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.
This year, three (THREE!) members of the BatchCrew gave presentations. They were:
“Wonderful World of Word of Mouth Marketing” by Michelle Riggen-Ransom
Michelle’s talk explored how to create low-cost buzz around a product or business. She spoke about identifying ways to connect with customers, how to get them talking about your business, and providing tools to help your customers to share the love. She also gave real-world examples of word of mouth campaigns both good and bad.
Matt’s presentation, “The Tao of GTD,” combined productivity tips for knowledge workers with martial arts philosophies from the Tao of Jeet Kune Do. “I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone more accomplished than Bruce Lee,” said Matt, “so it seemed only natural that some of the teachings from his book would apply well in other creative fields.”
The talk touched on several strategies for acknowledging your own weaknesses, removing obstacles from your workflow, and keeping yourself motivated. Matt also talked about a few tools he uses to manage his information and gave a quick overview of Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero approach to email. But ultimately it’s not about the tools. “It’s really easy to waste time fiddling with tools, if you forget that the whole point is getting to your real work more efficiently.”
Or as Bruce would say, “It is like a finger pointing toward the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”
“Turning Your Design into a WordPress Theme” by Adam Darowski
In this presentation, I deconstructed a WordPress theme I recently built (the Tabigail theme) and explained what each file does. Then, I took an all-new XHTML/CSS one-page design and combined it with the Tabigail theme code to make an all new original theme. I only had 15 minutes for the actual “building” part, so I didn’t finish the WHOLE theme, but I did get the home page and archives up and running. The theme will be launched in the form of a redesign of my personal site soon.
We love NewBCamp for a number of reasons. It’s local. It’s small, It’s intimate. But there is also an incredible amount and variety of information exchanged.
These days especially, listening to what your customers and potential customers are saying about your business, your competition, or what they need from a product or service is more important than ever. Even if you’re not a marketer, you’re likely doing some form of marketing for your company’s product or service (especially if you’re a business owner!) Making and tracking connections both online and off is what could mean the difference between boosting word of mouth and increasing sales or closing down shop.
To assist in this endeavor, we’re pleased to announce the official launch of BatchBook for Marketing. Working with an advisory board of marketing professionals, we’ve built this custom version of BatchBook around their unique data management needs.
BatchBook for Marketing enables marketers to:
Monitor prospect, customer and other blog posts, tweets and bookmarks with Social Media “SuperTags” (tags in which users can group contacts together and create custom fields) to gain unique insights into what they are thinking and doing
Track email, phone and in-person communications with contacts, keeping business-critical information easily at-hand
Send emails directly into BatchBook with the BatchBox mail-forwarding feature, which stores communications, attaches them to relevant contacts (and creates new contacts, if needed) and retains any attachments
Create connections with contacts by relationship to identify how people know each other and why they were added to their contacts network
Organize and tag contacts by event, industry or association
See what your contacts are saying on Twitter, in blog posts, and elsewhere in the social media sphere
As someone who does the lion’s share of communicating at BatchBlue, I’m already finding these new features enormously helpful. We hope you will, too.
As part of the innovative promotion for the book, he offered to answer five questions from fifty bloggers about the book:
“Three days ago I issued an open call on my blog to ask for any blogger to send me a 5 question interview that I would personally respond to (without cutting and pasting responses)…If you want to follow along through the day, you can do that here or just wait until the end of the day and I will produce a compilation of some of the best questions and themes that emerged.”
I thought this was a cool idea and so snuck in just under the wire (#50!) See a complete list of participants on the Influential Marketing Blog.
Below are my questions and, as promised, Rohit’s thoughtful responses. His answers (and the book) will be helpful as you build your own business and brand.
1. Do people really want to like a company or do they just want a good product? Can you love the player but not the game?
This is a great question, and one that I imagine many people considering getting my book will be asking. I happen to believe that the brand is the context around buying a great product that will not just be important to the person buying the product, but will also be a key influence in whether or not they decide to pass that experience on. The idea of the book, however, is not as regimented in parent brands. I shared an example in a few of the interviews so far about how a parent brand may not matter as much as the component brands in particular situations. For example, all the brand affinity for Darden restaurants like Olive Garden or Red Lobster (if there is any) belong to the restaurant brands. Do people care if its Darden or not? Not really. But the lessons of personality are equally relevant if you talk about Red Lobster or Olive Garden themselves. It is the same principle with products.
2. Are traditional ways of reaching niche markets still relevant (conventions, tradeshows etc.)?
Yes, I think they are – because people are still going there. I think the larger debate that you touch on is whether in person events are ever worth it anymore in this age of virtual conversations and virtual relationships. To answer that, I would point to a gathering of marketing bloggers next week in NY called Blogger Social which is essentially a chance for lots of marketing bloggers who have only corresponded virtually to finally meet in person. Ask anyone attending about the excitement they feel and you’ll have a pretty good idea of whether real in person events matter anymore.
3. Especially in the micro-business sector, many folks are completely untouched/unaffected by social media etc. Isn’t technology a bunch of hoo-haw that only us fancy Internet types care about (the Twitter-stricken, latte-sucking, city-living hipsters)?
If you talk about some of the newer tools, then I would have to agree. I am a big fan of twitter, but that doesn’t mean I would tell every client to use it. I can accept that for some people it will be totally useless, just as I can accept that for some people blogging is just a waste of time that they cannot justify. The view we technology-types (myself included) need to get away from is thrusting our point of view upon others as if it were a religion. Just because a tool works for you doesn’t mean everyone else needs to have it. Just because a certain belief works for you also doesn’t mean that everyone else wants to share it. Do you like when those Jehovah’s witnesses knock on your door? Don’t be that guy (or girl)!
4. What should a very small business owner (say 1-5 people) care about as far as building a great, personable brand?
The main thing to care about is how it impacts your relationships. A small business brand (or even a personal brand) has the same ability to inspire belief if done right. I spend a lot of time in the book talking not just about large companies but also how the ideas relate to small businesses. I think that is a very important audience for the message I was trying to share in the book … and I’m looking forward to hearing from some of them if I got it right.
5. IF YOU BUILD IT, WILL THEY COME?
It’s not really that easy, unfortunately … but if you do this right and they come, you CAN get them to stay, come back and tell others. What value would you put on that?
Thank you for sharing your insight, Rohit! I look forward to reading the book.
