BatchBook in the Real World: PR Professional
- Posted April 3rd, 2009
- Filed under: Social Media, Using BatchBook
PR professionals have unique challenges when managing contact information and ongoing communications for their clients, their client’s clients, press contacts, prospects and the myriad other people who help them get the word out. A PR firm wrote in with a few questions on how they should be using BatchBook to manage their team’s efforts. Below are the questions and our advice on how to best handle each challenge in BatchBook.
PR Team: my client does some of their own press outreach. How do I keep up with the conversations they are having so that I am not overlapping?
We’ve tried to make it as simple as possible to record conversations happening in e-mails, social media, etc. I would recommend that you ask your client to blind-copy (BCC) any e-mails they are sending directly to a blogger, media friend, etc to the unique BatchBox e-mail address associated with your account (they don’t need to be a user in the account to use the batchbox address). You can then easily see any past correspondence with a reporter by looking at their contact record. They can also easily forward in any blog comments, phone calls or trade show bathroom line conversations they might have, as well.
PR Team: How does a HARO query become a to-do item?
We know Peter Shankman’s HARO e-mails can be both a blessing and a curse. We ourselves have gotten some amazing press by quickly responding to HARO reporters, but we have also gotten overwhelmed by the number of follow-ups that need to be done and have missed a few great opportunities, as well. So we developed a tool within BatchBook that makes it easy to forward the HARO e-mails into BatchBook and then save individual pitch requests as to-do items and press contacts. By easily saving any relevant queries assigned to the right team member with a due-date set to the deadline and attached to the newly created contact record for that reporter, your team can just concentrate on getting the pitches out!
PR Team: How can the Social Media Supertags help me, specifically, as a PR pro? Can I customize them?
The social media SuperTag lets you easily track the conversations, professional updates or even daily musings of a journalist right in their contact record. By setting up a feed to track a reporter’s Twitter stream, latest blog posts or pictures they are posting on Flickr you can instantly get a sense of what is happening in their lives even as you are writing them with a new pr pitch. You’ll know not to approach them with a timely exclusive if they’ve tweeted about their honeymoon departure for Bora Bora. Or that you can celebrate together a Red Sox victory if they’ve been posting pictures of their box seat view of opening day.
And you can easily customize your social media tag to include information from any site that has an RSS feed including multiple blog sites (since many freelance journalists write for many different publications), online forums, LinkedIn groups, etc.
PR Team: Some freelance reporters write for multiple publications. Can I attach them to more than one company record?
Yes. Using our Affiliations feature you can attach a reporters record to as many publications as you want. You can even create custom affiliations such as “former writer for” XX publication to keep track of the history of their affiliations. So if you pull up the record for Inc. Magazine you can see not ony the current journalists listed there, but any other reporters in yout teams contact list that have written for them in the past.
PR Team: Can I connect a contact record with a communication record?
Yes, all communications (whether they are sent in via BatchBox or are logged using the “Add a Communication” form are automatically attached to all contacts involved in the communication.
PR Team: On the dashboard, can I set up multiple Google search tabs or Twitter tabs, to track multiple clients?
You can not setup separate tabs, but you can easily search for multiple clients – or even multiple brands belonging to one client. Just run the search on multiple names at once such as BatchBlue OR BatchBook OR “Pamela O’Hara” OR pmohara OR sbbuzz.
Here’s a diagram that shows exactly how the HARO integration works. For more information, see our HARO page.
