Way back in early 2008 (has it really been that long?), Michelle and I collaborated on what was then the second of our BatchBlue Blue Papers. Blue Papers, if you’re not familiar, are like white papers. Only… you know… blue. The paper was called Social Media for Small Business. It served as a primer for small business owners wondering how (or even if) they should get their businesses involved in social media.
Since 18 months is an eternity in the social media world, we decided it was time for an update. Some of the highlights:
- We expanded the Twitter section. This was necessary since in the last version we talked about how we were still skeptical of Twitter’s business applications. How the times have changed! The updates include discussion of tweet chats (like SBBUZZ!) and hashtags.
- In the social networking space, Facebook was brought to the forefront and MySpace was downplayed. When this was originally written, Facebook applications were all the rage. Remember those?
- We added StumbleUpon, a site that was totally left out of the first version.
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Tags: blogger, blue paper, delicious, digg, facebook, linkedin, myspace, Social Media, stumbleupon, twitter, wikipedia, wordpress
One of my favorite BatchBook features is the Social Media SuperTag. This week, we enhanced it by adding support for LinkedIn profiles. All you have to is enter address to a public LinkedIn profile. When you save it, we’ll replace the link with a widget that looks a lot like this:
Out of the box, the Social Media SuperTag allows you to enter a contacts usernames on Twitter, Flickr, or Delicious and we’ll show the last three tweets, photos, or bookmarks. You can also enter a Blog feed and see excerpts of the last three posts. This will actually work for any RSS feed. In the screencast below, I add a Slideshare presentations, Last.fm recent tracks, and BatchBook forum feeds to a contact record.
We think this is a great way to see what’s on the mind of your most valuable contacts right before you pick up the phone or start that email. Watch below to see the Social Media SuperTag in action!
Screencast: Social media integration with the Social Media SuperTag
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Tags: delicious, flickr, linkedin, rss, small business CRM, social crm, Social Media, supertags, twitter
I love getting neat BatchBook usage tips from our users. This happened again over the weekend as Andrew shared with us (via the BatchBook Forums) how he’s using FireFox 3′s “Awesome Bar” to quickly search for contacts in BatchBook.
Now that I have all my data in BatchBook, I wanted a quick way to pull up a contact. Thanks to Firefox and the Delicious.com extension, I have it!
(If you don’t know, Delicious.com is a great bookmarking application. It handles all my bookmarks. And there’s a handy Firefox extension.)
Be sure you have the Delicious extension installed. Then you can right click in the BB contact search box (upper right of any BB screen). Select “Add a keyword for this search in Delicious.” Then you can fill out the bookmark details and enter a keyword that will invoke the search.
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Tags: awesome bar, delicious, firefox, Our Users are So Smart, search
