5 Quick Things You Can Do to Keep BatchBook Fresh
- Posted May 31st, 2009
- Filed under: Social Media, Using BatchBook
I ran across a Twitter message recently from a customer who mentions that she likes BatchBook but needs to be more disciplined about using it. Well said! Your contact management tool is only going to be useful if you keep it up to date, but as busy business owners that’s not always easy to do. So I thought I would give a few tips on some “quickie” things you can do to keep your account fresh and useful.
- BCC e-mails into BatchBook using BatchBox. I’ve set up the BatchBox e-mail address (found in your communications tab, it looks something like batchbox+XXXXXXX@youraccount.batchbook.com) as a contact in all of my e-mail clients (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Blackberry) so can easily copy messages into BatchBox whether sending from work, personal or mobile accounts. I’ll periodically comb through those forwarded messages in BatchBook to add more details to the contact record of my recipient, but even if I don’t have time to do that the BatchBook search will find the recipients name in the body of their message, so I know I can always find them if I need to.
- Subscribe to the RSS feed of your communications. This is how I keep up with what is happening with the other Bluers. Our team is very disciplined about sending their communications into BatchBook (see 1 above), so when I do my daily (well, almost daily) catch-up on Google Reader, I can read through any communications happening with BatchBlue and the outside world.
- Send yourself to-dos. Easy peasy from your e-mail (or phone), just send the BatchBox account mentioned above an e-mail with “todo:” as the start of the subject line and BatchBook will automatically create a to-do item assigned to you. Don’t worry, we’ll soon work on a way to have BatchBook actually do them, too.
- Use the Twitter search on the dashboard. We have defaulted the Twitter search to look for your account name, but you can add as many searches as you like. My dashboard searches for “BatchBlue” OR “BatchBook” OR “pmohara” OR “sbbuzz” so I am constantly monitoring anything the Twitterverse is saying to/about me or our products (which is how I saw the message that inspired this blog post!).
- Add the Social Media SuperTag and use it. We know you are a savvy web user, so even if you are not actively blogging or Tweeting, your network probably is. Your BatchBook account will come alive if you add the Social Media SuperTag (from the SuperTag library) and start filling in some accounts. If you run across someone’s Twitter name, blog URL, Flickr account, etc, add the info to their contact record. BatchBook automatically grabs their friendly profile picture and a few of their recent messages – instantly bringing their contact record to life.
- Create a new “staff favorites” SuperTag.OK, this is just a fun freebie thrown in to lure you into the powerful world of SuperTagging. When you set up your BatchBook account, add a new SuperTag called “staff favorites” and add fields for things like “favorite cake flavor”, “favorite restaurant”, “favorite bands”, etc. Ask any users in your account to fill in their choices. This is a good way to get a sense of how SuperTags can be used, and will come in pretty handy the next time you are planning a staff party!
Do you have any “quickie” tips for fellow BatchBook users? We’re all pretty busy out there so would love to hear what you are doing to keep on top of your game.
