Wow.  They must have some really cheap, low-quality items.  As we kept walking, I couldn’t get that sign out of my mind.  This was a large, anchor store in a prominent shopping center and what they cared about most was being the cheapest price in town.

The more I pondered on their focus, the more disturbing it was to me.  They sell sporting goods equipment and must be doing well, but they have painted themselves into a corner.  Once your focus is solely on price, it is nearly impossible to change it.  You are labeled for life.  Their sign told me that they don’t care about quality, or my happiness, or a long-term relationship.  Their sign told me that I could shop online all I wanted, find a cheaper price, and tell them they had to match it because their sign said so.  They told me that no matter how great the sales person was that was helping me, how much time they spent working with me to find out what I wanted, or how their equipment was going to change my game, all that mattered is that their price was the lowest.  What did that message convey to their staff?  Did they assume that everyone who walked through their doors was some cheapskate looking for a deal?

It made me stop to think about the words that we use to describe our products.  The phrases that we focus on and highlight in our website, emails, and conversation.  When someone communicates with us, beyond what we say, what do our customers hear?

What do the first words your customers see and hear say to them about your company?

Today may be April Fool’s Day, but at Live Oak 360, we’re serious about Customer Care.  So serious that when we sat down at the end of 2009 to discuss product ideas for 2010, we decided to devote ourselves to BearHug.  We spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours last year trying various customer care solutions and none of them seemed to be a good fit for our business.  They were too complicated, too bloated, too expensive.  Like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, we wanted something that was just right.

What is BearHug?

BearHug is a Customer Care platform that is focused on establishing, nurturing, and growing relationships with your customers.  We prefer “Customer Care” because it’s more than just Service or Support, it’s about Caring for your customers.  The greatest brands in the world are known not only for the industry that they serve, but for how they take care of their customers.  When you think of Southwest Airlines, you not only think of on-time flights, free luggage, and low fares.  You also think of the smiling faces, funny stories, and how they take care of their customers.  Rackspace is an amazing managed hosting company, but they are specifically known for their Fanatical Support.  Their #1 goal isn’t to be known as the best or most innovative technology company in the world.  Their goal is to be the best service company in the world.

Live Oak 360 has created BearHug because we believe that organizations need a Customer Care solution that will do more than be a collection of complaints, problems, and frustrations.  Customer Care is about relationships.

How is it Different?

Most customer service and helpdesk solutions are focused on break/fix.  Someone reports a problem.  Someone fixes it.  Case closed.  Most Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are focused around the relationship between sales and the customer.  Smart businesses know that the real relationships are formed from the Customer Care team.  When customers have problems, Customer Care takes care of them.

Most organizations see supporting their customers as an obligation and a cost center to their business.  It’s a “necessary evil” of doing business.  Smart businesses know that Customer Care can, and must be a profit center.  That doesn’t mean that your support team is always selling to your customers.  Every marketer knows that you make more profit by taking care of your existing customers than through acquiring new customers.  Customer Care becomes a profit center when your team is focused on taking care of their needs, when they have the knowledge to make a difference, and when the experience is so enjoyable that your customers rave about you when asked (or even unprompted!).

Why “BearHug?”

Most experiences with customer service and support feel more like a flogging than a warm embrace.  When we talked about how we wanted our own customers to feel after a support experience, we described it as “how you feel after someone gives you a big bear hug.”  The name stuck and BearHug was born.

Who is it for?

BearHug was originally designed for technology companies, SaaS providers, hosting companies, service companies, and those organizations that need to communicate and interact frequently with their customers.  We believe in the Fortune 5,000,000 model made popular by 37Signals (in case you aren’t familiar with it, the Fortune 5,000,000 is the big part of the bell curve often overlooked.  It is the millions of small businesses that power the economy today and represent the greatest opportunity and market).

The reality is that anyone can use BearHug.  Large or Small.  Customer-facing or as an internal application for your company or department.  Non-profits, schools, and teams.  BearHug is for anyone who loves their customers and is looking for a better solution to tend to their needs.

The BearHug Roadmap

We are launching BearHug with 2 of the 12 modules we have identified as significant game changers for organizations in need of a Customer Care solution.  The other 10 modules will be launched throughout 2010, along with continual updates and improvements to our first two: Status and Answers.

BearHug is a platform, fully hosted and managed by our team.  There is no software to install.  All you need is a browser and a smile.

We have done a lot so far this year, but we have a lot further to go.  For now, we invite you to visit GetBearHug.com, sign up for a free trial, kick the tires, and let us know what you think.

BearHug – Embrace Your Customers

No, you’re not confused.  If you came here from a TechCrunch or Wall Street Journal link, you were duped on purpose.  No harm intended.  Just a dose of reality to the real world of short URL services.  Keep reading for the details.

The purpose of this post is to serve as a major wake-up call for short-URL users who are subject to link phishing – the ability to slightly modify a link to give a false sense of trust to your visitors.  Confused?  Here is an example:

This is a link to the blog post you’re reading:  http://bit.ly/dgbhjM

Here are a few branded sample links from various major news organizations that use Bit.ly Pro:

• Techcrunch: http://tcrn.ch/dgbhjM
• Wall Street Journal: http://on.wsj.com/dgbhjM
• MarketWatch: http://on.mktw.net/dgbhjM
• StockTwits: http://stk.ly/dgbhjM
• TheOnion: http://onion.com/dgbhjM

Make sense?  If you saw one of these links on Twitter, Facebook, or a blog, wouldn’t you believe it was real?

This is one of the primary reasons why our customers continue to invest into our Ez.com and BudURL Enterprise platforms.  They were designed from day one for business, with the tools, security, and integration that businesses need.  Our customers are global social media powerhouses, international brands, and smart marketers who take this seriously.  I wish everyone did the same.  Link phishing has been around for years, but some short URL services make it even easier.  When you’re looking for a short URL service for your business, consider these five key criteria:

1. Use a service that lets you use your own domain (improved branding and no chance of phishing)
2. Require that the service prohibit link phishing (like the examples above)
3. Your statistics should be real-time and protected so that your data is your own. (if you want to see the link traffic for any bit.ly URL, just add a “+” to the end, like this: http://bit.ly/dgbhjM+ ~ note: you really want to hide this data or your competitors can watch the success of every campaign)
4. Unique vanity links (the part after the slash “/”) so you can have reign over your links
5. Multiple users so everyone in your company or department can have their own account

If you’re not sure which services have all of these features, take a look at ours (Ez.com & BudURL Enterprise).  You’ll be in the company of the global brands you use and trust every day.  If you’re still not sure, drop us a line.

Fighting spammers and phishers (if that is what they are called) is an ongoing battle at BudURL. Staying off of blacklists is also an ongoing battle. We regularly check surbl.org, uribl.org, spamhaus.org, and a couple of others to see if BudURL.com is listed there. Sometimes I wish there was a single definitive source that we could check instead of having to check so many sites. But then again, it appears to me that these sites already wield too much power and wouldn’t want to turn it over to a single gate keeper. Getting flagged on one of these sites can mean that BudURL users cannot send emails with BudURL links while on a flagged list. Email can come to a complete stop for those who depend on emailing for their newsletters or other business reasons. We feel absolutely terrible and sympathize with our users when this happens. Currently to combat spammers we check every single external link in our system against surbl.org multiple times daily. We also forbid the use of other shorteners as long urls to prevent masking of bad domains.

I ask our readers, “What can we be doing better or should be doing to fight malicious users?”

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome. If you prefer, you can email us at support [at] budurl [dot] com.

All the best!

Mike

Late last year, we decided that we were done with long-term contracts that lock you into aging technology at fixed pricing.  Going forward, everything is 30-days at a time.  This was a hard lesson learned, but it had to be experienced to fully appreciate it.  Admittedly, there are some services that absolutely require a contract or annual payment and you can’t get around it – most of the time.  For everything else, no contracts.  If we are evaluating companies for a new service and you offer a month-to-month plan (even at a higher price), you’re immediately at the top of our list.

We have never charged our customers a cancellation fee and we have never used complex contracts (unless imposed by our clients).  We believe that every vendor must earn their keep on a month-to-month basis (us included).  Everyone is entitled to mistakes, however if a customer really wants to cancel their service with you, they should not be penalized.  In fact, you should help them leave.  Our zero-contract policy helps us stay nimble, try new things, and stop something if it isn’t working.  Freedom feels good.

Most people believe that customer service is painful, supporting your customers is a burden, and that the function of customer service hurts the bottom line.  For some organizations, it does, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Live Oak 360 has always felt very strongly about taking care of our customers.  We spend a lot of time and money trying to do the best we can with the resources we have.  We, like many businesses, are small, yet support customers all over the world.  We have limited time in each day and limited money to spend on tools.  As our business has grown over the past 8 years, we have started to outgrow the tools, applications, and services that we use to take care of our customers.  After spending months looking for a solution, we came to the conclusion that there is a definite gap in the space of Customer Care solutions.

BearHug is a new suite of tools that is being designed and built specifically for small businesses who are tired of struggling with complicated applications and who can’t afford the licensing and customization fees required by the bigger players.  BearHug can be brought online in minutes, is fully hosted and managed, continually evolving, and everyone can use it.

Why BearHug?

When someone ends a support conversation with you, do they feel happy, joyful, or excited?  Think about how you feel after a good, warm hug.  That’s what real customer service should feel like – each and every time.

Where are we now and where are we going?

The first support module we have launched is our Status module.  Many web applications and service companies struggle with the best way to communicate maintenance, outages, and updates.  This is a small component, but a critical step forward in the launch and evolution of BearHug.  We are rolling out updates each month plan to launch a new module each month this year.  We want this to be your perfect customer care suite and your input is encouraged and welcomed.  We aren’t quite ready to pull the covers back just yet, but we’re close.  In the meantime, if you’d like to to see the work-in-progress, check out our Status page.

Today's view from "the office"

The secret is out.  Live Oak 360 has been operating as a virtual company for several months.  Our “experiment” is over and the result is a resounding success.  As a company, we’re healthier and happier than ever.  As we celebrate 8 years in business this month, we wanted to share our story about how we arrived at this point and what tools we use to make it happen.

How We Got Here

When the time came to look for new office space last year, we tried really hard to find just the right location.  Our existing office was no longer the best solution for us.  Other spaces were attractive, but nothing seemed to fit just right.  The Austin office space market hasn’t softened as much as the rest of the country so there weren’t many “deals” to be found.  Locking into a 3-year lease means you’re either paying for space you don’t yet need or you’ll outgrow the space and get stuck with a sublease.  One afternoon, as I walked back into our office from touring new possible locations, I realized that over half of our team was working remotely that day and things were running smoothly.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized we had all been working remotely a lot more often lately.  Everyone was happy.  Work was getting done on time.  Things were working quite well.

After talking it over with the team, we decided to do a 90-day trial.  Our lease was up on Sept. 30th.  We would work remotely for 90 days.  If it wasn’t working, we’d be back in a new office on January 1st.  Through the magic of a hosted VOIP phone system for our hosting team, Skype Business for our development team, some technical wizardry, and lots of coordination from our team, our office made the leap.

It has been five months now since we moved out of our office and into, well, everywhere else.  Our hosting team is tethered to their homes, but that’s not really a bad thing.  Our developers work from home and several hand-picked coffee shops and restaurants around Austin and San Antonio.  We are fortunate enough to be close enough together that we still meet up several times a week in small groups.  Since we don’t have a big rent payment anymore, that means we can get together, as a company and with our families, and enjoy the plentiful Texas BBQ options that Austin has to offer!

The Tools We Use

We are often asked about the tools we use to keep us connected and in sync.
Basecamp – we’re all 37Signals fanatics at Live Oak 360 and tend to use as many of their tools as possible (when they fit).  Basecamp is the hub of all of our activity.  Every development client and internal project goes into Basecamp.  If you manage a small team or group and haven’t taken a look at Basecamp, do yourself a favor and sign up for the free trial.

Campfire – another 37Signals gem, Campfire is essential to our day-to-day office chatter.  We all stay logged in when we’re “on the clock” unless we need super-focused time to dig deep.  Otherwise, we’re continually logged into Campfire and hang out in a single room together.  We have various rooms for specific projects, but we mostly use a single room for our chatter.  It really helps to keep us connected, share stories/photos/movies about our surroundings, and keep the camaraderie flowing.  We use Propane (a Mac app for Campfire) as it adds the “rockstar” factor to Campfire.

Harvest – most of our development work is done on client projects and managing our time allocation is critical to our success.  Having a great program to track your time in an easy-to-use format is important for us.  Harvest makes it easy to record, track, and share our time among projects and with clients.

Beanstalk – since we’re always working on code of some sort, a great subversion repository is critical.  We transitioned to Beanstalk from our internal SVN repository many months ago and never looked back.  It’s the only way to go.

Skype Business – each of our developers has a dedicated Skype number with a subscription for inbound and outbound calls.  We use the integrated instant messaging for one-on-one chats and often use the click-to-conference feature for impromptu conference calls with our team.  I find a new use for Skype or a new usability feature almost every week.  Their customer service is terrible, but I’ve only needed it twice.  I underestimated Skype several years ago, but it has really matured.

Dropbox & JungleDisk – JungleDisk Workgroup serves as our repository for files shared across our team.  We don’t access them a lot, but the storage is cheap and access is easy.  Dropbox is being used more for accessing company files as it keeps things synchronized, saves endless versions, and access through the desktop, web, and iPhone make it incredibly convenient.

Jive Communications – our hosting business does a tremendous amount of telephone support to make sure our customers are well taken care of for web and email hosting.  We turned to Jive for their hosted VOIP phone system.  I’ll admit that we had a pretty rocky start when we first transitioned and learned more about the continually evolving VOIP world, but we’re pretty happy with their service.  The phone system is far better than our old system, the pricing is very reasonable, and they do not require a contract.

Grasshopper – we have enough paper coming through our virtual office.  Everything that is important gets converted to PDF anyway.  Why not let it start digital?  Grasshopper has a great eFax service and we were able to port our fax number directly to them and avoid the mess of re-routing calls.

Do we miss the office?

Personally, I don’t miss the office one bit.  What I miss is the people.  They are my extended family.  When we see each other (which is really quite often), it is usually over a hot cup of coffee or a cold beer – and food is almost always involved.  We talk every day on Campfire and share photos of our kids and weekend plans.  I don’t miss “coming into the office” at all, but it wasn’t “the office” that I was coming to see.