As you may have heard, we’re hard at work developing an iphone app for BatchBook. This is something we’re very excited about and in preparation for the big event, we’ve asked two local filmmakers to help us get the word out.
Meet Ethan and Dylan, eight-year old twins with a passion for all things movie-related. The boys, sons of BatchBook customer and BatchBlue friend Anisa Raoof from kidoinfo.com, write about movies as Flick and Flack on their blog FlickFlackMovieTalk.com. They also recently completed a week of film camp at the very cool Kid’s Eye Summer Filmmaking Camp, and their directorial debut (complete with a walk down the red carpet!) screened this past weekend at the University of Rhode Island.
We’re proud to support these local, up and coming filmmakers and look forward to seeing what they come up with to showcase the awesomeness that will be the BatchBook iphone app.
In the meantime, we’re pleased to introduce you to Flick & Flack as they enjoy lunch from Mad Ernie’s Cafe in lovely Wayland Square!
BatchBlue interviews Flick & Flack from Michelle Riggen-Ransom on Vimeo.
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Tags: batchbook, Community, iphone, marketing
Some big improvements to Search to announce. We recently moved to new search servers and they’re providing much faster searches. In addtion to this upgrade, we’ve also added two new features:
- Record Not Communicated With: Now you can do specific time based searches to see whom you have not been in contact with. Very handy for keeping in touch with folks. This field accepts natural language input like ‘7 days ago’ which is nice for creating reports as the date does not have to be static.
- “Is Empty”: This is probably our #1 feature request of all time. People have always wanted an ablility to see what records have no email address, what records do not yet have their supertag info filled out. Now you have it! In the advanced search dropdown you will now see:
Just select the ‘is empty’ filter with no value and BatchBook will bring back any records with blank info for that field. A really nice way to make sure the data you need is on the contacts important to you.
With these changes, BatchBook Search just became a lot more powerful. We hope you get some good use out of it!
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Tags: batchbook, search
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:
- I use my personal BatchBook account for my holiday mailing list, I’ve created a separate record for each person in a couple and link them with a “spouse” affiliation. I also created a field for how I want to address the collective them – ie “Dr. and Mrs. Allen” for my best friend’s older parents vs. “Sean Ransom & Michelle Riggen-Ransom” for my modern dual-name friends. I also created a field for their kids names so I can include them in the addressing.
- I’ve created tags for #doctor (which includes custom fields for hospitals & medications – my son has medical issues), #poker (my husband organizes a monthly game), #house (I seem to always call the plumber from the road), #holiday list, #teachers (with comments for gifts given so I don’t duplicate as multiple kids go through the same classes), #coach (same as teachers), #travel (my sister and I plan our family’s annual vacation so I’m usually dealing with hotels, house rentals, etc.)
- I am now the official keeper of my extended family’s official birthday and anniversary list, so I’ve created custom date fields for birthdays and anniversaries. My husband and I share a Google calendar and events I create from these dates automatically feed to it.
- I don’t keep my daily task list in BatchBook, but I do add events for recitals, performances, doctors appointments, etc. that feeds into my professional and my husband’s calendars.
- If I wanted to I could see my friends’ and families’ most recent Tweets, Flickr images, blog posts, etc. from within BatchBook, but honestly I don’t use this feature much in my personal account. These are all the same people I have on my special private Twitter list and I tend to keep up over there.
- I keep these all synced to my Android (and before that Blackberry) through Gmail. There is also a mobile version of BatchBook, and we are working to release native apps for the iPhone and Android soon.
My favorite criteria listed in the comments of Fred’s post (from wife Gotham Gal) is that the application they need should be built by a mom (we have a lot of those at BatchBlue, though we would add that a busy Dad’s probably just fine too!)
When it comes down to it, running a family is about managing relationships. No need to pie chart the likelihood of closing the deal, or dole out sales scripts to new employees. Just give me my son’s last prescription data when I need it, help me manage three different soccer schedules and keep me in good graces with my elderly Southern relatives who expect to hear from me no matter how busy I might be with work. Thanks to BatchBook, all that I can do.
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, how-to, supertags, work/life
We have been loving the Flowtown integration and have been looking for more ways to leverage the information we get back from Flowtown in BatchBook.
We’ve received some ideas from Twitter as well as a very thoughtful blog post from our customer Hugh Macken. They all agreed on one thing: Add Klout!
Klout, for those who don’t know, is a great tool to measure a persons influence on the social web. Influence is measured on many different fronts including followers, friends, total retweets, etc. You receive a Klout score from 1-100 with 100 meaning you basically rule the social web.
Flowtown gives us this score but until today we were not displaying it. Now, if you are using the Flowtown integration, we populate the score into your social media supertag:
Yeah my score is pretty low…thank you Mom for following me though!
We import the score as a number field so using BatchBook reports you can search for folks with a Klout score greater than, less than or equal to. You can create lists targeted based on Klout score which can be very powerful.
We’re also pulling in job title information from Flowtown if the contact does not have a existing title on their contact record. Let us know what else you would like to see out of this integration — we’re listening!
So there you have it, a small addition to BatchBook but something we think you will find very useful. And you’re welcome, @tsondermann.
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Tags: batchbook, flowtown, marketing, social crm, Social Media
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.
A big thanks to the BatchBlue tech team for making my BatchBook dream a reality! Now, who in my network needs an introduction to whom…?
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, usability
