Social CRM: Feed Readers, Shared SuperTags
- Posted October 14th, 2008
- Filed under: Product Updates, Social Media, Technology, User Experience, Using BatchBook
Now that we’ve hit BatchBook 1.0, it’s time to start looking at what 2.0 will be. To us, it means seeing how your contacts are interacting with and on the web. This translates to many things (syncing, sharing contact information with other apps, etc.) Each of our upcoming “social” features will more fully leverage the power of BatchBook and as a result, your contact network.
Feed Reader
For the first big addition in this more social direction, we’ve added a new SuperTag type: the Feed Reader. The Feed Reader SuperTag type lets you add any RSS feed, Twitter streams and Delicious streams to a SuperTag. You can add the Feed Reader to an existing SuperTag, or create a new SuperTag using new Feed Reader fields.
Here’s a screenshot of the Feed Reader in action. We’ve created a SuperTag called “social media” and added Feed Readers for personal blog, Twitter stream and delicious links. Currently, we show the last three updates to a feed and link back to the original feed source.
By adding feeds to a contact record, you can get a look at what they are up to on the web. You can even monitor a company’s brand using the Feed Reader. In our account, we’ve added the feed for Twitter search to our company record to keep up with any mentions on Twitter. Imagine having that information for all your clients right there on their contact record (editor’s note — maybe then they’ll start understanding all this crazy ’social media’ stuff!)
SuperTag Library
We’re also in the beta stages of getting SuperTag collections into a new SuperTag Library, which you can access from the main SuperTag tab in your BatchBook account. With one click, you can add a complete, pre-defined Supertag. These collections will be really useful as we continue to build them out for specific industries and job roles. If you’ve created any SuperTags that you think might be useful to others, please let us know if you’d like to share.
Thanks to all our customers for their continued support and input. We look forward to building BatchBook 2.0 with you!
In my quick test of two twitters, I see that the feed works even when someone required permission to follow. Is that a hole in the Twitter system?
Hello Ernie,
If someone marks their feed private we are unable to show it on BatchBook on you will be messaged as such. Otherwise all feeds are public and can be consumed by anyone on the web.
We just go through the web interface to get at feeds. These feeds must be publicly accessible and let us know if not.
Hope that helps clear this up,
-sean
Hi, Sean,
I purposely added someone whose feed is private. His tweets are showing up in his Social Media supertag. I do have permission to follow him, but it seems a little too cool that Twitter would recognize that I’m the same person pulling that feed into BatchBook. My main concern is that if we have a large number of private feeds that we start following, someone one day figures out there’s a leak and shuts it down at an inopportune time.
Thanks,
Ernie
Hello Ernie,
Hmm I am not able to repro this. Anyone that I follow with protected feeds stay protected in BB.
So possibly an error on twitters end or these people may have opened up their feeds. Feel free to send the examples to support@batchblue.com and I can take a deeper look.
-sean
Can not confirm that issue either, my non public twitter account does NOT appear at batchbook’s supertag (“This users updates are protected.”)