The lawn needs mowing and the Red Sox are on a winning streak, so that can only mean one thing… it’s spring! We have a bunch of cool things under development (if I do say so myself), but before we start adding more to BatchBook, we felt it was time to do a little spring cleaning. The community over at the BatchBlue Forums has helped us so much along the way that we consider it an additional team member. For that reason, we’re giving the forum users a sneak peek at the updates we’re making.
If you’re a forum user, we’d love to hear your feedback. If you’re not a forum user yet, we’d love to welcome you to the community. As forum user Kenny recently said:
One of the key benefits BB is becoming for me is an excellent source of tips on new or emerging web sites / services that I hadn’t been aware of previously, via users on this forum.
This is great! Thanks all for participating on this board
We’ve been busy these past few weeks hooking up on the backend with many of our favorite web services for small businesses. One of our favorites is FreshBooks, the professional invoicing and time tracking tool.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, then a screencast must be worth at least a thousand and six. Here’s Adam’s latest screencast explaining how the integration works. HINT: It’s way cool.
We’ve been long-time customers of FreshBooks and really love both the product and the company. We hope this integration will make it easier for you to manage all of your contacts and view their invoices from one place. Here’s a post on the FreshBooks blog talking about the integration as well.
BatchBox email forwarding is one of my favorite feature of BatchBook. Every BatchBook user gets their own BatchBox address. You can use that address to forward (or BCC) email messages into BatchBook. We’ll handle the trouble of creating a communication, attaching it to the proper contacts, and retaining attachments.
On any contact page in BatchBook, email addresses (of course) are hyperlinked so that clicking on them opens a new message in your email application. Forum user Dean made the awesome suggestion that we automatically BCC those messages to the BatchBox address. He got an Our Users are So Smart post for that.
Some of our savvy forum users are Gmail users. So, they used a Firefox add-on to make all email links open in Gmail. Only problem is Gmail was dropping the “+” sign that’s in every BatchBox email address. That’s no fun. We were kind of stumped, though.
… I know at least Firefox can be set-up to use gmail, and there are some scripts out there like Greasemonkey that allow me to make all my mailto links go through gmail, but I use several computers, sometimes a shared or public one or a friend’s which I could not do any of this to.
But I just found out that all these scripts do is re-write the ‘mailto’ link to something like this:
“https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&source=mailto&to=PUT TO ADDRESS HERE&bcc=PUT BATCHBOOK BCC ADDRESS HERE”
It would be amazing if you could provide an option for each account to make all their links use gmail (or other webmail services). By selecting options, like ‘Use Your Desktop Email’, ‘Use Gmail’, ‘Use Webmail Service X’, etc. the mailto links would be re-written to cater to our email service. …
Dude!
So, Sean put the change in and it was live about a day later. If you’re a GMail user, just head over to your account settings. In the BatchBox section, there’s a checkbox to convert all emails to GMail friendly links. Then, every time you click on an email address within BatchBook, it will open a new Gmail window and automatically put your BatchBox address in the BCC.
If you take a look at our website, you can pretty much tell what BatchBook is—a social CRM and contact management web application for small businesses and freelancers. There are many things BatchBook is not. But BatchBook is also very flexible (thanks to features like SuperTags and affiliations), which opens the possibility of people turning it into something we never imagined.
New forum user dcis-steve is one of those people. He went from “newbie user” to “BatchBook for Project Management” pioneer in two days. We had a good discussion on the BatchBook Forums about what he was up to. Here is his summary of how turned BatchBook into a project management application.
Prerequisite
First of all I have a supertag for “Projects”. The fields for this SuperTag I use are:
Bid Amount (text field for dollar amount)
Type of work (multiple choice – for my various types of services that I do bid work for)
Status (multiple choice – bid/proposal, active, completed, on hold)
Having this SuperTag attached to each project/company record allows me to easily call up all my projects by clicking the tag in the tag cloud. I have also created reports for Active Projects Only, etc.
Creating the Project
Since there is currently no place to create a project, I use a company record to represent my project.
Create a new company labeled with an @ on the front and then title it accordingly (ex: @New website for ABC, Inc.)
Tag it with your Project SuperTag and fill in the fields for the SuperTag as needed
You can optionally provide contact info for the project if you want, but I don’t bother since I will be affiliating the project with the company it belongs to.
Setting up the Affiliation
I create two different new affiliations to use with my projects:
Project : Company
Project : Customer
When I am affiliating the project with a company record, I use the first affiliation, and when it’s associated with an individual, I use the second one. This may or may not be the best way to do this, but it works for me.
Now that your affiliations are set up, you can create the affiliation for the project. Assuming you are affiliating the project with a company, you just enter the company name and then select the proper affiliation that you just set up. You’ll know if it worked right if you see the company listed under affiliations on the project. If you click the company name to go to that record, you should see the project listed under affiliations for the company.
That’s pretty much it. Now you have a project associated with the company or individual, which you can log project specific comms and to-do’s against.
Pretty smart, huh? I thought so. Thanks Steve… you’re so smart!
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.
