Live Oak Blog

Live Oak Interactive Rebrands as Live Oak 360

AUSTIN, Texas — March 28, 2008— Live Oak 360, an Austin, Texas-based web technology services company, today announced that it has changed its name to Live Oak 360. The rebranding of the company signifies that the firm has expanded its role beyond custom application development, as a consulting and development firm, guiding clients to strategic web development solutions that meet their evolving business needs and provide the crucial edge of profitability online.

Live Oak 360 assists companies in the management of their digital landscape through interactive consulting, customized software development, conversion acceleration and social networking applications. The new corporate name showcases a cyclical growth engine, an ongoing business process employed by the agency, that discovers client needs, develops custom solutions and then cyclically re-evaluates and refines the solutions as client priorities change over time.

“Our focus is to grow and manage a 360 degree view of our clients’ total interactive presence – their digital landscape. Our name also embodies our iterative process which is essential to that goal,” comments Andy Meadows, President and CEO. “The 360 process empowers the Live Oak team to step in sync with clients, at any point within their development process, and to create custom software applications in alignment with corporate goals.”

The firm’s capabilities, commitment to customer service and integrity have provided opportunities to develop a myriad of enterprise web applications, such as e-commerce, multimedia, and open source technologies. They are a full-service technology solutions provider with personalized service-orientation focusing on the following applications:

• Web development – public web sites, intranets and extranets
• Social media and community sites - web properties that are driven by users, including blogs, discussion boards, video logs, video sharing sites
• Business-driven technology solutions
• Enterprise web applications
• E-commerce systems
• Custom application development
• Business-class hosting through LiveOakHosting.com

Drawing upon proven industry experience and open source expertise, the Digital Landscape Management™ company is able to develop scalable and efficient customer driven applications. Live Oak 360 integrates marketing and business activities, provides in-depth business intelligence, and increases visibility with key audiences, which, in turn, improves website profitability for clients.

About Live Oak 360

Live Oak 360, an Austin, Texas-based web technology services company, specializes in Digital Landscape Management™ consulting, customized software development, conversion acceleration and social networking applications to assist companies in the management of their digital landscape.

The firm’s name embodies a cyclical growth engine that discovers the needs of clients, finds the strategic solution that is the best fit and then cyclically evaluates and refines the client solutions based on the clients’ evolving business needs. It empowers the team to step in sync with clients, at any point within their development process, to create custom software applications in alignment with corporate goals and to maintain iterative improvement for clients.

Drawing upon proven industry experience and open source expertise, Live Oak 360 is able to develop scalable and efficient customer driven applications. Live Oak 360 integrates marketing and business activities, provides in-depth business intelligence, and increases visibility with key audiences, which, in turn, improves website profitability for clients.

Live Oak 360 has developed solutions directly for Buffalo Technologies, Time Warner Cable Media Sales and Green Mountain Energy. Through strategic partnerships, the firm has customized applications for AMD, Symbol Technologies (now a division of Motorola) and World Vision.

For more information, visit www.Liveoak360.com.

# # #

All names are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Conversion Acceleration

No matter what your business does, your website has one goal — conversion. Its soul purpose is to generate conversions. Whether that be selling products, downloading files, connecting people with support documents, or registering for events. Converting what your visitor seeks into the goal that you want them to accomplish is conversion. Conversion Acceleration is the art of expediting the seeker with that goal. Live Oak has a methodology for implementing conversion acceleration on your website. It all starts with our C.P.R. Process. Conversion — Persona — Recommendation.

Conversion - what you want the seeker to achieve while they are on your website

Persona - how you classify that person into a given segment (VP Marketing, Purchasing Agent, Member of the Press, Investor, etc.)

Recommendation - what you do or say that accelerates the process of conversion

If you know that for a typical conversion, it takes 10 clicks for the average seeker to connect with the goal, what can you do that will accelerate the process from 10 clicks into 8, 6, 4, or less. Knowing what motivates the seeker, what answers they seek, and how to streamline the connection is the key. Many companies have access to this information already, or have the tools at their disposal to find out. The trouble is, most folks don’t know how to use them. Do you?

If you’d like to learn more about our Conversion Acceleration program or CPR process, please contact us to set up a free consultation. It’s what we do!

Digital Landscape Management

There’s a new term that we have been floating around the office lately — Digital Landscape Management™ (DLM). Based on a quick Google search, it appears that this is a new term for the web. What a rare occurrence!!

What is a Digital Landscape and why would you want to manage it?

Digital Landscape - all online venues where your brand is discussed, listed, or visible. This includes blogs, online magazines, partner sites/directories, social networks, and third-party tools that integrate and report on this activity (clipping services, analytics applications, hosted applications, etc.). The Digital Landscape is vast and rapidly growing on a continual basis.

Managing the Digital Landscape is no simple task. Depending on the size of your business and reach of your brand, your Digital Landscape could be immense. Knowing how to leverage the available tools and resources to understand and monitor your Digital Landscape is critical to the future of marketing organizations across the globe. Once you realize the value of harnessing and directing your Digital Landscape, you have just achieved a new level of understanding the digital marketplace.

Want to learn more about Digital Landscape Management? Contact us for more information.

OpenSocial Has Arrived

At 3:55 Central time on November 2nd, the OpenSocial link at Google went live. The site is pretty sparse and I only see openings for Orkut for developers to begin coding. The API documentation looks pretty good and there are currently 9 example apps from various developers.Let the Games Begin!!

Google, Open Social, Social Media

What OpenSocial Means to Business

Google’s release of the OpenSocial APIs finally opens social networks to business applications. By using standard web technologies rather than a specialized markup language, the APIs can make an organization’s current applications and infrastructure available using much of their existing code. By opening various social networks to interaction and collaboration, members can reuse their profiles, connections, and applications when they arrive at a custom social network. Organizations can create and manage business activity-focused social networks that increase productivity and collaboration, not reduce it. A business that manages their own OpenSocial-enabled social network can accelerate their sales cycle, keep their employees focused on business, and reuse their existing infrastructure investments in dramatically new ways.

Out of all the new web technologies of the past few years, only social networking has failed to find traction in the corporate world. While some organizations have tried to build networks within Facebook, the simple fact is that public social networks are closed, difficult to adapt to corporate needs, and fail to show real return. Top Facebook applications, for example, include “Free Animated Gifts,”"Funwall”, and “Top Friends.” In fact, in the Business section no application beyond the Fantasy Stock Exchange that has more than 300 active daily users. While some social networks can provide valuable business connection services, in most social networks its all about being social.

The challenge businesses face when considering building their own social networks is that they would be inherently non-social. Faced with the need to constantly register, filter, and participate in multiple closed networks, vertical social networks and applications could never gain the participation needed to make them valuable to their participants. What has been needed is way way to tear down the barriers between social networks (aka, the “walled gardens”), allowing participants to opt-in and opt-out, immediately be placed in communities of interest and form connections without repeating their information, and provide controlled access to portions of their profile while interacting with custom applications without exposing their entire on-line profile.

With the release the OpenSocial APIs from Google, already embraced by LinkedIn and other social media platforms, business now has access to tools that allow for the creation of managed social networks that can adapt to the needs of customers, partners, and employees.

One scenario would be lead acquisition. Imagine a potential customer coming to your web site through a simple process of joining your corporate social network. Immediately, their profiles, interests, and connections are available. With their permission, you could provide them connections to current customers that are also in their own social network for references. Their interest profile could immediately connect them to sales team members best suited to their industry or level of interest. They can immediately be linked into your customer support applications. A business can accelerate their sales cycles and increase their customer loyalty. Through the Google APIs, a business could even provide their custom social network applications to other social networks, allowing a customer currently on LinkedIn or Salesforce.com to access directly and share with their other contacts the business’s own embedded information and social network functions.

Industry adoption of Google APIs, which appears to be happening at lightening speed, is only part of the equation. For a business wanting to harness the power of social networks, the other half is a solid, proven social networking platform that can be customized for their specific needs. Live Oak 360’s new Social Network Platform for Business provides the core components needed to implement a corporate social network. With built-in support for the Google OpenSocial APIs, you can immediately implement a true collaborative social network, build custom applications that can be distributed to other social networks, and incorporate profiles, applications, and activities running on other social networks. With management tools to measure collaboration, use, and participation, you can feed incoming profiles to your Salesforce.com applications. Support your own lead generation, customer service, and partner collaboration applications. Incorporate a social network into your own intranet to build collaboration and communities of interest in your own organization.

Google has leveled the playing field for social networking. Organizations that recognize the power of social networking have waited for true cross-network applications. With built-in support for Google OpenSocial, Live Oak 360 can deploy your custom social network that opens the world and keeps you in control.

Welcome

In reality, this blog has had a few incarnations over the past 5 years. Today marks the countdown to a significant turn for our company. In the pages that will follow over the coming weeks, we’ll lay out our plan for 2008, how we’re changing as a company, how we’re growing as a contributor to technology, and how we’re continuing our quest to give deliver on our Power to Grow mantra.

The most recent piece of exciting news that ties directly to us (although the details aren’t quite public) surrounds Google’s announcement regarding OpenSocial. Here are a few quick links

• http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/open-social-a-n.html
• http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/open-social-scr.html
• http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/google-opensocial-api-launch.html
• http://gigaom.com/2007/10/31/google-to-facebook-i-want-to-suck-your-social-blood/#more-10577
• http://www.sixapart.com/about/news/2007/11/opensocial_kill.html
• http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071101/wr_nm/google_myspace_dc_2

In our next piece, we’ll outline what we believe this will do for businesses as they begin to understand how social media will impact them in the future and how they can start getting into the game.