When last we checked in on our friends at Rise of the Cubicle Farmer, our friends AJ, Tony and Michelle were headed West. Armed with laptops, caffeinated beverages and a couple of videocameras, they’re on a 65+ day journey around the US and Canada stopping along the way to chat with entrepreneurs, workshifters, freelancers and the companies that help them do their work wherever and whenever they need it.
They’re even using our recently launched BatchBook iPhone App to build a database of all the cool folks they meet along the way. See what AJ had to say about the App here:
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:
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.
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.
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.
