Once again, social media has collided my worlds in an interesting (and hopefully beneficial) way. Last week, I was lamenting on my personal Twitter account how many children and families were going to be impacted by all of the recent lay-offs across the country. My friend responded with a story about a single mom in Providence who didn’t have enough money to buy her hungry kids snacks. Within minutes another friend, T.J. Sondermann, had proposed that we use the next Providence Geeks meeting as a venue where we could collect food for our local food bank.
I contacted Jack Templin, who with Brian Jepson runs the monthly Providence Geeks meeting, and pitched the idea via email. Always supportive of local efforts, Jack and Brian were quickly on-board. BatchBlue president Pamela O’Hara then contacted a friend who works at the Rhode Island Food Bank and worked out the logistics of what was most needed and how we would collect it.
Jack requested an image for the newsletter he was sending out announcing the event, so Adam and I decided to have a little fun with it. We spent some time working up a couple quick logo ideas, then posted the results on Flickr and asked people on Twitter to vote for their favorites. We got a lot of great feedback and ended up combining two designs for the final logo used on the webpage announcing the first offical Geeks for Good project: tomorrow’s food drive at Providence Geeks. Thanks largely to social media and our people network, this was all organized in about three days.
Here are a few of the takeaways from this experience:
- Your social network is filled with people who are ready, willing and able to pitch in.
- Don’t be afraid to propose your ideas to folks who can help. They just might say yes!
- Try and do good where and when you can. The world can benefit for your unique skills and talents, whatever they may be.
We look forward to Providence Geeks tomorrow night, where our friends from Tizra are presenting and we’ll also be helping out some folks in need. Hope to see some of you there!
Tags: Community, food drive, geeks4good, providence geeks, Social Media
Big businesses, traditional businesses, the ones that you drive by on the way to Wal-mart or see on Superbowl commercials have operated for years as if they are the ones managing their relationships with their customers. That if they can rank leads and assess opportunities they will somehow know what value each customer brings to their company.
For these folks marketing involves mass messaging. To them, CRM involves measuring those mass efforts. Magazine ads, radio spots, direct mail, telemarketing calls, e-mail blasts, etc. are sent out liberally then sliced and diced and ranked and rated for a decision on the next campaign’s target. Communication between the company and its customer is largely one way with perhaps an e-mail address in small print in case a customer REALLY needs to talk back.
Small businesses operate at a different level. They start with a handful of customers. The relationships are intimate, the conversations are free flowing and organic and fun. The trick is - what happens when a small business starts to grow? When you can’t remember if it was Sally or Anita who said her business is expanding into organics. Or if anyone told Fred that the new feature he requested got implemented? Or if those folks who were your biggest fans at start-up still recommend you to their friends? How do you grow without losing the intimacy?
It all comes back to what makes a real relationship. It’s not just sending out a thousand messages, but listening to the responses those messages generate. Listening to the folks who are walking into your store, or searching Google for your service, or playing with a trial version of your product. Listening to the ones who buy it as well as the ones who don’t. And especially listening to the ones who are telling the world what they think.
The Web, Google and social media have brought what once was an intimacy available only to the local shopkeepers to a whole new audience. CRM is becoming a listening tool. Not just for monitoring your own messages, but for monitoring everyone else’s. When we built BatchBook, we designed it to maintain that intimacy. The customer page tells so much more than the name, address and opportunity rank. It tells you about every e-mail a customer has sent, or blog post they have written, or friend they referred, or t-shirt they received, or complaint they filed. If you want, it can tell you their hair color, or sales volume or shoe size.
As we continue to add features to BatchBook we will always keep that intimacy between a small business and its customer as our guiding principal. Because it is that intimacy with our customers that makes our own business worthwhile.
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At BatchBlue, we love Twitter (the super-popular micro-blogging service). Pam had a great idea a couple weeks ago to post tips—called BatchTips—to our Twitter account every business day. While our goal is to provide you with useful tips for using BatchBook, like this one:
#BatchTip : You can save any advanced search results as a list. And it’ll auto-update!
we also like to have some fun. 
And #BatchTip #2 of the day… now, use SuperTags to track who gave you what candy. And just hit the good houses next year! Happy Halloween!
What’s with the # before the #BatchTip? I’m glad you asked! Adding a pound sign before a it becomes a “hashtag”. What’s a hashtag? According to hashtags.org:
Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.
Using Twitter’s search interface (as well as other tools), you can search for certain hashtags to see all tweets that reference it. For example, when the Red Sox were in the playoffs, many people posted to Twitter using the “#redsox” hashtag. If you looked up “#redsox” on the Twitter search page, you would see a constantly-updated page of Red Sox-related tweets.
You can do the same by searching “#BatchTip”:
But what if I’m not a Twitter user? No worries! You can still get the BatchTips through your RSS reader. See that link in the corner that says “Feed for this query”? You can simply put that link into your RSS reader and get the BatchTips as we post them.
Enjoy!
Tags: batchtip, Social Media, twitter
BatchBlue is participating in Blog Action Day this year by partnering with the RI Community Food Bank to raise awareness of the ongoing efforts to fight poverty in Rhode Island. As a part of the effort, we pledge that for every comment posted below we will donate 3 meals to a deserving RI family. No contact information is required, just let us know you care and will help spread the message.
I spoke with Lisa Roth Blackman, Senior Director of Development & Communications at the Rhode Island Community Food Bank, about the work that the Food Bank is doing and how others can get involved. Below are her responses.
- The theme of Blog Action Day this year is Poverty. That is a very broad term. From your perspective, what criteria defines poverty?
The Federal Poverty Level for a family of 4 is defined as an income of $21,200 a year. The Federal Poverty Level was developed in the 1960s and measured poverty based on the cost of food. At that time, food costs represented a third of a family’s budget. However, the Federal Poverty Level is now widely recognized as a flawed measurement because expenditure patterns have changed significantly since the 1960’s. For example, costs such as housing and health care have risen much faster than food costs since then.
According to 2007 U.S. Census data, 12% of the people in Rhode Island are poor. The state’s childhood poverty rate is 17.5%.
To put the Federal Poverty Levels in perspective, it is helpful to consider the 2006 Rhode Island Standard of Need (RISN), an alternative measurement developed by The Poverty Institute at Rhode Island College (www.povertyinstitute.org). Every two years The Poverty Institute publishes The Rhode Island Standard of Need (RISN) to show what it costs for families and single adults to pay for housing, food, transportation, health care, child care and other basic necessities. In 2006, the most recent year, the Rhode Island Standard of Need for a two-parent, two-child family is $52,224. This figure shows what a family needs to earn to maintain a standard of living that does not ask them to choose between necessities such as food, medical care, housing, or child care.
While other essentials such as phone, clothing, shoes and paper products are accounted for, the RISN does not take into consideration the need to buy household necessities like furniture, towels, kitchenware, bedding and car seats. It does not include the cost of child enrichment activities like school trips, music, or art lessons. Finally, the RISN does not include any funds for vacations, birthdays, holidays or other special occasions.
- We are approaching a tough time of the year and apparently a tough year for the economy. What do you all do to prepare for a particularly difficult time?
At the Rhode Island Community Food Bank, we often talk about summer being an unknown time of hunger for families because kids are out of school and aren’t receiving free or reduced price breakfast and lunches, so there is an added burden on families. This year, all of our member agencies (food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, etc.) are bracing for a very difficult winter. Already, many of our agencies are reporting large increases in the numbers of people they are serving, and people haven’t even started to deal with home heating bills yet. Plus, unemployment in Rhode Island is 8.5%, the second highest in the nation.
This all comes at a very challenging time for the Food Bank as well. Food donations from food producers and grocery stores are down as those industries become more efficient and have less waste. In addition, the cost of food is up, which makes it more expensive for us to purchase the foods we do purchase to make up for the decrease in donations.
To prepare, we’ve been seeking efficiencies in our daily operations, so that we have as much funding as possible to purchase additional food, or to pay the shipping costs on bringing in donated food from other places. We’ve reduced our workforce by about 10%, and we are exploring ways to save money on heat and electricity.
One way we are preparing is by coordinating with the Narragansett Council, Boy Scouts of America, for the 21st annual Scouting for Food Drive. On Saturday, October 25th thousands of Boy Scouts will fan out across the state to leave empty plastic bags on people’s doors. The following Saturday, November 1st, they will come back to pick them up. This is one of our largest food drives of the year, and this year, with so much need in the community, we hope to collect over 200,000 pounds of food.
In addition, we are getting ready to launch our Holiday Meal Drive, during which we hope to bring in an additional five truckloads of food to help people during the holiday season and throughout the cold winter months. We ask the public to donate funds toward the purchase of food, or to donate most needed items, including frozen turkeys, canned hams, stuffing, rice, beans, canned vegetables, and other staples, such as canned soup and breakfast cereal. We can purchase an entire truckload of food for $20,000.
- Blog Action Day is about unifying the power of online journalists to address a particular social issue. Any specific ideas for ways more local bloggers can get involved with the Food Bank?
The best way local bloggers can get involved is to keep the issue of poverty and hunger at the forefront of the online conversations that are happening out there. Hunger is a serious, but solvable, problem—we just need the political will to end it. Bloggers can direct people to our website (www.rifoodbank.org) to learn more about hunger in Rhode Island, and what they can do to help. We also invite bloggers or others interested to get involved with either the food bank or a local food pantry and share the experience with their own audience. These personal stories are a powerful way to spread the word about our efforts.
- Where do we go to learn more about the RI Food Bank and how to get involved?
You can visit our website at www.rifoodbank.org to learn more about the work that we do, the people we serve, and upcoming events. You can also donate online by clicking the “Donate Now” button on our homepage.
Please get involved by leaving a reply message using the form below. For each reply that we receive, we will donate 3 meals to a deserving RI family. And please help us spread the word to as many people as possible by e-mailing your own network and asking them to post a message at:
http://blog.batchblue.com/?p=149
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Now that we’ve hit BatchBook 1.0, it’s time to start looking at what 2.0 will be. To us, it means seeing how your contacts are interacting with and on the web. This translates to many things (syncing, sharing contact information with other apps, etc.) Each of our upcoming “social” features will more fully leverage the power of BatchBook and as a result, your contact network.
Feed Reader
For the first big addition in this more social direction, we’ve added a new SuperTag type: the Feed Reader. The Feed Reader SuperTag type lets you add any RSS feed, Twitter streams and Delicious streams to a SuperTag. You can add the Feed Reader to an existing SuperTag, or create a new SuperTag using new Feed Reader fields.
Here’s a screenshot of the Feed Reader in action. We’ve created a SuperTag called “social media” and added Feed Readers for personal blog, Twitter stream and delicious links. Currently, we show the last three updates to a feed and link back to the original feed source:
By adding feeds to a contact record, you can get a look at what they are up to on the web. You can even monitor a company’s brand using the Feed Reader. In our account, we’ve added the feed for Twitter search to our company record to keep up with any mentions on Twitter. Imagine having that information for all your clients right there on their contact record (editor’s note — maybe then they’ll start understanding all this crazy ’social media’ stuff!)
SuperTag Library
We’re also in the beta stages of getting SuperTag collections into a new SuperTag Library, which you can access from the main SuperTag tab in your BatchBook account. With one click, you can add a complete, pre-defined Supertag. These collections will be really useful as we continue to build them out for specific industries and job roles. If you’ve created any SuperTags that you think might be useful to others, please let us know if you’d like to share.
Thanks to all our customers for their continued support and input. We look forward to building BatchBook 2.0 with you!
Tags: batchbook, crm, social crm
