Michelle recently wrote an article about some of the networking events that the BatchBlue communications team is attending. We then hosted an #sbbuzz Twitter chat discussing with our fellow small business owners how to make the most of those events (thanks for the tips, buzzers!). So I thought I would share some insights and stories from a few of these events as they happen.
I recently flew down to Washington, DC to attend Network Solution’s Grow Smart Business conference. I heard about this event from my very good Twitter friend Shashi Bellamkonda (@shashib), the Social Media Swami at Network Solutions. I knew anything that he is involved in would be worthwhile, but honestly I had not predicted just how productive this travel would be.
I flew down the night before the one day conference and visited my old co-workers at Matrix Group International. While at their offices I learned that Matrix CEO, and my former business partner Joanna Pineda (@jmpineda) was one of the speakers at the Grow Smart Conference (such a small small business world). I also learned from Joanna and from Twitter that the socially over-achieving @shashib and the nice folks at WASP Barcode were hosting a happy hour that night about 2 blocks from my hotel. Don’t have to ask me twice!
At the happy hour I was delighted to see more great friends Brent Leary from CRM Essentials (@brentleary) and Anita Campbell (@smallbiztrends) from Small Biz Trends. I first met Brent a few years ago at the Inbound Marketing Summit (I sat in the front row and devoured his then prescient talk on Social CRM). We’ve kept in touch through Twitter, occasional conference sitings and surprise radio interviews down south. And Brent introduced me to Anita this past winter at the Small Business Technology conference in NYC. I had always loved Anita’s site SmallBizTrends.com and could tell immediately why it is such a valuable resource. Anita personifies the resourcefulness and integrity you find in every article on her site.
(more…)
Tweet This Post
Tags:
I’m particularly excited about the launch of our new BatchBook Web Forms today for so many reasons. Because we built the forms to use the super flexible customization of our SuperTags and the super connectedness of our Social Media Tag, there are a great many things you can do with them. You can reach out to your network of business evangelists in so many different ways – to ask for their feedback or connect with them on Twitter. You can find new evangelists by posting a sign-up form or asking them to sign up for your newsletter.
Here are just a few of the great things you can do with the new forms:
- Add a Contact form to your web site with the click of a button. Simply create a new web form, name it and publish it on your own web site. Anyone who fills in the form can be saved directly in your BatchBook account for a follow-ups by your staff or sales team.
- Survey your prospects by adding custom SuperTag fields to your contact form. Learn up front what products they are interested in, what budget they are working with, what their purchase deadline is, or anything else that is important to you when starting a new relationship with an interested customer.
- Survey your customers by creating a custom form with SuperTags and e-mailing a group of customers to determine what new features they would like developed, what their satisfaction level is with your service team or anything else that will help you keep up a good relationship with your customers.
- Manage newsletter Sign-ups in 3 easy steps. First create a web form asking users if they would like to receive your newsletter. Second create a report of anyone who responds “YES”. And third send the list off to MailChimp for distribution to your new best friends!
- Collect social media information from your customers, prospective customers, business partners and favorite pets by including fields from the Social Media SuperTag on your web form. BatchBook will automatically pull feeds of their blogs, tweets or photos instantly giving you a richer insight into their world. What better way to get to know someone?
- Combine all of the above to reach out to your entire network, ask them a few questions and connect with them in social media spaces all at once.
Please let us know what you think and how you are using the new forms. To show off the new web forms we are hosting a Summertime Vacation contest with some HOT, HOT prizes! Enter to win a surfboard for land lovers, some hot new Moo cards or a free BatchBook account.
Tweet This Post
Tags: batchbook, mailchimp, social crm, Social Media, supertags, twitter
Way back in early 2008 (has it really been that long?), Michelle and I collaborated on what was then the second of our BatchBlue Blue Papers. Blue Papers, if you’re not familiar, are like white papers. Only… you know… blue. The paper was called Social Media for Small Business. It served as a primer for small business owners wondering how (or even if) they should get their businesses involved in social media.
Since 18 months is an eternity in the social media world, we decided it was time for an update. Some of the highlights:
- We expanded the Twitter section. This was necessary since in the last version we talked about how we were still skeptical of Twitter’s business applications. How the times have changed! The updates include discussion of tweet chats (like SBBUZZ!) and hashtags.
- In the social networking space, Facebook was brought to the forefront and MySpace was downplayed. When this was originally written, Facebook applications were all the rage. Remember those?
- We added StumbleUpon, a site that was totally left out of the first version.
Of course, a bunch of other minor changes were made. Please take a look at the new version of Social Media for Small Business. If you prefer your reading on paper instead of pixels, it has a nice print style sheet as well!
Tweet This Post
Tags: blogger, blue paper, delicious, digg, facebook, linkedin, myspace, Social Media, stumbleupon, twitter, wikipedia, wordpress
I was in Atlanta last week reuniting with my college roommates and decided to bake in an extra day to meet up with a few BatchFriends. No specific agenda, no deals to broker, I just thought it would be fun to see some of BatchBlue’s online pals in their natural environments.
It was quite a jungle at the world headquarters of MailChimp.com. There is apparently a pretty spunky monkey living there because there were mini stuffed offspring swinging through the entire office. I finally got a chance to meet the head chimp Ben Chestnut, who despite the fact that we’ve integrated our products, co-founded the Small Business Web, sponsored joint promotions, blogged, tweeted and just gotten downright social, I had never actually met or even talked to him person. While it was a treat to finally meet Ben and much of the MailChimp.com gang in person, the thing that really made it worth the trip was the in-person, real life witness of their passion for MailChimp, for small business, for e-mail campaigns and for monkeys. This are the things that let you know you’re doing business with good people.
The other part of my visit was an unexpected camera-in-the-face live interview by that prankster Brent Leary of Social CRM (and Barack 2.0) fame. I know from following Brent on Twitter that he regularly DJs a retro hip-pop stream over the interwebs. So I had thought I was going to be sitting in on a WKRP moment, watching Venus FlyLeary rocking the airways. Boy was I surprised to spend the time talking about BatchBook, social CRM, #sbbuzz and cheese grits instead. It was the first I’ve ever had a giant microphone in my face and you know what? It was great fun.
If you can, it’s important to get out from behind the computer screen of and spend a little time meeting folks in your “social network” in the real world – you’ll learn new things about them and probably have a lot fun.
Thanks to Ben and Brent for being excellent hosts – our time together was definitely a highlight of my trip.
Tweet This Post
Tags: brent leary, mailchimp, small business web
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.
Image: Chris Penn a.k.a. Financial Aid Podcast via flickr
Tweet This Post
Tags: @sbbuzz, chris brogan, Customer Service, radian6, rockstars of social crm, small business, social crm, twitter, twitter chats
