Business is booming here at BatchBlue and as such, we’re looking to add a few fine folks to our staff. If you like working with fun people, having a flexible schedule, helping small businesses and building something cool that, well, hasn’t really been done before, please take a look at our BatchBlue Jobs page.
We’re currently in need of some stellar Customer Service help and a kickin’ Ruby on Rails developer. Both jobs would be part-time to possible full-time and would involve in-person as well as remote work (so local to the Rhode Island area is preferred). Can-do attitude and a “That’s the ticket!” sensibility a must!
Sure working at BatchBlue is not ALL mustaches, cookie parties and donut cakes, but it is pretty fun. If you’d like to join our merry blue band, drop us a line and tell us why.
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Tags: batchblue, jobs
We’ve joined forces again this year with the awesome Providence Geeks crew to host our second annual “Geeks for Good” food drive. The food collected will go to the very worthy Rhode Island Community Food Bank, and we’re hoping to have someone from the organization come and tell us a little about their efforts to help local families in need to kick off the night’s event.
Here are the details:
When: Tonight! Wednesday, December 16, 2009 5:30-8:30 (we’ll be there starting at about 5:00 to collect donations)
Where: AS220 in downtown Providence, RI
What: Geekery, beer, networking and goodwill
Who: Free and open to anyone
Why: Because you are nice and we like you
Please bring your non-perishable food items with you; we’ll be collecting them at the door (here’s a list of their most needed food items.)
Hope to see you there!
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Tags: Community, providence geeks
Just a quick update on our Movember efforts. Thanks to our dear friends, family (and even a few strangers!) we were able to hit our goal in raising money to fight men’s prostate and testicular cancer. Our team collectively raised $290, and BatchBlue matched this amount for a total of $580 for team BatchStash — that’s $80 over our goal!
We’re excited to have participated in our very first Movember. Not only did we help raise money for a great cause, but as you can see, the BatchBoys grew out some mighty fine looking facial hair.
Well done, team!
A mustache in Montreal!
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Tags: movember
This past week, I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City. Since we launched BatchBlue Software just over three years ago, I’ve been to quite a few conferences. In tandem with the growth of our company has been the rise of social media, which has been great for us in many ways since our product, BatchBook, is an online contact organizer that grabs feeds from social media sites and lets you read them in one place.
But something seems to be changing in the conference world. In the past, they’ve been great places not only to learn from the leaders in your industry but to make connections, spark new friendships and form potential new partnerships. That sense of the hallway conversations being as important as the sessions themselves seems to be receding, largely because the conversations…aren’t really happening.
At Web 2.0, people were heads-down on their various electronic devices during breaks, not engaging with each other but seeking frenetically to connect with people not actually at the conference. I don’t mean to just specifically call out the Web 2.0 Expo because this is certainly happening in other places as well. And the conference panels were very good, in fact from a business-level some of the most useful that I’ve attended. But that’s another post.
Having recently attended the PopTech conference, which is a place where people connect instantly and constantly to share ideas, discuss sessions, start projects, I was particularily struck by the lack of attendee interaction. Even at the Web 2.0 “Power Up” station (Web 2.0’s version of the Blogger’s Lounge at another highly social conference, SXSW) it felt like we were in a cavernous office, with people quickly clicking and scrolling away in solitude rather than talking about the sessions that they had just attended.
Admittedly, people still have their daily work to do and as someone who liveblogs, I’m guilty of having my laptop up and running most of the time during sessions. But another thing that’s changing is what people are doing while they are online during the sessions. The Keynote speakers had an enormous screen behind them that was at first broadcasting their Twitterstream (hashtagged #w2e) behind the speakers. As an attendee, I found it enormously distracting. danah boyd from Microsoft Research New England, presenting on (ironically) “Streams of Content”, found it so unnerving that the audience was laughing at criticisms of her presentation that she later stated on her blog that she “closed down”.
I’m all for the back-channel and having a spirited conversation about a presentation, but I can tell you that as a presenter, to have it broadcasted while you are presenting sucks, especially once the spammers and the trolls join in. There’s even a term now, “harshtag”, which is when people start tagging their related tweets with something insulting in order to get it to trend.
(more…)
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Tags: chris brogan, Social Media, twitter, web 2.0 expo
I thought I’d share some quicklights from yesterday’s sessions at Web 2.0 Expo. I started at Kristina Halvorson’s “Content First: Why Content Strategy Will Save the Web” (view her presentation here), where she talked about how crucially important your content is and how often it’s the last thing companies plan for or think about especially when coming up with a “social media strategy”.
We’re guilty of this ourselves when we make site changes: often I’ll get a design to review that includes placeholder text “words go here” or “blah blah blah”, which as a writer I’ve always found kind of funny. But words matter and should absolutely be part of your planning and design process and even your usability testing.
Halvorson also talked about how things like Facebook and Twitter and blogs are only tools, that what’s important are the words you’re putting out there, reflecting your brand. If you put something up in a social media space, she notes, you become a publisher. Halvorson should a couple examples of old YouTube sites for forgotten corporate contests and mentioned how, if you don’t maintain your content in all the places you rush out to add it, it lives on out there without you, reflecting your brand.
A key takeaway from this session for me was the importance of creating a content inventory, which simply lists all the places where your content lives so none of it gets forgotten and languishes. She suggested looking on Google for guidance on getting a content inventory set up.
The next session was Tara Hunt’s “The Whuffie Factor”, which is based on her book of the same name about using social networks to build your business. She switched it up, though and gave a slightly different presentation. She did talk a lot about engaging customers, but was more focused on what’s next in this space. It’s not enough, she said, for a brand to simply be on Twitter, nor is it scalable to think that you can support a growing customer base there. She mentioned how people in social media are quick to hold up examples like Comcast as being wildly successful with using social media, but that if you dig a little deeper there are issues there (customers only using Twitter to vent, companies not responding to every issue etc.)
My favorite part of yesterday’s sessions though was hearing Chris Brogan’s talk “They Shall Know Us by Our Dialtone”. Chris is a great speaker and almost everything he says is tweet-worthy. But I was especially excited when he mentioned that he uses BatchBook to manage his contact database. Chris has been a customer for a while and he mentions us often, but it was really fun to be in the same room when someone’s advocating using your product you’ve worked so hard on building.
Tonight is our Small Business Web-up, so I’ll have pictures from that and more to report. I’m tweeting from @mriggen and the hashtag from the session is #w2e if you want to follow along!
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Tags: chris brogan, kristina halvorson, tara hunt, web 2.o expo
