BatchBook Blog
Archive for the “Using BatchBook” Category
I’ve written in the past about some clever uses for Tags and how they can be used to help track all sorts of things from To-Dos to Communications and more. In chatting with the rest of the team and in working with our customers, it seems that most folks are using tags to denote that some sort of action has been completed or that the record is part of a group such as clients, vendors, Western Region etc. While these are really great uses, in most instances folks are using tags to permanently note something about that record.
One thing that I find helpful though is to create and use tags on a temporary basis, in fact I often use tags as a pseudo To-Do item. While our To-Dos are useful for specific actions, I often find that using a single word tag is sufficient to remind me that a particular contact, or contact record, needs some attention. Here are a few examples:
BatchBox: All Items coming in to BatchBook through the BatchBox email get tagged automatically with a ‘Review’ tag. This lets me know that I haven’t yet acted upon that communication, be it to further process it or to verify that the contact it is attached to is completely populated and verified.
Review: This review tag gets used all the time as I’m working as well. If I am working and notice something inconsistent or incomplete in a contact record I’ll tag it ‘review’ so when I have time to go in and take another look I can find them easily.
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Tags: tags, todos, workflow
Several people sent me the link to NYC VC Fred Wilson’s blog post in which he asks his readership for suggestions for a “Family CRM” service. He explains that he and his wife Joanne Wilson a.k.a Gotham Gal are looking for a way to share basic contact/calendar information, build some e-mail lists for social correspondence, planning and general family-managing.
In the thread, a few BatchBook customers recommended our CRM BatchBook (thanks Boris, Sri, Stefano and Sandro!), so I’d talk about how I use my BatchBook account to help manage my busy family.
First, I should explain that BatchBook was not designed for managing families, but it WAS designed for those small businesses that are about the same size, shape and energy level of an on-the-go family. I think the folks who recommended us recognize that the flexibility of BatchBook makes it work for all sorts of situations, including the work/life balancing (or is it juggling?) act that we small business owners face every day. As we know all too well, the line between business owner and family member frequently blurs.
My other co-founders and I started BatchBlue so that we could build a business deeply integrated with our family lives (I have three small children; they have two). Part of the solution for me has been using a personal BatchBook account to manage my family life. Here’s how I do it:
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, how-to, supertags, work/life
We love being able to pull in information related to your contacts and their actions on the Social Web. While our ‘Search Social Network’ option lets you pull in some of this data automatically, it’s really very easy to set up custom fields to bring in information from a variety of different sources as well. Our SuperTags are capable of pulling in and populating your contact data with any RSS Feed. (For a quick primer of RSS, check out this handy video from the fine folks at CommonCraft)
For example, I’m a music fan and a long time user of the last.fm service which records all of the music I listen to on my computer. I think music is a logical conversation starter so I’m a big fan of adding information about what my contacts are listening to and adding that to their profile. Here’s how I did that:
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Tags: Dossier, Last.fm, rss, supertag
Customer: Piers Shepperd
Company: Stagelink Limited (www.stagelink.com)
Tell Us A Little Bit About What Your Company Does And What Services You Provide:
Stagelink provides specialist technical design and production services to the live event industries. We have worked all over the world, helping teams from the Rolling Stones and U2 to the Opening Ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympics and 2010 Vancouver Olympics. We provide specialist 3d technical design solutions using AutoCAD and Rhino, technical drawings, specifications and technical direction. Much of our work involves the coordination of lighting, sound, video, rigging and staging teams to ensure that everybody is heading in the right direction. Our real ‘buzz’ is bringing together hugely complex projects and teams to realize a creative dream.
How Did You Get Started:
After leaving school, I worked as a lighting technician on events all over the world, before moving onto the technical design of stage sets.
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Tags: Blue By You, small business
The latest cool little feature we snuck into BatchBook has been a pet project of mine for a while. So much so that I get to be the one to announce it!
Have you ever been working in BatchBook and thought “Oh, I’d love to send someone this person’s contact information”? Recently, I had an editor friend looking for a freelance writer for a project. I clicked on my “writer” tag in BatchBook, took a quick look at the resultant list and found someone I thought would be perfect for the job. But I had no way to send that person’s information from BatchBook, so I had to cut and paste everything into a separate email. Kind of a bummer since all the info my friend needed (name, email and street address, phone number) was right there on the contact detail page.
Thanks to some back-end wizardry, you can now send a person’s contact information directly from BatchBook just by clicking on this last little icon on the Contact detail toolbar:
<== hello!
Once you click, just add the recipient’s email address to the drop-down bar and the vcard information is zipped off to your friend. This is also great for those times when you want to make a virtual introduction between two folks. With this new feature, you’re off and networking in no time. It’s just a quick little thing that adds up to a bit of a time-saver, which is always nice.
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, usability
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