Our very own Michelle Riggen Ransom (@mriggen on Twitter) was part of a panel on Twitter this week. The panel was hosted by The Perry Group and called “The Twitter phenomenon explodes in Rhode Island: What it means for you, your business and your brand”. The local news was present, and Michelle (among others) was interviewed in this segment:
We’re back and finally somewhat recovered from the madness that is SXSW. This year, Michelle, Pam and Matt attended (Michelle’s usual partner in social media crime, Adam, was out having a baby – congrads, Adam!)
Like last year, the event was blur of meet-ups, panels, interviews, intense hallway conversations and non-stop activity. Sadly, the BatchBlue team didn’t get to attend too many panels, but as a networking event, it was great. And a lot of cool stuff came out of it.
In the days (okay, more like hours) leading up to SXSW, we put the finishing touches on the beta of BatchBook sync, which was hugely exciting for us as it brings us one step closer to the idea of true data portability. Our plan was to soft launch BatchBook sync at SXSW, then return home to do some tweaking and de-bugging before really getting the word out. But like many well-intentioned plans (especially as they pertain to SXSW), this got tossed out the window and instead we found ourselves buckling our virtual seatbelts for a wild web app ride. Lots of new traffic and an ill-fated server move resulted in some growing pains for BatchBook, but thanks largely to the superhuman, nocturnal efforts of Sean and Matt, we’ve made it through and are better than ever. We also give a huge thanks to our customers both old and new for bearing with us through that rocky week.
T-Shirts and a Texas-sized small business brunch Since we knew how much people depend on Twitter in Austin to help them plan, we brought a bunch of “BatchBook Social CRM” t-shirts with us that had a space for people’s Twitter handles on the front. The t-shirts were a big hit: we literally had people chasing us down to get one! Thanks to our friend and unofficial BatchBlue mascot TJ Sondermann for the concept.
On Sunday, we planned on hosting a Small Business Brunch with our friend Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions. We expected maybe twenty or so folks to come by the delicious Moonshine Cafe to meet up, network and talk small business. We were pleasantly surprised when more than double that number showed up, thanks in large part ot Shashi’s mad Twitter skills. The restaurant was extremely accommodating and graciously set up extra tables so everyone could enjoy their delicious Sunday brunch. We hung out with social media man Jeff Pulver, Lisa Rodwell from Moo cards, Saul Colt from Freshbooks, Becky McCray from Small Biz Survival, and many many others. Perhaps the most important connection made that morning was when Matt learned chicken-fried steak is best eaten with gravy.
The Small Business Web
We were also happy about how much excitement the concept of the Small Business Web generated, both with our new sync partners and the press we spoke with. Grant Robertson from the Download Squad shot a really fun video (see above) of us and some of the folks from Freshbooks, Outright and Shoeboxed talking about the Small Business Web. It was definitely our most rock star moment, as people crowded up to us after the interview wanting to know more about our products and how they worked with each other. Cool! We’re still sorting out the details of what the Small Business Web will look like as we partner with other folks, but we did put together a sort of mission statement:
The Small Business Web is a movement to bring together like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to integrate our respective products and make life easier for small businesses. While there are many products available for small business owners on the Web, the approach we’re taking is to use each others APIs to provide a high-level of integration between these applications and create a more seamless experience for our customers.
Our goal is to refine and better define the Small Business Web over the upcoming months. We’ll be updating here as we do.
We also got some other great press coverage coming out of SXSW, which you can read on our Press page. One of the coolest things was that Chris Brogan called us his “favorite web app” (well, after Twitter), which is a huge compliment coming from the King of All Social Media (though he would tell you he was but its humble servant).
In all, it was once again a worthwhile conference filled with interesting people doing exciting things and we were very glad to be a part of it. Thanks to everyone we met and we hope to see you again in Texas next year (you too, Adam!)
It’s been a while since we’ve done a round up of all the nice things people are saying about us and how they are using our product, so we thought we’d give you an update on what’s been going on in the Wonderful World of Press.
BatchBlue on TV
Since we last checked in, we’ve been on TV (well, Hubspot TV) talking about using social media tools for business. Adam and I touched on many of the topics we cover in our Social Media for Small Business Blue Paper and we enjoyed a nice sushi lunch with one of our favorite Hubspotters Rick Burnes afterward. Fun! And delicious!
All the Chrises in the house
Chris Penn, who runs the successful Financial Aid Podcast, wrote an excellent post about how job hunters can use BatchBook, which is very timely in light of the present economic climate. And social media wunderkind Chris Brogan proved he’s not just another pretty face by showing us how he uses BatchBook to help him beat Dunbar’s Number.
@sbbuzz is buzzing
As Pam wrote last week, we created @sbbuzz after receiving a plea from a small business owner to help her better understand what tech tools are out there and how your average small business owner should be using them. @sbbuzz is a weekly conversation taking place between techies and business owners on every Tuesday from 8pm-10pm EST addressing these very issues.
We’ve had two successful sessions and look forward to hosting another this evening. See what people are saying in the Twittersphere.
It’s exciting to see the many different ways people are using our product, and discovering new ways to be helpful to our customers. It’s what we love doing and it’s what keeps us as busy as bees.
BatchBlue was thrilled to receive an Inbound Marketing Award for our Small Business Super Hero contest, which we ran earlier this year. We’ll be receiving the award, as well as presenting on a panel “Inbound Marketing Challenges and Solutions for the Trenches” at Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing Summit next Monday up in Boston.
On Tuesday, Sept. 9th, we’ll be on a panel at Chris Brogan and Paul Gillin’s New Marketing Bootcamp. The panel is entitled “Hands-on Workshop: Applying Social Networking in the Real World”, a topic we’ve written about and participated in actively over the past year. It should be a lively discussion!
We’re really looking forward to these events. If you’re going, make sure you find us and say hello — we look like this. See you there!
BatchBlue and BatchBook have been getting some great reviews and other exciting coverage over the past few weeks, so I thought I’d give you the highlights in case you missed any of it on our press page.
Earlier this month, our friend and a man with excellent hair Chris Brogan wrote up a product review of BatchBook on his blog (complete with screenshots and everything!) Here’s an excerpt:
I recommend BatchBook for the list sorting ability, for the tagging and slicing ability, for the Super Tags…and if you have no other form of client relationship management software, this would be a great lightweight tool.
Chris is what they call around these parts “wicked smaht”. We’re thrilled he’s using and liking BatchBook.
Another great guy and a long-time BatchBook user (since alpha, baby!) is Scott Blitstein, who writes over at Web Worker Daily. We love Web Worker Daily since we are all work-at-home Web workers ourselves. Scott wrote up his nice review highlighting our BatchBox email forwarding feature here.
I was personally very excited to be written up by Kiva as a company that is promoting their support of Kiva.org. As I’ve written in the past, we’re big fans of the site and just today were able to help fund four more entrepreneurs through Kiva’s site.
Last but certainly not least, our very own president Pamela O’Hara was just announced as one of Providence’s “40 under 40: The Next Generation of Business Community Leaders”! We’ll be writing a separate post about the award complete with pictures from the celebratory dinner. In the meantime, here’s the official announcement from the Providence Business Journal. Congratulations, Pam!
That’s the round-up. Reading that people like your product and appreciate your company’s efforts really make all the hard work well worth it.
![[Post to Twitter]](http://blog.batchblue.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter.png){kind=icon}
