Recognizing our "Most Connected Customer" Brandon Dunlap at the SXSBW Happy Hour
In preparing for the launch of the new Small Business Web Directory and for the SXSBW (South by Small Business Web!) party that we co-sponsored at SXSW last week, we came across someone who we think just might be our “most connected” customer, Brandon Dunlap from Brightfly, Inc. Brandon uses several of the Small Business Web members applications to run his business.
We were delighted to bring Brandon to the party as our Special Guest of Honor and showered him with all sorts of hip and useful schwag from the thirteen sponsoring companies of the party.
Here’s Brandon’s story:
Very well-connected
Brandon Dunlap, managing director of research at Brightfly, Inc., logged nearly 100,000 air miles last year crisscrossing the country for business meetings, conferences and other professional events. He is constantly networking, which in turn helps the research and consultancy firm grow its contact base by thousands each year.
To foster and grow all of these relationships, Brightfly relies on a number of solutions offered by The Small Business Web, an open collective of businesses aimed at connecting Web applications to help small businesses bloom and grow. The integrated solutions, which work together through their open APIs, help Brightfly maintain mountains of contact data and more efficiently and personally stay engaged with each person.
“Being a relationship-driven company, we don’t have a sales team managing all of our data. without the help of BatchBlue, this would be an arduous task. The companies of The Small Business Web give us a single point to manage all the ways we get in touch with our friends and colleagues in the field,” said Dunlap. “Since The Small Business Web solutions can ‘talk’ with each other, I can get back to people faster, even while I am on the road. The time savings are phenomenal.”
For example, Dunlap might collect a batch of business cards while at a information security conference in San Francisco and send them off to Shoeboxed before he gets on a plane to return home to Texas. Once back in the office, he can take all of the contact data that can be scanned and digitized by Shoeboxed and seamlessly enter it into his BatchBook social CRM account by BatchBlue. BatchBook enables him to tag each person by what event he met them at, what types of materials they requested or any other follow-up or other identifiers. He can then build and manage e-mail lists using MailChimp, another Small Business Web partner, to stay in touch with contacts with key research developments as they occur. Recently, Brightfly has kicked off a Competitive Compliance survey project leveraging the relationship between MailChimp and Small Business Web member SurveyGizmo to glean research insights from leaders in the information security and audit field.
Data in Brightfly’s is also imported into a Freshbooks account for recurring invoices, while Small Business Web partner Clarity helps Dunlap and others try to forecast and look for trends in their revenue streams.
“Everything in our business is done on personal connections. For everyone on my team to share all that information in one location and to be able to pivot across that data is huge,” said Dunlap. “The Small Business Web network of solutions helps us maintain currency and relevancy with all the individuals we need to contact at a price and service level better than a single-source solution.”
It was great to meet Brandon in person and be able to learn first-hand how the Small Business Web is helping small businesses like his succeed.
What about you? Are you using multiple web apps to help your small business bloom and grow? Let us know, we want to hear from you!
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Tags: batchbook, freshbooks, mailchimp, small business, small business web, SXSWi
Today, live from the action at SXSWi in Austin, we launched the new version of The Small Business Web. This site has grown from a single page put together on the fly at last year’s SXSW, to a full-blown Directory that includes categories, screen shots, pricing info, links to integration information and more.
Helping small businesses navigate and use technology has always been part of BatchBlue’s mission. It’s why we write our “Blue Papers“, it’s why we started the Twitter chat for small business owners #SBBUZZ and it’s the reason we’re now so excited about the new Directory. We think it will be very useful for folks looking for ways to grow and manage their businesses using some of the best tools out there.
Here’s a short video our friends at MailChimp put together to help explain what the Small Business Web is all about:
We hope you will make many good connections through the new Small Business Web Directory. We look forward to helping you hook them all up.
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Tags: batchblue, mailchimp, small business, small business web, SXSW, SXSWi
You may have noticed the increased excitement around BatchBlue recently. We’ve been working on some new efforts and tonight we are announcing the launch of the BatchBook as a part of the Google Apps Marketplace, Google’s online storefront for Google Apps products and services. BatchBook is part of a diverse group of applications that will now be available for sign-up directly within all Google Apps customer’s accounts.
This marketplace represents an exciting new era in the world of small business management. Google has long been a leader in providing easy, affordable, reliable applications such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs for small businesses to use to run their businesses. With the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, Google is now making it that much easier for their customers and all small businesses to find, set up and maintain their own grab bag of business applications without the overhead of IT installation and maintenance.
Why we love the new Google Apps Marketplace:
- It’s easy for small businesses to set up all of their applications at once.
- It is safe, reliable and very affordable.
- The integration between Google Apps Marketplace vendors means better results and less work for small businesses.
- The high caliber of companies in the Google Apps Marketplace means we know our customer’s are in good hands.
- We got to work with THE Google.
All of the applications included in the new Google Apps Marketplace integrate with the existing Google Apps products. So a small business user can now manage their communications in Gmail, automatically save those Gmail contacts as customers in BatchBook, easily invoice them using FreshBooks and collect payments using Google Checkout, then send an auto-response using MailChimp. All with a few quick clicks and without uploading/downloading separate files or duplicating entries into different systems.
We are very excited to be involved in the new Google Apps Marketplace. And we are excited by what this new era in cloud computing means for small businesses.
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Tags: freshbooks, google, google apps, google marketplace, mailchimp
We wanted to start the new year off with a round-up of some recent articles and reviews that have hit the Interwebs. A brief media retrospective, if you will (a complete list of media coverage can be found on our press page.)
Live via Skype
Back in September, our friend and Internet marketer Bernie Borges did my first ever interview via Skype about all things BatchBlue and our content strategy in particular. His Optimize This blog post has a link to the audio version as well as a nice summary of our chat.
The work/life thing
One of our very favorite ladies Aliza Sherman, who’s the Entrepreneur Mom at WorkItMom (among her many other projects!) posted an interview of our president Pam O’Hara and me by problogger Gina Blitstein. Pam and I were both surprised at how different our answers were when it came to how we balance our work and family lives (Pam has three kids under seven and I have two.) Have a read – maybe you have come up with an entirely different way to make it all work that you’d like to share.
Locavores
Here in our hometown of Providence, we were featured in Rhode Island Business Quarterly. I like this article because it includes a picture of (most of) our team in our office, which is kind of rare. I also love the title “The Organizers” because it makes us seem alike street gang in a gritty episode of the Sopranos — arguably more exciting than building software!
Monkey do
Our favorite monkeys over at email marketing company MailChimp reached an important milestone with their API and mentioned BatchBlue and our Small Business Web cohorts over on their blog. Our integration with MailChimp was our first ever, therefore we will always have a great fondness (as well as free bananas!) for them. Congrads to the MailChimp team on their continued success.
Word on TheStreet.com
Finally, as an early Christmas gift, Jonathan Blum wrote a nice review of BatchBook on TheStreet.com and also posted a slick little video of BatchBook in action. It was a great way to end an exciting year.
As always, we’re now hard at work at the BatchBlue headquarters, building things to surprise and hopefully delight our customers in upcoming months. Thanks to all for your support — we look forward to what the new year will bring for BatchBlue and our customers.
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Tags: batchblue, batchbook, mailchimp, small business web
Since we launched the Small Business Web last March, we’ve had over 40 amazing, like-minded companies join our mission to provide powerful, affordable software to small business owners. As we’ve grown, so has our Small Business Website. We’ve given it a pretty new look and made it a bit easier to find things.
This week, I’m at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York meeting with the Small Business Web founders and other small business owners to see what’s next. We’re even planning a Small Business Web-up for Wednesday night to talk small biz – please stop by if you are in town and would like to meet up for a drink!
Want to be a part of the Small Business Web? Join the Google group or, if you have an API, sign the manifesto! We’re taking over the Internet, one small business at a time.
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Tags: freshbooks, mailchimp, outright, shoeboxed, small business, small business web, web 2.0 expo
