As you may have heard, we’re hard at work developing an iphone app for BatchBook. This is something we’re very excited about and in preparation for the big event, we’ve asked two local filmmakers to help us get the word out.
Meet Ethan and Dylan, eight-year old twins with a passion for all things movie-related. The boys, sons of BatchBook customer and BatchBlue friend Anisa Raoof from kidoinfo.com, write about movies as Flick and Flack on their blog FlickFlackMovieTalk.com. They also recently completed a week of film camp at the very cool Kid’s Eye Summer Filmmaking Camp, and their directorial debut (complete with a walk down the red carpet!) screened this past weekend at the University of Rhode Island.
We’re proud to support these local, up and coming filmmakers and look forward to seeing what they come up with to showcase the awesomeness that will be the BatchBook iphone app.
In the meantime, we’re pleased to introduce you to Flick & Flack as they enjoy lunch from Mad Ernie’s Cafe in lovely Wayland Square!
BatchBlue interviews Flick & Flack from Michelle Riggen-Ransom on Vimeo.
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Tags: batchbook, Community, iphone, marketing
Some big improvements to Search to announce. We recently moved to new search servers and they’re providing much faster searches. In addtion to this upgrade, we’ve also added two new features:
- Record Not Communicated With: Now you can do specific time based searches to see whom you have not been in contact with. Very handy for keeping in touch with folks. This field accepts natural language input like ‘7 days ago’ which is nice for creating reports as the date does not have to be static.
- “Is Empty”: This is probably our #1 feature request of all time. People have always wanted an ablility to see what records have no email address, what records do not yet have their supertag info filled out. Now you have it! In the advanced search dropdown you will now see:
Just select the ‘is empty’ filter with no value and BatchBook will bring back any records with blank info for that field. A really nice way to make sure the data you need is on the contacts important to you.
With these changes, BatchBook Search just became a lot more powerful. We hope you get some good use out of it!
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Tags: batchbook, search
I’ve written in the past about some clever uses for Tags and how they can be used to help track all sorts of things from To-Dos to Communications and more. In chatting with the rest of the team and in working with our customers, it seems that most folks are using tags to denote that some sort of action has been completed or that the record is part of a group such as clients, vendors, Western Region etc. While these are really great uses, in most instances folks are using tags to permanently note something about that record.
One thing that I find helpful though is to create and use tags on a temporary basis, in fact I often use tags as a pseudo To-Do item. While our To-Dos are useful for specific actions, I often find that using a single word tag is sufficient to remind me that a particular contact, or contact record, needs some attention. Here are a few examples:
BatchBox: All Items coming in to BatchBook through the BatchBox email get tagged automatically with a ‘Review’ tag. This lets me know that I haven’t yet acted upon that communication, be it to further process it or to verify that the contact it is attached to is completely populated and verified.
Review: This review tag gets used all the time as I’m working as well. If I am working and notice something inconsistent or incomplete in a contact record I’ll tag it ‘review’ so when I have time to go in and take another look I can find them easily.
Delete: I also frequently use a ‘delete’ tag to flag items that I don’t think I need to keep active any longer. I like to verify things before just removing data though so I’ll just tag these items and I can remove them all at once using a batch action.
Follow-up: A lot of times I’ll be looking through my contact list and come across a record and think I really need to call or email them. I could create a To-Do for that but even with our quick add that could break the flow of what I am working on. I can hover over the contact though and add a quick ‘call’ or ‘email’ tag to follow up on later.
It’s easy enough to filter or search for all the records I’ve tagged and work through them as I have time. Removing the tag when the action is complete returns things back to normal.
Imports: Another really useful place to assign a temporary tag is on a new file import. Say you’ve got a list of leads you collected at a trade show and you have a series of actions you want to perform with that list, a weekly mailing for example. You could create tags for each of the dates and the step of the mailing – aug23intro, aug30intro2 etc. These tags remind you that you need to perform that action and also let you grab and consolidate the recipients together easily without needing to enter in a unique ToDo item for each record.
These are just a few examples of how I use temporary tags as part of my workflow – I don’t doubt that our smart users have plenty of others – feel free to share them in the comments.
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Tags: tags, todos, workflow
Several people sent me the link to NYC VC Fred Wilson’s blog post in which he asks his readership for suggestions for a “Family CRM” service. He explains that he and his wife Joanne Wilson a.k.a Gotham Gal are looking for a way to share basic contact/calendar information, build some e-mail lists for social correspondence, planning and general family-managing.
In the thread, a few BatchBook customers recommended our CRM BatchBook (thanks Boris, Sri, Stefano and Sandro!), so I’d talk about how I use my BatchBook account to help manage my busy family.
First, I should explain that BatchBook was not designed for managing families, but it WAS designed for those small businesses that are about the same size, shape and energy level of an on-the-go family. I think the folks who recommended us recognize that the flexibility of BatchBook makes it work for all sorts of situations, including the work/life balancing (or is it juggling?) act that we small business owners face every day. As we know all too well, the line between business owner and family member frequently blurs.
My other co-founders and I started BatchBlue so that we could build a business deeply integrated with our family lives (I have three small children; they have two). Part of the solution for me has been using a personal BatchBook account to manage my family life. Here’s how I do it:
- I use my personal BatchBook account for my holiday mailing list, I’ve created a separate record for each person in a couple and link them with a “spouse” affiliation. I also created a field for how I want to address the collective them – ie “Dr. and Mrs. Allen” for my best friend’s older parents vs. “Sean Ransom & Michelle Riggen-Ransom” for my modern dual-name friends. I also created a field for their kids names so I can include them in the addressing.
- I’ve created tags for #doctor (which includes custom fields for hospitals & medications – my son has medical issues), #poker (my husband organizes a monthly game), #house (I seem to always call the plumber from the road), #holiday list, #teachers (with comments for gifts given so I don’t duplicate as multiple kids go through the same classes), #coach (same as teachers), #travel (my sister and I plan our family’s annual vacation so I’m usually dealing with hotels, house rentals, etc.)
- I am now the official keeper of my extended family’s official birthday and anniversary list, so I’ve created custom date fields for birthdays and anniversaries. My husband and I share a Google calendar and events I create from these dates automatically feed to it.
- I don’t keep my daily task list in BatchBook, but I do add events for recitals, performances, doctors appointments, etc. that feeds into my professional and my husband’s calendars.
- If I wanted to I could see my friends’ and families’ most recent Tweets, Flickr images, blog posts, etc. from within BatchBook, but honestly I don’t use this feature much in my personal account. These are all the same people I have on my special private Twitter list and I tend to keep up over there.
- I keep these all synced to my Android (and before that Blackberry) through Gmail. There is also a mobile version of BatchBook, and we are working to release native apps for the iPhone and Android soon.
My favorite criteria listed in the comments of Fred’s post (from wife Gotham Gal) is that the application they need should be built by a mom (we have a lot of those at BatchBlue, though we would add that a busy Dad’s probably just fine too!)
When it comes down to it, running a family is about managing relationships. No need to pie chart the likelihood of closing the deal, or dole out sales scripts to new employees. Just give me my son’s last prescription data when I need it, help me manage three different soccer schedules and keep me in good graces with my elderly Southern relatives who expect to hear from me no matter how busy I might be with work. Thanks to BatchBook, all that I can do.
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, how-to, supertags, work/life
It’s summertime and that means many BatchBluers have been taking a little time off to spend with family, go camping, splash 
around in pools and relax just a bit before the mad crunch of our Super Secret Fall Launch. That doesn’t stop folks from writing about us (in fact, judging from all the press we received in recent weeks, I should go on vacation more often!)
Here are a few links to some recent articles in case you saw one of us at the beach and want to make sure that yes, there is still work getting done around BatchBlue headquarters…
Award winning software AND software builders!
We are delighted to have been selected as a Rising Star by CRM magazine as part of the 2010 CRM Market Awards. This prestigious event is attended by some of the biggest names in the CRM space: other winners included industry analyst and author Brian Solis, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and companies like FourSquare, Radian6, Salesforce and IBM. We’re proud to have been chosen as representing “SMB meets social—in a very good way” by this organization. See the complete list of award recipients.
Speaking of winners, our very own VP of Technology Sean Ransom received his 40 under Forty Award at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, RI. A good time was had by most all of the BatchBluers (a couple of our crew couldn’t make it) as we celebrated Sean’s specialness with delicious drinks and food. Congratulations again to Sean on his achievement!
Multi-media
One of our favorite people in the small business world is Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends. Pamela and I were honored to be interviewed by her recently on her radio show. We had a great time talking small business with one of the leaders in this space.
While in Chicago for Start-Up Weekend, I sat down with Tim Jahn from Beyond the Pedway to talk about a topic we’re quite passionate about: the Customer Experience! Tim asked some great questions and meeting him was definitely a highlight to an already really fun and interesting weekend with some rocking Chicago entrepreneurs.
Fresh ink
The past couple of weeks have also brought some nice product reviews that we wanted to share. CRM Buyer featured us in a recent product profile of BatchBook and we received a mention in a helpful article from PC Mag about how to choose a CRM.
Phew, that’s it I think. A special thanks to our PR folks at Matter Communications who help us wrangle all this media and to all our great customers and readers for being so interested in what we’re up to.
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Tags: Community, Customer Service, small business
