Our friend Ramon Ray over at Smallbiztechnology.com invited me to take part in a webinar next week entitled “Beyond the Hype: How to Use Social Media Tools to Grow Your Business“. The webinar will focus on success stories, do’s and don’ts and how to get the most out of your social media efforts.
We met Ramon a couple of years ago at the Small Business Technology Summit he hosts in NYC each year and he is definitely one of the most enthusiastic, positive people we’ve had the pleasure of meeting! I’m excited to be a part of this conversation with Ramon.
Paul Burani, president of Clicksharp Marketing is my co-panelist (”webinarist”?), so it should be an interesting and hopefully informative discussion.
The webinar will take place on Wednesday, June 10 at 2pm ET. You can find complete details and register for the free event here.
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Tags: clicksharp, ramon ray, small business technology summit, smallbiz technology, Social Media, webinar
What do you do when you’re a small business that makes software for small businesses, specifically CRM for small businesses, and you start a weekly Twitter chat about small businesses using technology, then after a few weeks the Twitter chat folks want to talk about, well…CRM? If you’re BatchBlue, you invite someone super cool to moderate that week’s session and an equally cool person to be a Subject Matter Expert, then you step aside to let the conversation go where it may.
Sure, we hope everyone likes our product BatchBook but we recognize it might not be the best solution for everyone out there. So we’re saying “Bring it on!”
Join us tonight 8pm-10PM EST to take part in the Twitter CRM #sbbuzz conversation – Pam and I will be there but participating only as small business owners, not makers of one certain, lovable, kick-ass CRM. We’ll save that for our blog 
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Tags: @sbbuzz, bradford shimp, brent leary, small business CRM, twitter
Christopher Penn wrote a great post last week pointing out the importance of corporate and government America reestablishing trust with the people they serve. He explains what authenticity and transparency can do to help an organization establish this type of trust. At one point he mentions the role that social media can play in this relationship and he mentions me as an example of “human beings who represent their companies, but the trust you have in them is at the human level.” I am flattered by the compliment, especially coming from someone so committed to doing things right.
And it got me thinking. Personal transparency is certainly an important goal, but I have to say that the business’ transparency is the more important and more difficult to achieve. Here at BatchBlue, we are working very hard to build the trust that Chris is talking about; trust from our customers, trust from our vendors, trust from the bloggers who write about us and trust within ourselves. We strive to be as open, honest, responsive, and helpful as we can be. We feel that the best way to get to know a company, and ultimately to trust it is through direct access to the people behind it. We work hard to make sure that everyone here at BatchBlue is engaged in the conversations that are ultimately shaping what the company becomes.
I thought I would share some of the things we are doing to make our company increase its transparency in hopes that it will be useful to some of the other folks out there trying to establish an open relationship with their universe:
- First off, the BatchBlue communications team does not hoard the communications. In fact, our Communications Director Michelle established and published goals for the BatchBlue communications efforts early on and works with staff to make sure everyone is comfortable and supported in their own roles as Batch Ambassadors. And she is not afraid to venture out into the great social networking unknowns and bring the rest of the group up to speed as the conversations start churning.
- Everyone in the company has access to the company social network accounts including our Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. We keep the logins for the company accounts posted on our wiki and everyone is encouraged to engage. Our communications team carries the bulk of the load, but even surly programmers have been known to Twitter away.
- Everyone copies all of their professional email messages into our BatchBook account so that we all have access to any communications with our customers or other professional contacts. Most of us subscribe to the RSS feed of those communications – so we can see these business conversations as they are unfolding.
No longer are the direct conversations inevitably happening between people working closely together being lost in their separate e-mail accounts. We can all see the progression of a conversation as it is happening.
- We have a very active group of customers interacting with us and with each other in our user forums. Each of us subscribes to the RSS feed of those forums so we can also keep an ear open to the conversations happening there as well.
- All messages that come in from customers to our support@batchblue.com or feedback@batchblue.com email addresses are sent to the entire staff. Customer service responds to the incoming questions, but everyone on staff sees the general tone and issues being reported. This helps us all stay in touch with the attitude of our customers towards us and our product.
- Every staff member responds to customer service emails. We have rotating schedule on the front lines of customer service so that not only are we aware of the relationships that are forming with our customers, each of us takes a turn at forming some ourselves.
- We have a feed of all Twitter messages being sent in to or written about BatchBook directly on our BatchBlue dashboard. You can follow full Twitter conversations happening between other staff members and prospects or clients as they are happening.
- We have a feed of all mentions or our company in Google News or Google Blogs directly on the BatchBlue dashboard. So again we are all keeping a close tab on what is being said about us in the great wide Internet and can engage quickly where it makes sense.
An interesting thing happened on the way to finishing this post. I showed the draft to some folks at our weekly staff meeting and got a little razzing on my use of the circa 1999 jagged edge effect on the screenshots I include above. Since this is story about the importance of transparency and authenticity, I felt funny about reworking the images just for the coolness factor. Being a human being, I also felt funny about having TOO much of my dorkiness show through. For an organization trying to put together a group voice, I think it is important that everyone be allowed to let some of the raw, unedited versions of themselves show. But I think it is equally important that they learn and grow together and hopefully raise the bar for each other to collectively improve . So retro-jagged edges make it in for now, though I reserve the right to switch to the hip new thing as I learn from my classy cohorts just what that thing is.
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You may have thought the BeeGees had three members (OK, four if you include Andy). But our social media BeeGees are actually five in number.
Lately we’ve been asked by some pretty smart folks about what our social media strategy is and how we’ve been using social media to help our small business grow. In thinking about the answer to this question, I’ve come up with what really is at the heart of what we as a company strive to do. It’s not as much of a strategy as it is a philosophy. And because we’re BatchBlue, there had to be some disco involved just to keep it fun.
“B.G.” in this case stands for “Be Good“. These five principles drive everything we do, from late-night work sessions, to customer feature request reviews at staff meetings, to raising money for local food shelters. So crank up the hi-fi, put your earphones on and settle back to enjoy the high-pitched melodic stylings of the BeeGees of Social Media:
1. Be Good at your product or service. There’s no sense in trying to sell a product that you don’t believe in. It’s a waste of your time and your potential customers’ time. Make your product or service awesome. If you make widgets, they should be the best darn widgets out there. If you polish widgets, they should end up really, really shiny. And, more importantly, help make your customers be awesome in using your great, shiny widgets. They will love you for it.
2. Be Good at customer service. Customers should always have a good experience with your company, even if they decide not to use your product or service. Who wants to have a bad experience when trying to get something done? Nobody, that’s who. The new numbers floating around indicate that a happy customer will tell three people, but now thanks to the power of social media, an unhappy customer can reach an average of 3,000. You want happy customers — the numbers prove it.
And, not only do customers give you a chance to get valid feedback on your product or service, they often have suggestions that will wildly improve it. Therefore, you should also…
3. Be Good at listening. Like it or not, people are out there talking about your company. A social media-savvy company will be all ears, listening what people love or hate about them and responding where appropriate. Have a blog? Open comments and respond to each one. If you have folks who are passionate about your product or company, look at hosting a forum where they can talk to you and to each other. Ning is a great, free networking site where like-minded people can come together to discuss things, and you need virtually no technical knowledge to set it up.
Monitor your brand on Twitter using Twitter search to see what folks are saying there. Type in your company’s name and “sucks” in Google search to see if anyone is damaging your brand without you knowing it. Again, the conversations are happening out there – and no one likes it when people talk behind their back, right?
4. Be Good at sharing. In his new book Outliers, writer and social theorist Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. You might not be an expert, but whatever it is you do, you probably know more about it than most people. Write a paper or a blog post and share what’s worked for you. Someone is bound to find it helpful.
Many folks are giving away great, relevant content via their blogs. Chris Brogan gives away daily advice on social media on his blog and often publishes free eBooks. Todd Defren writes smartly about PR over at PR Squared. And Anita Campbell’s SmallBizTrends is chock full of advice for, you guessed it, small business owners.
Last, if a customer has given you a great suggestion that you’ve ended up using, tell the world! It will be good, free publicity for them and give you some of that whuffie that the Internet folks are so crazy about these days. We run a series on our blog featuring customers suggestions we’ve implemented called Our Users are So Smart because, well, they are! We wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.
5. Be Good. This one is Very Important. If you own your own business or have a job working for someone else, you’re better off than a lot of folks in the world. Give of your time, give of your money, give of your service. Only good will come of it.
Maybe this post didn’t quite get you dancing (although you should be!) but especially in this economy, following the BeeGees just might be what keeps you Stayin’ Alive.
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Tags: bee gees, communications, Customer Service, Social Media
This is the final post in a three-part series about how I made the BatchBook Screencasts. In Part 1, we recorded the screencasts. In Part 2, we encoded the screencasts and embedded them on the web. Today, we’re going to take your screencasts and turn them into a video podcast. We’ll also submit the podcast to iTunes.
Making the screencast into a podcast
First of all, what exactly is a podcast? Sure it’s audio, and you can subscribe to it, but really… what is it? Luckily, we included “Podcasting” in our glossary of tech terms!
Podcasting is a kind of audio broadcasting that uses the Internet, like an on-line radio show. The name was created by combining “iPod” and “broadcasting”. Podcasting involves making one or more files available in an RSS feed. A pod-caster (the creator of the podcast) makes a list of music and/or other audio files and makes the list available for other users to retrieve.
So, once you have a few audio or video files, all you need to make them into a podcast is an RSS feed. That’s what your listeners/viewers can “subscribe” to in an RSS reader or podcasting client (such as iTunes).
What’s an RSS feed? That’s in the glossary too!
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is a document that contains either a summary of content from a web site or the full text of a website. RSS feeds makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites automatically rather than checking them manually.
What does an RSS feed look like? It looks a lot like an XML document (because it is an XML document!). Here’s an example of a feed—our BatchBlue News RSS feed (truncated after the first news story):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>BatchBlue News</title>
<description>News updates from BatchBlue Software, LLC</description>
<link>http://batchblue.com</link>
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
<lastBuildDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:21:00 -0500</lastBuildDate>
<pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:20:14 -0500</pubDate>
<generator>FeedForAll Mac v2.1 (2.1.0.1); http://www.FeedForAll.com/</generator>
<item>
<title>BatchBlue Launches New Social CRM Solution Specifically for Marketers: BatchBook for Marketing</title>
<description>New BatchBook for Marketing Includes Functionality to Manage Queries from Peter Shankman's Popular Help a Reporter Out (TM) Service</description>
<link>http://batchblue.com/pr-090122-batchbook-for-marketing.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="false">BF056ABF-4EAA-4872-8FC5-247166D68DBE-3971-000031C872E078D5-FFA</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:21:00 -0500</pubDate>
</item>
...
Looks scary, huh? If you look carefully, it makes sense… the “channel” is what the feed is about (in this case “BatchBlue News”). There’s the date last updated, link to the feed’s author, some technical jargon, etc. An “item” is an individual entry (or in this case, a news story). Each “item” has a description, a link, a date, etc.
Luckily, you don’t have to edit this by hand. There are some nice tools out there to help you do it. The one I use is called FeedForAll. Specifically, I use FeedForAll for Mac ($40).
The interface is much less scary. In fact, it’s downright inviting. Here’s the “channel”:
And an individual item:
So, that’s an RSS feed. But there’s one more thing needed in an RSS feed to make it a podcast: an enclosure. In a podcast feed, each “item” will contain not only a <link> but an <enclosure> (a link to the actual media file). What’s the difference? When a podcast episode is published, it will often be posted on a web page or blog. The <link> is that page. The <enclosure> is a direct link to the media file (audio or video) itself. That way, podcasting clients such as iTunes know what file to download.
Here’s an example of an item from our screencasts feed. The screencasts have an <enclosure> (the video file) as well as a <link> (a direct link to that video on our screencasts page).
<item>
<title>Manage your contacts and social network</title>
<description>Manage your contacts and social network</description>
<link>http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts.html#contacts-video</link>
<enclosure url="http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts/contacts.m4v" length="8750577" type="video/x-m4v"></enclosure>
<guid isPermaLink="false">0BB7B405-54E1-4BD3-85D8-9E43757ED8A7-29077-00011275E171D3F1-FFA</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:05:32 -0500</pubDate>
<itunes:subtitle>Manage your contacts and social network</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>Manage your contacts and social network</itunes:summary>
<itunes:duration>00:03:56</itunes:duration>
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
</item>
Getting the podcast on iTunes
The first thing everyone wants to do when they get a podcast is submit it to iTunes. Why? iTunes has the largest, most popular podcast directory built into the application. You can submit your podcast to get it listed on iTunes. An iTunes listing looks like this:
To submit your podcast, open iTunes. Then go to the iTunes Store. Choose Podcasts. Near the bottom, you’ll (eventually) find a “Submit a Podcast” link. That will bring you to a screen that looks like this:
That’s all it takes to actually submit your podcast. Within a few days, it will be approved.
Now, there are ways to enhance your feed for iTunes, to make it look better. iTunes uses a slew of additional tags for the RSS feed. For example, here’s the “channel” for the screencasts feed:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>BatchBook Screencasts</title>
<description>BatchBook is an easy-to-use customer relationship manager (CRM) designed for small business owners. The BatchBook Screencasts will show you the ins and outs of using BatchBook.</description>
<link>http://batchblue.com/screencasts.html</link>
<copyright>2006-2008 BatchBlue Software, LLC</copyright>
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
<language>en</language>
<lastBuildDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:33:55 -0500</lastBuildDate>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:33:44 -0500</pubDate>
<generator>FeedForAll Mac v2.1 (2.1.0.1); http://www.FeedForAll.com/</generator>
<itunes:subtitle>BatchBook Screencasts</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>BatchBook is an easy-to-use customer relationship manager (CRM) designed for small business owners. The BatchBook Screencasts will show you the ins and outs of using BatchBook.</itunes:summary>
<itunes:category text="Technology">
<itunes:category text="Software How-To"/>
</itunes:category>
<itunes:keywords>small business crm, contact management</itunes:keywords>
<itunes:author>BatchBlue Software</itunes:author>
<itunes:owner>
<itunes:email>adarowski@batchblue.com</itunes:email>
<itunes:name>Adam Darowski</itunes:name>
</itunes:owner>
<itunes:image href="http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts/itunes.png" />
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
...
As you can see, the iTunes info contains such data as a summary, categories, contact information, artwork, and more.
Here’s an example of an “item” in an iTunes-optimized screencast feed:
<item>
<title>Manage your contacts and social network</title>
<description>Manage your contacts and social network</description>
<link>http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts.html#contacts-video</link>
<enclosure url="http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts/contacts.m4v" length="8750577" type="video/x-m4v" ></enclosure>
<guid isPermaLink="false">0BB7B405-54E1-4BD3-85D8-9E43757ED8A7-29077-00011275E171D3F1-FFA</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:05:32 -0500</pubDate>
<itunes:subtitle>Manage your contacts and social network</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>Manage your contacts and social network</itunes:summary>
<itunes:duration>00:03:56</itunes:duration>
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
</item>
Thankfully, we don’t have to edit that by hand either. FeedForAll can handle iTunes data just fine. Here’s the interface for adding “channel” information:
And here’s the additional info for an “item”:
Every time you add a new item (or episode, or screencast), simply update the feed and iTunes will automatically update as well.
And you’ve done it!
If you’ve followed along since the first post, you’ve got a bunch of screencasts, they’re embedded on your site, they’ve got a feed, and they’re listed in iTunes. Sweet! I hope you found this series helpful!
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Tags: enclosure, FeedForAll, how-to, itunes, podcast, rss, screencasts, tutorial, video
