One of my favorite BatchBook features is the Social Media SuperTag. This week, we enhanced it by adding support for LinkedIn profiles. All you have to is enter address to a public LinkedIn profile. When you save it, we’ll replace the link with a widget that looks a lot like this:
Out of the box, the Social Media SuperTag allows you to enter a contacts usernames on Twitter, Flickr, or Delicious and we’ll show the last three tweets, photos, or bookmarks. You can also enter a Blog feed and see excerpts of the last three posts. This will actually work for any RSS feed. In the screencast below, I add a Slideshare presentations, Last.fm recent tracks, and BatchBook forum feeds to a contact record.
We think this is a great way to see what’s on the mind of your most valuable contacts right before you pick up the phone or start that email. Watch below to see the Social Media SuperTag in action!
Screencast: Social media integration with the Social Media SuperTag
The Flash Video runs 5:18 and is 34.9MB. (Download iPod compatible version, 17.5MB)
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Tags: delicious, flickr, linkedin, rss, small business CRM, social crm, Social Media, supertags, twitter
I ran across a Twitter message recently from a customer who mentions that she likes BatchBook but needs to be more disciplined about using it. Well said! Your contact management tool is only going to be useful if you keep it up to date, but as busy business owners that’s not always easy to do. So I thought I would give a few tips on some “quickie” things you can do to keep your account fresh and useful.
- BCC e-mails into BatchBook using BatchBox. I’ve set up the BatchBox e-mail address (found in your communications tab, it looks something like batchbox+XXXXXXX@youraccount.batchbook.com) as a contact in all of my e-mail clients (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Blackberry) so can easily copy messages into BatchBox whether sending from work, personal or mobile accounts. I’ll periodically comb through those forwarded messages in BatchBook to add more details to the contact record of my recipient, but even if I don’t have time to do that the BatchBook search will find the recipients name in the body of their message, so I know I can always find them if I need to.
- Subscribe to the RSS feed of your communications. This is how I keep up with what is happening with the other Bluers. Our team is very disciplined about sending their communications into BatchBook (see 1 above), so when I do my daily (well, almost daily) catch-up on Google Reader, I can read through any communications happening with BatchBlue and the outside world.
- Send yourself to-dos. Easy peasy from your e-mail (or phone), just send the BatchBox account mentioned above an e-mail with “todo:” as the start of the subject line and BatchBook will automatically create a to-do item assigned to you. Don’t worry, we’ll soon work on a way to have BatchBook actually do them, too.
- Use the Twitter search on the dashboard. We have defaulted the Twitter search to look for your account name, but you can add as many searches as you like. My dashboard searches for “BatchBlue” OR “BatchBook” OR “pmohara” OR “sbbuzz” so I am constantly monitoring anything the Twitterverse is saying to/about me or our products (which is how I saw the message that inspired this blog post!).
- Add the Social Media SuperTag and use it. We know you are a savvy web user, so even if you are not actively blogging or Tweeting, your network probably is. Your BatchBook account will come alive if you add the Social Media SuperTag (from the SuperTag library) and start filling in some accounts. If you run across someone’s Twitter name, blog URL, Flickr account, etc, add the info to their contact record. BatchBook automatically grabs their friendly profile picture and a few of their recent messages – instantly bringing their contact record to life.
- Create a new “staff favorites” SuperTag.OK, this is just a fun freebie thrown in to lure you into the powerful world of SuperTagging. When you set up your BatchBook account, add a new SuperTag called “staff favorites” and add fields for things like “favorite cake flavor”, “favorite restaurant”, “favorite bands”, etc. Ask any users in your account to fill in their choices. This is a good way to get a sense of how SuperTags can be used, and will come in pretty handy the next time you are planning a staff party!
Do you have any “quickie” tips for fellow BatchBook users? We’re all pretty busy out there so would love to hear what you are doing to keep on top of your game.
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I love getting neat BatchBook usage tips from our users. This happened again over the weekend as Andrew shared with us (via the BatchBook Forums) how he’s using FireFox 3’s “Awesome Bar” to quickly search for contacts in BatchBook.
Now that I have all my data in BatchBook, I wanted a quick way to pull up a contact. Thanks to Firefox and the Delicious.com extension, I have it!
(If you don’t know, Delicious.com is a great bookmarking application. It handles all my bookmarks. And there’s a handy Firefox extension.)
Be sure you have the Delicious extension installed. Then you can right click in the BB contact search box (upper right of any BB screen). Select “Add a keyword for this search in Delicious.” Then you can fill out the bookmark details and enter a keyword that will invoke the search.
Now I can search my contacts directly from the Firefox Awesome Bar. I just type “bb smith” and hit enter. Voila!
So, in summary, entering “bb darowski” into the address bar would automatically run a BatchBook search for “darowski” and take you to the results. Nifty! I immediately set this up and found it super useful. I then realized you don’t even need the Delicious extension to set it up.
Here’s how you can set this up for yourself:
Step 1: Right click (or control+click) on the search field in BatchBook. Choose “Add a Keyword for this Search”.
Step 2: Name your search and give it a shortcut (I’m using “bb”).
Step 3: Enter your search string. Entering “bb darowski” searches BatchBook for “darowski”.
Step 4: View your results.
Great tip, Andrew! Thanks for sharing!
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Tags: awesome bar, delicious, firefox, Our Users are So Smart, search
PR professionals have unique challenges when managing contact information and ongoing communications for their clients, their client’s clients, press contacts, prospects and the myriad other people who help them get the word out. A PR firm wrote in with a few questions on how they should be using BatchBook to manage their team’s efforts. Below are the questions and our advice on how to best handle each challenge in BatchBook.
PR Team: my client does some of their own press outreach. How do I keep up with the conversations they are having so that I am not overlapping?
We’ve tried to make it as simple as possible to record conversations happening in e-mails, social media, etc. I would recommend that you ask your client to blind-copy (BCC) any e-mails they are sending directly to a blogger, media friend, etc to the unique BatchBox e-mail address associated with your account (they don’t need to be a user in the account to use the batchbox address). You can then easily see any past correspondence with a reporter by looking at their contact record. They can also easily forward in any blog comments, phone calls or trade show bathroom line conversations they might have, as well.
PR Team: How does a HARO query become a to-do item?
We know Peter Shankman’s HARO e-mails can be both a blessing and a curse. We ourselves have gotten some amazing press by quickly responding to HARO reporters, but we have also gotten overwhelmed by the number of follow-ups that need to be done and have missed a few great opportunities, as well. So we developed a tool within BatchBook that makes it easy to forward the HARO e-mails into BatchBook and then save individual pitch requests as to-do items and press contacts. By easily saving any relevant queries assigned to the right team member with a due-date set to the deadline and attached to the newly created contact record for that reporter, your team can just concentrate on getting the pitches out!
PR Team: How can the Social Media Supertags help me, specifically, as a PR pro? Can I customize them?
The social media SuperTag lets you easily track the conversations, professional updates or even daily musings of a journalist right in their contact record. By setting up a feed to track a reporter’s Twitter stream, latest blog posts or pictures they are posting on Flickr you can instantly get a sense of what is happening in their lives even as you are writing them with a new pr pitch. You’ll know not to approach them with a timely exclusive if they’ve tweeted about their honeymoon departure for Bora Bora. Or that you can celebrate together a Red Sox victory if they’ve been posting pictures of their box seat view of opening day.
And you can easily customize your social media tag to include information from any site that has an RSS feed including multiple blog sites (since many freelance journalists write for many different publications), online forums, LinkedIn groups, etc.
PR Team: Some freelance reporters write for multiple publications. Can I attach them to more than one company record?
Yes. Using our Affiliations feature you can attach a reporters record to as many publications as you want. You can even create custom affiliations such as “former writer for” XX publication to keep track of the history of their affiliations. So if you pull up the record for Inc. Magazine you can see not ony the current journalists listed there, but any other reporters in yout teams contact list that have written for them in the past.
PR Team: Can I connect a contact record with a communication record?
Yes, all communications (whether they are sent in via BatchBox or are logged using the “Add a Communication” form are automatically attached to all contacts involved in the communication.
PR Team: On the dashboard, can I set up multiple Google search tabs or Twitter tabs, to track multiple clients?
You can not setup separate tabs, but you can easily search for multiple clients – or even multiple brands belonging to one client. Just run the search on multiple names at once such as BatchBlue OR BatchBook OR “Pamela O’Hara” OR pmohara OR sbbuzz.
Here’s a diagram that shows exactly how the HARO integration works. For more information, see our HARO page.
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Tags: batchblue, batchbook, haro, help a reporter out, marketing, pr, public relations
My favorite part of building software is that I get to help people focus on what they’re good at, by using computers to do what people suck at. One of the reasons I was so happy to come on board as BatchBook’s Product Manager is that I was joining a group with a strong hold on that sensibility.
We all want to believe that our memories are like steel traps, our communications are always crystal clear, and our relationships are totally under control, but there’s a lot of power in seeking a little help from your computer, even in these squishy human topics.
One such area that I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately is personal productivity. I wish I could say I was a naturally productive person, but I’ve begrudgingly come to realize that my mind is no match for a pen and paper, nevermind a good software system, when it comes to some tasks. At last month’s NewBCamp conference, I gave a talk about some abstract tools that have helped me keep at least a little more focused, and I’d like to share some of those ideas with you.
One approach that has made a huge difference in my own productivity is having good a good system of buckets. (Bear with me!) The buckets are just trusted places to keep your stuff, and the system is so that you can remember what bucket your various stuff is in. BatchBook’s Communications tab is a great example of a bucket that works for both individuals and groups. If you don’t already have a convenient and trusted place to put this information, you might be amazed at how much time and mental energy you spend in a day just figuring out where all your stuff is. On the other hand, when you have confidence that you can find all of your team’s communications and stop worrying about keeping track of everything mentally, your mind is free to stay focused on the task at hand.
Another great advantage of using buckets is making your priorities explicit. For example, having all of my tasks waiting for me in BatchBook’s To-Do list gives me a single view into all the things on my plate, which makes it easier to see what most needs my full attention. I’ve been practicing Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero approach for a while, which not only helps me ensure that all my To-Dos are in one place (i.e. not buried deep within my inbox), but also removes a certain “urgency confusion.” Dealing with things as they come in can screw with your sense of priorities. New stuff that comes in can feel more important than it is. Of course, some interruptions are necessary, so you may never be able to isolate yourself from them entirely. But you can definitely limit the impact that unnecessary interruptions have, when you know exactly what bucket to dump them into. This improves the quality of the time spent on the things you decide to do, but also helps you make better decisions about what to work on, when you re-visit your buckets’ contents at an appropriate time.
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