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@budurl.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.

Some interactive and social media agencies have asked us how they can use Ez.com to manage their customer’s social media efforts.  We recently added a great new feature that makes this easier and more secure than ever.

If you sign up for a multi-domain plan in Ez.com, you’ll be able to assign individual account holders to specific domains.  This will allow you to add customer domains to your account and then give your customers access to only their domains, yet give your staff a single login to see and manage all of your customer accounts.

Easy, right!?

This also works great in larger organizations where you have multiple brands or entities that need individual representation online, yet are managed by one social media team.  Have an idea on how we can tune our service to work better for your agency or organization?  Please let us know!

BudURL & Ez.com received a must-requested feature – the ability to shrink, schedule, & tweet.  In a single click, you can use the new bookmarklet to create a short URL, write your tweet, and immediately post or schedule it for the future.  It’s so easy!  Even if you manage multiple domains on Ez.com, you can choose your preferred URL from the bookmarklet to shrink and tweet across all of your accounts.

This feature is available for all of our plans.  Just log into your account, click the Twitter tab, and enjoy!

After a lot of conversation, feedback, and soul-searching, we have made some significant changes to our plan options at Ez.com.  At the core, we realized our primary focus was making it easy to have your own custom URL shortener.  We decided to make this a standard feature of all paid plans.  In addition, we added a new Solo plan that starts at $24 per month.  That means that for a mere $24 per month, you can have your own custom URL shortener with real-time analytics, email notifications, etc.

We also increased the number of users that you can have on several accounts and raised some of the link limits and premium click counts.

We still offer a 21-day free trial for all of our accounts so you can sign up and take it for a spin without spending a penny.  Pretty cool, eh?  We’d like to think of it as being Ez.  Click here to check out our new plans.

The Wall Street Journal has written an excellent piece about safety and security of short links in their article, “Social-Media Con Game.”  BudURL and Ez.com are both featured as solutions used by AMD and the Seattle Seahawks/Sounders FC organizations to combat link fraud.

Update: The Blacklist has been removed. Huge thanks to Jason Stoddard of Stagira for all his assistance and special thanks to the little elves inside of Facebook that flipped the switch.

As many of you are aware, Facebook began blocking BudURL and several other URL shorteners last week.  We have been reporting the issue daily and trying to reach Facebook by phone, but have yet to receive a response.  Through some great connections, we’re trying to reach Facebook through other means and hope to hear a response from someone soon regarding this issue.  In the meantime, we’d like to ask that everyone who is impacted by this issue please fill out a bug request using the link below with the subject line “Remove BudURL from Facebook Blacklist”

Submit your Facebook bug request here.

Thank you all for your patience and understanding.  We take great pride in keeping our service clean from spam and act diligently to eradicate any spammers found in our system.  We know the expectations are higher when you’re a paying customer of a service and we take our commitment to you very seriously.

Since we cannot get a response from Facebook we do not have an update as to when the issue will be resolved.  If you have any connections at Facebook, we’d love to hear about them.  Feel free to comment below or email us at support@budurl.com.

Some of our customers have been asking for a better way to organize and manage their dozens and hundreds of BudURLs.  We’re happy to announce that you can now create Labels and assign them to each BudURL to better organize your links.  Similar to Labels in Gmail, you can create and edit any number of labels and assign as many labels to each BudURL as you’d like.  We keep track of which labels are being used the most and allow you to search by labels as well.  It’s the first step towards better organization and tracking of your categorized links.

We’d like to know how you use labels in BudURL.  Please share your thoughts in the comments below.