Open for Business
- Posted February 2nd, 2009
- Filed under: How We Do It, Using BatchBook
Christopher Penn wrote a great post last week pointing out the importance of corporate and government America reestablishing trust with the people they serve. He explains what authenticity and transparency can do to help an organization establish this type of trust. At one point he mentions the role that social media can play in this relationship and he mentions me as an example of “human beings who represent their companies, but the trust you have in them is at the human level.” I am flattered by the compliment, especially coming from someone so committed to doing things right.
And it got me thinking. Personal transparency is certainly an important goal, but I have to say that the business’ transparency is the more important and more difficult to achieve. Here at BatchBlue, we are working very hard to build the trust that Chris is talking about; trust from our customers, trust from our vendors, trust from the bloggers who write about us and trust within ourselves. We strive to be as open, honest, responsive, and helpful as we can be. We feel that the best way to get to know a company, and ultimately to trust it is through direct access to the people behind it. We work hard to make sure that everyone here at BatchBlue is engaged in the conversations that are ultimately shaping what the company becomes.
I thought I would share some of the things we are doing to make our company increase its transparency in hopes that it will be useful to some of the other folks out there trying to establish an open relationship with their universe:
- First off, the BatchBlue communications team does not hoard the communications. In fact, our Communications Director Michelle established and published goals for the BatchBlue communications efforts early on and works with staff to make sure everyone is comfortable and supported in their own roles as Batch Ambassadors. And she is not afraid to venture out into the great social networking unknowns and bring the rest of the group up to speed as the conversations start churning.
- Everyone in the company has access to the company social network accounts including our Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. We keep the logins for the company accounts posted on our wiki and everyone is encouraged to engage. Our communications team carries the bulk of the load, but even surly programmers have been known to Twitter away.
- Everyone copies all of their professional email messages into our BatchBook account so that we all have access to any communications with our customers or other professional contacts. Most of us subscribe to the RSS feed of those communications – so we can see these business conversations as they are unfolding.
No longer are the direct conversations inevitably happening between people working closely together being lost in their separate e-mail accounts. We can all see the progression of a conversation as it is happening. - We have a very active group of customers interacting with us and with each other in our user forums. Each of us subscribes to the RSS feed of those forums so we can also keep an ear open to the conversations happening there as well.
- All messages that come in from customers to our support@batchblue.com or feedback@batchblue.com email addresses are sent to the entire staff. Customer service responds to the incoming questions, but everyone on staff sees the general tone and issues being reported. This helps us all stay in touch with the attitude of our customers towards us and our product.
- Every staff member responds to customer service emails. We have rotating schedule on the front lines of customer service so that not only are we aware of the relationships that are forming with our customers, each of us takes a turn at forming some ourselves.
- We have a feed of all Twitter messages being sent in to or written about BatchBook directly on our BatchBlue dashboard. You can follow full Twitter conversations happening between other staff members and prospects or clients as they are happening.
- We have a feed of all mentions or our company in Google News or Google Blogs directly on the BatchBlue dashboard. So again we are all keeping a close tab on what is being said about us in the great wide Internet and can engage quickly where it makes sense.
An interesting thing happened on the way to finishing this post. I showed the draft to some folks at our weekly staff meeting and got a little razzing on my use of the circa 1999 jagged edge effect on the screenshots I include above. Since this is story about the importance of transparency and authenticity, I felt funny about reworking the images just for the coolness factor. Being a human being, I also felt funny about having TOO much of my dorkiness show through. For an organization trying to put together a group voice, I think it is important that everyone be allowed to let some of the raw, unedited versions of themselves show. But I think it is equally important that they learn and grow together and hopefully raise the bar for each other to collectively improve . So retro-jagged edges make it in for now, though I reserve the right to switch to the hip new thing as I learn from my classy cohorts just what that thing is.
