Last night, BatchBlue Onboarding Specialist Stephanie Sweeney and I made the drive up to Boston to attend the Rock Stars of Social CRM event, hosted by Radian6 and Chris Brogan. They had a lot of fun with the Rock Star theme, complete with colored stage lights, concert tees and even a full-blown Rock Band set-up for audience members to rock out with after the panel.
The panelists included were Frank Eliason (Comcast), Paul Greenberg (Author of CRM at the Speed of Light), Michael Thomas (National President, CRM Association), and our favorite CRM go-to guy, Brent Leary (Co-author of Barack 2.0 and Co-founder of CRM Essentials).
Because we consider BatchBook to be a social CRM (slide via Brent Leary), I was curious to hear what the folks at the cutting edge had to say. I was especially impressed with Frank Eliason’s inclusion on the panel, since he represents a company that is actually out there doing all this stuff. While I always appreciate the bird’s eye view from consultants and experts, I have to agree with Doug Haslam of Shift Communications‘ assertion that he’s getting a bit impatient with social media.
After the panel, Doug and I had a brief conversation where I wondered if, when email entered the picture ten years or so ago, there were endless conferences and seminars and articles written about how email (a communication tool in the same way that social media is a communication tool) was going to fundamentally change the business world.
Admittedly, email did change the way companies interacted with their customers – I was in the customer service department at Amazon.com in 1997 and I witnessed it happening first-hand. Customers found it insane that we didn’t take phone orders; that Amazon was an Internet only company. At the time, we were too busy answering customer emails to talk about email as a tool.
That experience definitely influenced BatchBlue’s commitment to providing excellent service. One thing BatchBlue does using social media is host a weekly Twitter chat called SBBUZZ, where small business owners can talk about the issues (largely focused on social media and other technologies) that are most important to them. What’s nice about this event is that a real community of folks has developed there. Each week, there’s an opportunity for folks to share what’s working, what’s not, what kind of issues people are having, even just to swap funny stories about what happened over the course of the past week as they deal with running and growing their businesses.
If Social CRM is all about the customer, I guess what I’m missing at these big, “rock star” events is more of a presence from other small business owners who are in the trenches, actually using these tools to build their customer relationships every day. There are plenty of Rock Stars out there, talking to each other on SBBUZZ and similar social media places. And my favorite Rock Star, Stephanie, was sitting right next to me. She in every way embodies customer service and building customer relationships done right. I’d wear her concert tee any day.
One of my favorite BatchBook features is the Social Media SuperTag. This week, we enhanced it by adding support for LinkedIn profiles. All you have to is enter address to a public LinkedIn profile. When you save it, we’ll replace the link with a widget that looks a lot like this:
Out of the box, the Social Media SuperTag allows you to enter a contacts usernames on Twitter, Flickr, or Delicious and we’ll show the last three tweets, photos, or bookmarks. You can also enter a Blog feed and see excerpts of the last three posts. This will actually work for any RSS feed. In the screencast below, I add a Slideshare presentations, Last.fm recent tracks, and BatchBook forum feeds to a contact record.
We think this is a great way to see what’s on the mind of your most valuable contacts right before you pick up the phone or start that email. Watch below to see the Social Media SuperTag in action!
Screencast: Social media integration with the Social Media SuperTag
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.
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:
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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