We’re extremely proud and excited about these two new things we’ve created. Here’s the scoop:

Help Center

There’s a key detail about what we’re doing at Get Satisfaction that is sometimes hard to make shine through: We’re not trying to build a place where companies and customers are compelled to come to resolve their differences. That is, we’re not trying to capture people and keep them here. What we’re ultimately focused on is increasing the connections between companies and their customers. And that can happen anywhere. In fact, for best results, it should be happening in as many places as possible.

In that spirit, we’ve created the Get Satisfaction Help Center. It’s a PHP installation you can download and drop right onto your own Web site. It’s as easy as setting up a blog, and it allows you to push and pull all of the data from Get Satisfaction in a seamless way. Simply put: It’s our site on your site.

Here are a few examples already up and running: Joby, makers of the Gorillapod, Skitch, and a highly modified version for MyBlogLog. You can also see a default installation running for our own section of Get Satisfaction.

Since Help Center is based on PHP (surely the Web’s most popular programming language), it’s easy to install and customize. We offer some very pretty templates you can use, but we also encourage you to adapt it to your own site’s look and feel. After all, you’ve probably spent countless hours honing your company’s visual style. Go get it now and make it yours. Let us know if you have any questions right here in Get Satisfaction.

Also, a side note to developers. Help Center is actually an open source application hosted on Google Code under the MIT license, so if one of your modifications really rocks, you can share it back with everybody else!

Overheard

Ever wished you could respond to what people are saying about your company anywhere they’re saying it? Of course you do. I bet you wouldn’t mind chiming in about what people are saying about other companies, too, huh?

To help fulfill that need, we’ve added the Overheard feature. It’s a way for people to monitor and extend the conversations going on around companies and their products. Yep, we’ve got tons of that going on already on Get Satisfaction, but these conversations are from Twitter. That’s right: Twitter. You’ve probably noticed that Twitter is quickly becoming more than just a way to send shout-outs to your friends. It’s transforming into a primary attention stream.

Overheard tracks Twitter conversations — “tweets” — that mention a specific company or its products and displays them in a list. If you see a tweet that you think would needs an in-depth response or would make a great topic on Get Satisfaction, turn that tweet into a Get Satisfaction topic with a click. Anyone on Get Satisfaction can do this, and we ping the user on Twitter to let them know that we’ve started a new topic based on their tweet. It’s a great way to locate conversations going on out there in the wild and provide rich, archived (i.e. searchable) responses on the Get Satisfaction network. Combine this with Help Center, and companies are now able to bring distributed Web conversations into their everyday operations, improving their customer service and fostering retention.

If this idea of tracking mentions on Twitter isn’t something you’ve considered before, you might find that it’s a superb way to not only find out what people are saying about a company and its products, but also to connect with people you otherwise wouldn’t be able to reach. If you’re an admin for your company, you can even set additional keywords and tune this Twitter stream.

Go check it out for companies like Ebay, Comcast, Google, even the US Government. We think you’ll be surprised at just how neat it is.

Get Satisfaction is organizing a meet-up — next Saturday — to help app developers wrap their heads around and implement the OAuth protocol. If you haven’t heard of it, OAuth is how users can give access to their information on one application on a second app without sharing all of their identity. If you’ve ever used an app that requested permission to access your Flickr account you know what it’s all about. Get Satisfaction is excited to provide OAuth support in its API.

Maybe you’ll be fired up about OAuth after attending the Web 2.0 conference next week. Maybe you’ve been meaning to figure out OAuth for awhile now. Maybe you started an OAuth project but didn’t get very far. Either way you should join us.

Here are some reasons to add OAuth to your app:

• You want to link to a third-party app (like Get Satisfaction!) but you don’t want your users to have to create a wholly new account. With OAuth you can pass-through their credentials for a seamless, single sign-in experience
• You want your app to be able to access user accounts on third-party OAuth-enabled apps. Use OAuth if you want to give users access to their existing Get Satisfaction accounts and functionality from within your app.
• You want to give third-party developers the same benefits we mention above. It will increase your accessibility in the broader ecosystem of other apps.

Cameron will be emceeing this hackathon, from 2 p.m. – 8 p.m., next Saturday, April 26th, and there’ll be numerous OAuth experts on hand to help you make quick work of your implementation. Since we don’t have a massive office here at Get Satisfaction (you’d probably also get distracted by our Rock Band set-up), the folks at Six Apart have generously donated their space for this event.

You can RSVP and find out all the details here.

But along the way we realized that anecdotal evidence — even solid, practical, billion-dollars-a-year-in-revenue evidence — while a strong start, just wasn’t enough. And so we asked ourselves: How can we help evolve the conversation that companies and customers are having? What can we bring to the table that will help these companies communicate better — more effectively, more honestly, more transparently — with their customers? What hasn’t been said but needs to be?

With this goal in mind, we launched at the Summit an essentially open source document we’re calling, simply, The Company-Customer Pact.

This pact is a call for shared responsibility between companies & customers — one that promises that both sides will hold up their end of the bargain to change the game. The document provides a way to opt into a set of shared values. It’s a balanced statement of responsibilities for companies and customers.

You might wonder why we need this, as it seems like common sense. But if common sense were enough more people would be employing these principles now. We’ve been trained by the bad habits of corporate culture to turn away from the anger of alienated customers reacting to an environment where it’s common place for companies to hide behind phone trees, avoid fault, and employ anonymous and in-human call centers that makes them hard if not impossible to reach. Or by engaging in practices like price-gauging and issuing confusing bills and policies.

And what’s the customers response to this, now that, thanks to the tubes that power the Internet, the customers can respond? More often than not it’s revolt, whether led by one man’s descent into Dell Hell or an entire (digg)nation rising up to defend their right to recite a seemingly random string of letters and numbers. But revolt, as any Frenchman from the 18th century will tell you, while thrilling, isn’t particularly pleasant, and it’s definitely not sustainable. We need another way.

Previous attempts at such documents usually end up coming from the company side as a “Consumer’s Bill of Rights,” the most notable of which was put forth by JFK in a speech he gave in 1962. (Never heard of it? Yeah, neither had we.) A customer bill of rights is a start, but that’s unilateral disarmament. This pact is bilateral disarmament; both sides holster their flamethrowers and try to work it out.

The central thesis of the Company-Customer Pact is that at some point we are all working on behalf of a company, and at the same time we are all customers. We all spend time on either side of that fence, and we should take our understanding of each of those roles into whatever situation we’re in. In that regard, while this Company-Customer Pact speaks to two sides, it’s really speaking to one side — the human side.

Customers can expect more from a company that’s signed onto this document. And whie it’s impossible for a company to tell its customers how to behave, they can certainly ask, and by opting into a pact like this they can imply a sense of shared responsibility with their customers. And a statement like this can even give a company’s internal teams some guiding principles for their behavior.

This is an open initiative — a living document. We want your feedback, which is why we’ve posted it on a wiki where anyone can comment or edit. Keep in mind, though, that one of the goals is to have it be simple enough that anyone can adopt it. It contains five basic tenets:

1. The first point reiterates, because it can’t be said enough, the golden rule of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

2. The second point warms against the temptation to anonymity, because more often than not, in commercial settings anonymous often gives license to be rude.

3. The third point reflects the fact that we all know in advance that mistakes wil be made and that problems are going to happen — to err is human, after all, and we’re both humans on either side of the line. We can embrace this as an opportunity to deal honestly with problems as they arise; done right, this is where lasting customer relationships are forged. Who hasn’t had the experience of seeing a company turn a bad situation around, creating a tremendous amount of customer loyalty?

4. The fourth point is about companies embracing the opportunity of instant, always-on communication. Now that it’s easier than ever before to get the word out to hundreds of our friends and co-workers, it’s somehow harder than ever to communicate with some of the companies we do business with. There is absolutely a mandate to make honest and direct communication between companies and customers as easy and frictionless as it is with the people you friend on Facebook.

5. Finally, it’s vital to show follow-through and to support those who are trying to follow through. It’s a new world, and we all have to live in it together, so let’s cut each other some slack, ok?

Pretty simple all said and done, but also potentially very powerful. If you haven’t done so yet, check it out at ccpact.com and add your name — as a customer, as a company representative, or as both. We’d love to have you take part in the conversation.

Tony Hsieh opened up our Customer Service is the New Marketing Summit with a compelling statement: “We’re a customer service company. We just happen to sell shoes. Twenty years from now, hopefully people won’t even remember that we sell shoes.”

That’s a strong statement from the CEO of a pretty strong company: Zappos. You may not know it, but they’re not in the shoe business. Having effortlessly bought — and effortlessly returned — many pairs of shoes from and to them, I’m inclined to agree with him. They ooze customer service.

To help us foster and encourage the kind of spirit that Tony believes in, we’ve introduced the “Company-Customer Pact,” a simple, usable framework for company-customer interaction.

The provisional draft of this document is now available at CCPact.com. We’re actively seeking community support, as well as public comments on this document. Support and comments can be voiced right on the wiki pages. Having your voice included would be terrific.

Please forward this post to folks that you’d like to hear in this conversation — or anyone you think would be interested in building better company-customer relationships.

Zachary tries to manufacture controversy by pitting “elitists” such as Thomas P. Hughes (”New technologies are becoming so complex that many are beyond the possibility of democracy playing a role in their development”) against new schoolers like Eric Wilhelm of Instructables (”If innovation isn’t tailored to [customers], they expect to be able to tailor it to themselves”). But where’s the conflict? The iPhone is a phenomenon that is Apple doing what Apple is best at (i.e. elite design), but there are thousands of developers hacking away at its hardware, operating system and applications. And as Eric von Hippel (the MIT evangelist for user-led innovation) would point out, this is where most democratic contributions are made, at the edges of the maker’s business. If history is a guide, we can expect some of these apps and hacks from users to end up influencing Apple engineers or being integrated wholesale into its products.

Many of us are attracted to this notion of ivory tower-based innovation, but it’s largely mythical. Many of us know that Thomas Edison, the original icon of the elite genius generating invention after brilliant invention, owed much of his success to raw opportunism and the willingness to crush superior technologies that threatened his business. The technology his famed Menlo Park lab produced often relied on the work of outsiders, usually mavericks and hobbyists. For instance, Edison famously took credit for the early motion picture projector known as the Vitascope, which had been invented by a couple of kids trying to distinguish themselves in trade school.

And Apple, that most singular modern epicenter of technology innovation, owes much of its success to the innovations that came from outside its hallowed walls. The early Mac was a refined set of innovations from Xerox Parc and Douglas Englebart (with design help from folks like my alma mater, Frogdesign). The resurgence of the Mac with OS X is due in part to the fact that it’s based on freeBSD, an open source UNIX system built with contributions from many scattered developers.

And the iPod, the iPod! Not at all the pure creation of isolated genius within the company that Zachary implies in his article. The iPod chip came from PortalPlayer, its interface designed in part by third-party firm Pixo, and even the iPod name was coined by a freelance copywriter.

But one thing’s for certain. Apple will never be able to farm out its MacWorld keynote presentations. There are some things that only Steve Jobs can do.

I’m very glad and proud to work for a company that embraces open source, and realizes that there is business value in contributing to the open source community and spirit. In the past they have given me a pretty long leash to play with, letting me develop things like voo2do2ical, railmail, and exceptional. I am looking forward to creating plugins and snippets out of the interesting pieces of code that spring forth while developing Satisfaction.

That brings me to my next point: Erber. This will be Satisfaction’s first among many contributions back to the community, a plugin for ruby on rails that makes it trivially easy to register additional file extensions for rendering in the same manner as rhtml. In my case, I wanted to be able to render javascript files in the same manner as I do html (with rhtml), and css (with css_dryer). More on this in a coming post.

Anyways, the following is an example of how to register an extension with Erber:


Erber.register :njs, :rrtf, :rpls


just include the above in your environment file and at that point, you create templates that end in .njs, .rrtf, and .rpls. Pretty simple, really. The code is up on google project hosting at http://code.google.com/p/erber/, and you can install the plugin with the following command:

script/plugin install http://erber.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

Well I’m off. I’ll be in touch in the future.