Update: When you import your Twitter contacts into BatchBook, be sure to put the username inside a Feed Reader SuperTag field. That way we’ll show you the last three tweets on their contact detail page (also works with any other kinds of feeds). See more about the Feed Reader SuperTag.
As Michelle wrote last week, we’re Twitter fans at BatchBlue. I love that Twitter is so simple, but I find myself wishing I could better track information about my Twitter contacts. For example, I’m following enough people now that I don’t remember why I started following a lot of them in the first place. I know BatchBook is a great way to track contacts, so I’ve been looking for the best way to get my Twitter contacts into BatchBook.
Mike Gunderloy recently wrote a post about a service called Tweetake over at Web Worker Daily. The service exports your Twitter friends, followers, tweets, or all the above to a CSV for backup. While “backup” may be the intended purpose, I immediately though “import”. As in… Import into BatchBook!
So, the steps are:
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, importing contacts, screencast, Social Media, tutorial, twitter
One of BatchBook’s key features is the ability to track all sorts of custom data for your contacts. We introduced SuperTags, allowing you to create custom fields, choose which contacts to apply them to, store custom data, generate sortable, printable reports and export the data.
Now, we’ve made it super easy to import custom data. In your “Import a Contact” sidebar (see image below), you can now export a blank CSV template based on the fields you’ve created within your SuperTags. So, while you’re importing all your phone numbers and addresses, you can also easily import data such as favorite color, dog’s name, zodiac sign and just about anything else you can think of.
To assist you in the import process, we’ve built a page with step-by-step instructions that will help you prepare a file chock full of contact info and other custom data for an import to BatchBook. Happy organizing!
Tags: batchbook, importing contacts, supertags
As soon as I joined BatchBlue in May, I was thrown into the fire—we had a beta to get out, after all. There were lots of bugs to be fixed, display issues to be resolved, cranky browsers to accommodate, and architectures to learn. A lot of things initially impressed me about BatchBook, but it seemed like all I was doing was fixing issues. It becomes easy to lose a sense of the whole when you’re arm wrestling with tiny pieces of code day after day.
Then, a wonderful thing (on so many levels) happened—I took a couple weeks off to welcome our second child. For two weeks, I didn’t fix any bugs… I fixed makeshift dinners. I didn’t clean up code… I cleaned up belly button regions. I didn’t change class names, I changed diapers. Yet, I still used BatchBook. But I finally used it as a real live user.
When you become a user, you expand your view of the app beyond just functionality to include the entire user experience. Sure, things work… and kudos to Sean and Riley on getting that foundation in place. Now is the time for Michelle and I to make sure things feel right.
I started off by importing my contacts from my Mac OS X Address Book, my GMail account, and my LinkedIn account. The imports (via vCard) were flawless, which is wonderful. What I noticed right away is that we really need to streamline the process for consolidating the contacts library after this first batch of imports.
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Tags: batchbook, crm, importing contacts, online address book, User Experience, vCard
