BatchBook Blog
Archive for the “Social Media” Category
We have been loving the Flowtown integration and have been looking for more ways to leverage the information we get back from Flowtown in BatchBook.
We’ve received some ideas from Twitter as well as a very thoughtful blog post from our customer Hugh Macken. They all agreed on one thing: Add Klout!
Klout, for those who don’t know, is a great tool to measure a persons influence on the social web. Influence is measured on many different fronts including followers, friends, total retweets, etc. You receive a Klout score from 1-100 with 100 meaning you basically rule the social web.
Flowtown gives us this score but until today we were not displaying it. Now, if you are using the Flowtown integration, we populate the score into your social media supertag:
Yeah my score is pretty low…thank you Mom for following me though!
We import the score as a number field so using BatchBook reports you can search for folks with a Klout score greater than, less than or equal to. You can create lists targeted based on Klout score which can be very powerful.
We’re also pulling in job title information from Flowtown if the contact does not have a existing title on their contact record. Let us know what else you would like to see out of this integration — we’re listening!
So there you have it, a small addition to BatchBook but something we think you will find very useful. And you’re welcome, @tsondermann.
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Tags: batchbook, flowtown, marketing, social crm, Social Media
I recently did some customization of the BatchBlue fan page on Facebook. We thought it would be fun to have a little give-away for our friends on Facebook, so I added one of our very own BatchBook Custom Forms to our page. Now, when friends sign up on our Facebook page, their information is magically transported to our BatchBook account so we’ll have all the important information we need to notify the winners.
One of our super smart customers, Alex Webster, outlined the steps for adding a BatchBook form to your Facebook page in our forums and I thought I would share some steps and screenshots here for you.
Step 1:
The first thing you will need to do is set up your form in your BatchBook account. We have a handy FAQ which explains the process. Create the form and save it in your account. I would suggest that you set the return URL to the URL for your Facebook Wall. Then, you’ll need to take a little trip down memory lane to visit Adam Darowski’s post on customizing BatchBook forms. Grab the source code from your form and pay particular attention to step 2 so your form will work with your BatchBook account. Save the code in a text file. If you would like to add your own custom css you can add it at the top of this file between some style tags or use inline styles for the elements you would like to customize. If you don’t use your own styles, then the default Facebook styles will be used for your form. If you need help customizing the css in your FBML tab, here is a great tutorial.
Step 2:
Head on over to your Facebook fan page. Click on the edit button below your profile picture. You will need to add the FBML application from this page. If you don’t see it listed at the bottom of the page under “More Applications”, then click on “Browse More” and do a quick search for it. Adding this application to your Facebook page will allow you to create a custom tab on your Facebook page.
Step 3:
Click edit to customize the tab.
You will need to give the tab a name and then you will paste the form code from your text file into the large box of the FBML application. Click “Save Changes”.
Step 4:
FBML can be saved as a box or a tab. We will be setting this up as a tab, so you will need to make the following edits. Find the name of the FBML tab that we just created and click on Application settings.
You will need to change the settings to look like what we have in this image. The wording is a little confusing, but make sure that you change it to “Box: Available” and “Tab: Added”. That will make your form appear on it’s own tab.
Step 5:
You can set the form tab to be the default landing page for new visitors to your Facebook fan page. You can do this by clicking on the “Edit” link under “Wall Settings” and selecting your form page from the drop down menu.
Ta Da!
You now have a new Custom Form on your Facebook Fan Page. Who’s cooler than you? Please share your Fan Pages with us, we’d love to see them!
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Tags: facebook, forms, Social Media
You may have noticed a few new shiny links and buttons that we snuck into the BatchBook redesign. My favorite of these is a bright green “Search Social Network” button found under every individual’s name and title information. But don’t be fooled by the unassuming manner of this image – it actually wields a mighty power when clicked.
The “Search Social Network” activates a search through Sociotoco.com. Using the first/last name and relevant location information of your contact, the application searches through the Twitter, Flickr and LinkedIn sites and returns anyone that it thinks matches your contact. You might see a few erroneous people returned especially if you contact has a fairly common name, but you can use the included pictures and location information to help you find the right contact.
Once you’ve selected the radio button next to the matching social media accounts, click the “Save” button. Your contact will now have the social media SuperTag attached to this record and will pull the most recent Tweets, Flickr pictures and LinkedIn profile and display it on the contact page.
With this new integration, the click of a button now richly populates your contact’s profile with social media content that includes the observations, images, and relationships that make up their online world. Powerful stuff indeed.
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Jeremiah Owyang recently wrote an article for CRM Magazine Social CRM Vendors Don’t Walk The Talk where he puts a number of CRM vendors through the spreadsheet grinder to see how their social media engagement measures up to the social media features their products espouse. BatchBook was not included in the analysis, though BatchFriend and customer Paul Mabray from Vintank.com was kind enough to mention us in the comments.
I agree with Jeremiah, but I think there is a clear distinction between the CRM companies that are now making a social media play versus the social media upstarts who are incorporating some traditional CRM features such as sales and customer service management into their products as they build them. Jeremiah highlighted a number of products that were developed around older (phone, e-mail, direct mail) marketing tools and are now working to add social media as an additional sales channel. Alternately, there are newer products like Jive, Gist and our own BatchBook that really began as social media communication tools and have added sales features as another layer.
Not surprisingly, those with Web 2.0 roots have more integration with social media throughout our products and throughout our company cultures, as well. As he mentions, social media is not a linear channel that can be “added on” in the same way previous channels have been. It is an intricate web of blogs, comments, tweets, direct messages, friend requests, recommendations, favorites and hashtags each with their own sub-culture and mini-dialect that together shape the direction of a conversation. Whether it’s sales, customer service, or project management, this new dialogue is not fully represented unless you can track all aspects of the conversation, and more importantly, understand their meaning in context with your relationships.
I applaud Jeremiah for calling companies out for more engagement. He makes great points about not only supporting customer and developer discussions, but also showcasing those communities as a vibrant component of the product. He’s also given us a few ideas for pushing our community into a more prominent part of the product. And isn’t that what social media is about? Using a public kick in the pants to move your efforts forward.
While it’s certainly interesting to watch how the older, more established companies work to fit social media into their product offerings, I think it’s even more interesting to build a product around the new tools as they are being developed.
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Tags: batchblue, batchbook, crm, social crm, Social Media
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
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