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Batchbook Adds Facebook, Enhanced Twitter & LinkedIn Integration

We’re on a bit of a roll with launching revamped versions of integrations in Batchbook. First it was MailChimp and now it’s on to something very near and dear to our hearts: social media.

This is a major revamp to how we integrate social media in Batchbook. We’ve both revamped Twitter and Linkedin and added full Facebook support. Let’s take a look at some screenshots of the new integrations. We also have a great screencast at the bottom so you can see it all in action.

First let’s take a look at Twitter:

Build social media activity into your workflow
For each service, we’ve added a more complete profile to your social media supertag. You’ll now see “cards” for each connected account. On Twitter you can now follow, retweet, favorite and/or reply right from Batchbook. You can also save the individual tweets as Communications or To-Dos. Turning Tweets into actionable items is a fantastically useful way to bring social into your everyday Batchbook workflow. (more…)

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Social Media for Small Business: Updated Blue Paper

blue-paper

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.

(more…)

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A Busy Month of Product Updates

Last year, for quite a while, it seem as though we were churning out feature updates for BatchBook at a dizzying pace. These weren’t enormous new features, but just smaller updates that simply made the lives of our users easier. Since the start of 2009, however, we’ve been busy on a few rather major updates. Some have launched (like our integrations with FreshBooks and Shoeboxed), some are in beta (like Google Contacts sync), and some haven’t been released yet (I’m not telling!).

The month of June has been a welcome return to the “flurry of updates” release schedule. Over at the BatchBook forums, Keri posts detailed notes about product releases. Today, I wanted to tell you about the “Greatest Hits” from these updates.

Batch Updating of SuperTags

Batch Updating of SuperTags

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LinkedIn profiles added to the Social Media SuperTag

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:

LinkedIn Profile Widget

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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Always Be Listening

We feel so strongly about finding the best tools and procedures for turning our customer’s conversations into new product features that we convinced a few of our high-profile friends to join us in telling some inside secrets. And they are doing it publicly (if we can get your help voting us in!) as part of the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference’s panel discussion titled “Customer Service is the New RD.”

The current lineup includes:

  1. Sean Ransom, BatchBlue.com
  2. Sunir Shah, FreshBooks.com
  3. Mario Sundar, LinkedIn.com
  4. Lane Becker, GetSatisfaction.com

The plan is to talk with these folks about the tools they are using to connect with customers and how these conversations are integrated back into the product development process. It’s easy to say you are listening to your customers, but unless you can act on what they are saying and give them what they need it is not a very productive conversation.

(more…)

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