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.
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
We’re pleased to announce the launch of our official Small Business Web site (thesmallbusinessweb.com). Here, we introduce you to the founding members of the Small Business Web and our new friends, lay out our mission, and encourage other companies with similar philosophies on helping small businesses to sign our newly-created manifesto.
You can also show your support of the Small Business Web by putting a custom badge on your site. Choose from a variety of lovely, hand-crafted badges here.
If you’re working to make the world a better place for small business owners and you have an open API, we invite you to join us. Is small the future of business? No one can say for sure. But we do know that when lots of small businesses get together, big things can happen.
This year, three (THREE!) members of the BatchCrew gave presentations. They were:
“Wonderful World of Word of Mouth Marketing” by Michelle Riggen-Ransom
Michelle’s talk explored how to create low-cost buzz around a product or business. She spoke about identifying ways to connect with customers, how to get them talking about your business, and providing tools to help your customers to share the love. She also gave real-world examples of word of mouth campaigns both good and bad.
Matt’s presentation, “The Tao of GTD,” combined productivity tips for knowledge workers with martial arts philosophies from the Tao of Jeet Kune Do. “I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone more accomplished than Bruce Lee,” said Matt, “so it seemed only natural that some of the teachings from his book would apply well in other creative fields.”
The talk touched on several strategies for acknowledging your own weaknesses, removing obstacles from your workflow, and keeping yourself motivated. Matt also talked about a few tools he uses to manage his information and gave a quick overview of Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero approach to email. But ultimately it’s not about the tools. “It’s really easy to waste time fiddling with tools, if you forget that the whole point is getting to your real work more efficiently.”
Or as Bruce would say, “It is like a finger pointing toward the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”
“Turning Your Design into a WordPress Theme” by Adam Darowski
In this presentation, I deconstructed a WordPress theme I recently built (the Tabigail theme) and explained what each file does. Then, I took an all-new XHTML/CSS one-page design and combined it with the Tabigail theme code to make an all new original theme. I only had 15 minutes for the actual “building” part, so I didn’t finish the WHOLE theme, but I did get the home page and archives up and running. The theme will be launched in the form of a redesign of my personal site soon.
We love NewBCamp for a number of reasons. It’s local. It’s small, It’s intimate. But there is also an incredible amount and variety of information exchanged.
A couple of us at BatchBlue are launching an exciting new project this week. We’re organizing a weekly time on Twitter for small business owners, social media enthusiasts and interested geeks to get together and discuss how small businesses can best use new (and even old) technologies to run their business.
We’ve set up the Twitter account @sbbuzz and will be hosting a weekly chat each Tuesday night from 8:00 PM – 10:00 PM Eastern time with anyone who wants to participate on Twitter using the hashtag #sbbuzz. More information is on the site http://sbbuzz.biz
This project was originally inspired by an email sent in by a friend and long time BatchBook user. She wrote:
I have a small business and you have stuff that helps small businesses and I don’t know how to make that work for me. There is SO much out there and it’s all confusing and overwhelming and I don’t know how to choose something that will help me – manage my contacts, sales calls, business goals, projections, etc.
PLUS there are all these great resources I learn about and how do I incorporate them into my life, world and schedule? And finally how do we make our website and blog work for us and drive traffic there to help with business leads?
AGGGG – so much to do, so much possibility.
When we started BatchBlue almost three years ago, one of our goals was to not only develop products for small business, but also to help educate them on ways to make technologies work for their business. Since then, we’ve spent a lot of our time immersed in various technologies from accounting software to e-mail marketing, social media to virtual office management and know more about PCs, Macs, Blackberries, and iPhones than the average BestBuy salesman. And yet, there is still so much left to learn.
So please help us spread the word and join us each Tuesday night on Twitter as together we small business owners figure it all out. Or at least, have fun trying.
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A couple of us at BatchBlue are launching an exciting new project this week. We’re organizing a weekly time on Twitter for small business owners, social media enthusiasts and interested geeks to get together and discuss how small businesses can best use new (and even old) technologies to run their business.
