Feed Me! Clever Uses for the RSS SuperTag Field
- Posted August 2nd, 2010
- Filed under: Using BatchBook
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:
The first step in capturing this information is to set up a SuperTag field to hold an RSS Feed. I’m going to add these to my Social Media SuperTag but they could go anywhere.
From the Tags / SuperTags Tab I go in to edit mode on my SuperTag and choose to add a new field. I name it accordingly, choose the Type: Feed Reader and then specifically the Blog / RSS Feed Type.
Click “Save” and I’m ready to go and grab the address of that feed. In this case, I’m going to vist the user profile for my contact – for example mine is at http://last.fm/user/scoblitz and looks like this:
You’ll see the familiar RSS Icon displayed near the Recently Listened Tracks which is the feed I want to subscribe to. You’ll need to grab the address of that feed by right clicking on it and choosing “Copy Shortcut” in IE. The wording is slightly different in Firefox or Chrome but generally grabbing that address works similarly. In this case it is formatted as follows:
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/scoblitz/recenttracks.rss
So with the address on my clipboard I go back in to my contact record, add or modify my Social Media SuperTag and paste the address for the feed in to the Last FM Profile field I created in step 1.
Now whenever I view this profile in BatchBook I can see the last few songs that my contact has listened to.
You can do this with any publicly available RSS feed tied to your contact. For example, here are some others that may be useful:
Twitter Search – Our Twitter integration already lets you view the Tweets from a particular user, but what if you want to monitor what folks are saying about your contact as well. Any search on Twitter generates a unique RSS feed for those search results:
How about tracking Google News search results. At the bottom of any query page you’ll see an RSS feed link created for that search:
You can do this for weather for their local zip-code. Comments they make on DISQUS. Chances are you’ll find these RSS feeds generated for tons of sites that your contacts are already involved with, automatically tied to their profile. Be observant and you’ll see them everywhere. With a little bit of SuperTag wizardry you’ll be able to capture an amazing customized dossier of information about your contacts.
What interesting things are you capturing in your RSS SuperTags?
This does make some sense. For facebook, it might take a quick video on how to do this. I can’t figure it out.
Hi David – Yes, Facebook does seem to hide the RSS Icon so it does take an extra step to discover the feed address. I’ll do a follow up post specifically on Facebook fan pages.
But it’s not usually difficult – If you’re using IE or Firefox you can click on the Subscribe button in your browser and it will pull up the RSS page. In Firefox it’s right in the address field, in IE it’s usually on the toolbar.
Once you’re on that general RSS page you can grab that link from your address box and use that to paste in to the SuperTag field like we created here.
sb
Hey David. This may help you with finding your RSS feed for facebook
http://www.techlifeweb.com/2008/12/16/how-to-find-your-facebook-status-rss-feed/
FYI, this post had me thinking updating my super tag for this. Here is my current additions.
Flickr Username (RSS/Feed Reader)
Personal Blog (RSS/Feed Reader)
Twitter Username (RSS/Feed Reader)
Delicious Username (RSS/Feed Reader)
Linkedin Url (RSS/Feed Reader)
Work Blog (RSS/Feed Reader)
Lastfm (RSS/Feed Reader)
Youtube (RSS/Feed Reader)
Vimeo (RSS/Feed Reader)
Goodreads (RSS/Feed Reader)
Call stupid but I just want a Field and a button to add someones twitters account to their contact data.
The social search facility doesn’t always pick up on peoples social accounts and there is no way of adding basic social contact details manually.
This doesn’t solve my problem at all. It looks nice.
Can Batchbooks developers please add a couple fo fields to the contact forms so we can also add data manually. That would be really useful.
Kind regards,
Duncan
Hi Duncan – you can actually do this using SuperTags, which will allow you to add as many different types manually as you would like. There’s some information on tags and SuperTags in our FAQs: http://support.batchbook.com/kb/customization-with-tags-supertags
If you want more specific help with how to do this, please feel free to write to support@batchblue.com and they can assist!
Hi
I love social media and I know that a lot of my contacts are using them too, but I have over 4000 contacts and the thought of going through them one by one to try and add their social accounts is particularly horrifying. Is there anyway that I could get them imported automatically to their contact details. I know that Mailchimp allow me to see which of my newsletter subscribers are also on various social accounts and wondered if you do (or plan) to do the same?
I’m also investigating a separate social ROI application (Argyle Social) and wondered if you had plans to start any of this sort of enhancement in the future.
Thanks in anticipation
Linda