We at FreshBooks are all about bringing the fun to the middle of your working day. We are sponsoring three contests right now, simultaneously!

FreshBooks and Yahoo! take you to the good old hockey game

In conjunction with PodCamp Toronto, FreshBooks and Yahoo! Search Marketing Canada are taking three video/podcasters to see the Toronto Marlies vs. the Hamilton Bulldogs this Sunday, February 24 at 4 PM ET.

Go here for details, and enter by Saturday at 5 PM ET for your chance to win.

SEOs fight fat for charity!

A bunch of SEOs realized they needed to lose some weight, so they got together and made it a public event. FreshBooks is pledging $500 on long-time customer, Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Guide. Ever the mommy blogger, if she wins the Human Milk Banking Association of North America will get a cheque for thousands of dollars. She’s currently leading! Cheer her on, or make a pledge yourself!

MediatorTech book launch!

Tammy Lenski, another FreshBooks customer and professional mediator, is having a virtual book launch party, for her new book, Making Mediation Your Day Job, her marketing guidebook to help mediators open their own private practice. It has five stars so far on Amazon! FreshBooks is offering up a year-long “shuttle bus” package as one of the prizes in the drawing. Be sure to check it out!

Hockey fans: it’s time to face facts. The Toronto Maple Leafs are not just in a slump. They aren’t in a hole. They are in a pit. It hurts being second-last in the NHL.

Don’t drown in your beer just yet, though. Toronto’s other pro hockey team is currently crushing in the AHL standings, first in the western conference and third in the league. Who am I talking about? The Toronto Marlies, of course!

FreshBooks and Yahoo! Search Marketing Canada have three tickets to the Toronto Marlies vs. the Hamilton Bulldogs on Sunday, February 24 at 4 PM ET, the Sunday of PodCamp Toronto. We’re giving them away to lucky PodCamp Toronto participants.

Sing the Marlies’ praises, and you could win a ticket!

All you have to do is create a 30-second audio promo to support the Marlies, Toronto’s winningest hockey team. Play your promo during your podcast this week, and then send an e-mail to podcampmarliescontest@gmail.com by Saturday, February 23 at 5 PM ET with a link to the podcast.

A panel of three judges from FreshBooks, Yahoo! Canada, and PodCamp Toronto will award tickets to the top three promos. We’ll announce the winner at the opening of PodCamp Toronto on Sunday, February 24.

Update for videocasters:

Videocasters, don’t fret. You can enter too! Just videocast your promo. Mind you, we’ll consider only the audio component just to be fair to podcasters.

Brought to you by:

Next Thursday, November 1, Mike and I are heading down to The New New Internet in Washington, D.C. to paint the Mall red.

Because Mike has ended up speaking on the Software as a Service: Benefits Beyond Delivery panel, we have a free pass to hand out to the first person who is willing to wear one of our stylish T-shirts all day. Please send me your T-shirt size, bearing in mind American Apparel sizes are usually one size smaller than you’re used to.

And if any customers of ours would like to meet for dinner on Friday, please drop mike a note.

It’s been 13 days since we announced that we would pay for someone’s ticket to the SEED conference. To earn this right we asked that people submit stories of truly remarkable customer service. We’ve received a slew of outstanding entries. In fact, we’ve had customers of FreshBooks account holders (like Sky IT Support) take the time and write in to tell us stories of how FreshBooks users provided them with exceptional service. Absolutely marvellous.

Among all the great entries this one stood out:

Hey Mike and the rest of the Freshbooks team - I’m writing to submit to the “best customer service story” contest for the SEED conference ticket.

The Internet company that I believe has the best customer service going today is Zappos.com. Having ordered from Zappos.com many times, their customer service is phenomenal, and they’re driven by creating the best experience possible for their customers. They’ve truly created a culture of service, this is hard to do within the organization but when they get it right, it’s truly amazing to witness.

Speaking of witnessing it, I had the opportunity to visit Zappos.com in January of this year. I was blown away at how welcoming all of the employees were and how as we walk through the entire building, everyone we passed stood up smiled and waved hello to us. It was a fantastic look at the behind the scenes operation of a truly focused company. I blogged about it here. After our trip there, and we were so inspired as a company that when we rolled out our “customer service is the new marketing” initiative, we referenced our experience at Zappos.

As far as the best customer service story I’ve ever come across, actually came upon it the other day. It’s not an original story by me, but I think it’s a wonderful example of the extent to which Zappos will go to show that it cares about its customers. Here’s the post:

I Heart Zappos

I really do.

One bright, extraordinary note in all of the sad stuff of the last few weeks - in May we had ordered several pairs of shoes from Zappos for my mom. She’d lost a lot of weight, and her old shoes were all too big. She had a whole new wardrobe of clothes in pretty colors, that fit, so I wanted her to have some pretty shoes that fit, too, when I took her up to Oregon to stay where her sister is. Out of seven pairs, only two fit. Not bad considering she’d never been this thin, so I was winging it, and the return shipping is free.

The rest were here waiting to be returned. Because of various circumstances - lost label, my mom being hospitalized and me being away, the shoes were never sent back. There’s a time limit on the return of 15 days. Remember this. When you do a return to them, they pay the shipping, but you have to get the shoes to UPS yourself. Remember this, also.

When I came home this last time, I had an email from Zappos asking about the shoes, since they hadn’t received them. I was just back and not ready to deal with that, so I replied that my mom had died but that I’d send the shoes as soon as I could. They emailed back that they had arranged with UPS to pick up the shoes, so I wouldn’t have to take the time to do it myself. I was so touched. That’s going against corporate policy.

Yesterday, when I came home from town, a florist delivery man was just leaving. It was a beautiful arrangement in a basket with white lilies and roses and carnations. Big and lush and fragrant. I opened the card, and it was from Zappos. I burst into tears. I’m a sucker for kindness, and if that isn’t one of the nicest things I’ve ever had happen to me, I don’t know what is. So…

IF YOU BUY SHOES ONLINE, GET THEM FROM ZAPPOS.

With hearts like theirs, you know they’re good to do business with.

Tony Hseih has done a fantastic job building an culture of service within Zappos. During my visit I learned the extent to which the employees are empowered to go to keep a customer happy. If a customer cannot find a shoe they’re looking for on Zappos.com, the customer support rep is empowered to browse competitors websites, Nordstrom.com, shoes.com, and help the customer look for the shoe that they want all the while on the phone with the customer. This is truly about keeping the customer happy.

Zappos recently introduced an industry first free shipping both ways. This encourages people to order as many issues as they want in different sizes and try them on. Through this initiative Zappos is competing directly with brick-and-mortar high-end shoe stores.

The story above is not the first I’ve heard of Zappos ordering flowers for customers. The culture of WOW encourages employees to go the extra distance to wow their customers with great customer service. This is truly the company with the best customer service going today. I hope this wins the magic ticket! Thanks for caring about customer service.

This account of great customer service — and more importantly a culture of extraordinary customer experiences — was submitted by Chris Schultz of Voodoo Ventures. Congratulations Chris — you’ve earned yourself a ticket to SEED.

We are going to post one or two of the other entries because the companies and the people they highlight deserve the recognition. Thank you to everyone who entered. We’re going to send you all FreshBooks shirts as a token of our thanks.

First off, we’d like to express our deepest gratitude to all the contestants in the “why is FreshBooks better than an iPhone?” contest. We received some really great entries, and it’s obvious a whole lot of effort went into these creations! A job well done by all.

Unfortunately we only have one iPhone to give away. It was definitely a tight vote here at the office, but after every single staff member had their say and submitted their individual voting card, here’s how things turned out.

Our grand prize winner!

The comedy stylings of Boomy the bunny-like creature won the hearts and minds of our staff members, making heymonn the winner of a brand new iPhone! Congratulations and well done — in doing the best job of proving the iPhone is worthless, you earned yourself one! Alanis would be proud.

But wait, there’s more…

Hold on, what? More prizes? That wasn’t in the rules!

Well, all the efforts put in by the entrants put us into a giving mood today.

Second and third prize!

Putting in a strong showing in second place was caj531 with his very clever parody of a recent UPS ad campaign. He’ll be retiring to his nerdery and invoicing his clients using his six free months of FreshBooks service!

And coming in third place was BradyBoyShaw, whose animation skills were second-to-none in this contest… quite literally, since it was the sole animated entry! He will find himself rewarded with three free months of FreshBooks service.

Alright… prizes for everybody!

What the heck, let’s go crazy! We’ll also be sending a spiffy FreshBooks t-shirt to every one of you who submitted an entry, from the grand prize winner right on down. We’ll be getting in touch to get shirt sizes and shipping addresses — expect to hear from us in the next day or two.

For those of you who missed out on this contest, be sure to check out all the entries for your enjoyment. And don’t forget, we’re still looking for somebody to send to the SEED conference, too! If you’d like to go, check out the contest details on our blog and get your entries in.

Merci beaucoup!

Thanks again, everybody; this contest was a lot of fun, and I hope you all enjoyed yourselves as much as Sunir and I did. Keep an eye on those YouTube accounts, I’ll try to get a message to everybody tomorrow. Cheers!

Our friends Jim and Jason at Coudal Partners and 37Signals are teaming up with Carlos Segura of Segura Inc, are putting on the SEED Conference on October 29th in Chicago. The sold-out event is a:

…discussion on design, entrepreneurship, and inspiration.

You’ll learn about taking control of your own work, seeking out methods to inspire new ideas, and adopting unconventional ideas about collaboration and business. The SEED conference will fill your head with knowledge you can use.

I was so inspired by the event (largely because I’m a big believer in the personalities behind it) that I bought two tickets — one for myself, and one someone out there with the best answer to the challenge I outline below…

Preamble: At FreshBooks we believe we are a service — not a technology. We believe in outstanding service experiences, and as a result we’ve been doing the little things we feel matter to people for more that three years now. Things like ensuring a real person answers the phone when you call — not a phone system. Giving you timely and thoughtful replies to your emails when you reach out to us, and maintaining our forums with enthusiasm. We’ve been doing all this, day in and day out since May 2004, on top of continuously polishing and perfecting the web application part of the FreshBooks experience.

So here’s the challenge: Tell us the best story of customer service you know, and send it to us by Tuesday October 23 at 3 PM ET, and we will give the winner (as judged by the team here at FreshBooks) a ticket to SEED. You’ll have to get yourself to Chicago, and find yourself a place to stay, but we’ve got your $399 USD entry fee covered to this sold-out event. We’ll post the winning story here on Fresh Thinking and I’ll be looking forward to meeting the winner in the flesh at SEED.

Wow! As we approach the Monday night deadline for video entries in our iPhone contest, it looks like the competition is starting to get fierce; after a quiet Friday, we received four entries on Saturday!

Watch the new videos

Sadly, there’s simply not enough space here to include everyone’s submission. But you can watch all the new entires in the nifty, all-in-one YouTube player on our contest page!

Creativity looks to be the order of the day — from animation to puppeteering, these videos are really running the gamut. It’s fantastic work from all those involved, so be sure to check it out!

Remember: to keep up on new FreshBooks videos from ourselves and the community, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel. (Feel free to add us as a friend, too! Don’t worry, we won’t bite unless you ask.)

Excellent work, folks!

Thanks again to all the entrants; your response to this contest has been incredible! Here’s hoping we can look forward to a few more videos by the time we’re back in the office Tuesday morning.

To our Canadian friends, a happy Thanksgiving; to the south, enjoy your Columbus Day; and to the rest of the world, have a good weekend!

Now it’s time to get back to mine.

Careful, folks. We’ve got another entry in our iPhone giveaway! Chad Jolly of Colorado brings us the latest, and this one’s reaching for great heights.

Bravo, Chad. Thanks for the video!

You can view all the videos at FreshBooks.com/contest. If you’d like to be notified of new entries as we receive them, just subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube.com/freshbooks.

Don’t forget to get your entries in by Monday, folks. Thanks again for watching, we’ll see you soon!

The deadline for entering our contest to win a free iPhone is coming up this Monday, and it looks like the submissions are starting to roll in.

Our first contestant goes by the name “freshbooksobsessed” on YouTube. (In my books that’s worth some bonus points right there, for the clever play on the slogan of a local grocery chain.)

In the spirit of next week’s provincial elections here in Ontario, the video is in the style of a political campaign attack ad. Check it out:

Well done, and thanks for the entry!

For the rest of you, keep those videos coming, and best of luck to you.

Hey there, Fresh Fans! How would you like to win yourself a brand spankin’ new iPhone?

Well, we’re running a contest on YouTube to give one away! Just tell us, in two minutes or less, why FreshBooks is better than an iPhone. If we think you’ve got the best response, the iPhone is all yours, baby.

Digg this video!

Check out the full contest rules, and then post your video response on YouTube by Monday, October 8th. We want to see entries from as many FreshBooks users as possible, so like the video says, don’t be shy; make yourself heard—and seen!

Don’t be afraid of YouTube!

You don’t even need special software to record your own video; if you’ve got a webcam, or you can borrow one in the next couple weeks, you can record straight to YouTube. Most camera phones these days can record video, too.

If you’re having any trouble, just post a comment and we’ll gladly give you a hand, cause we’d love to hear from you. There’s a reason YouTube became so popular; because it’s so darned easy to get your videos on there.

We look forward to seeing some of your great videos in the next few weeks. Have fun, people, and good luck!