As you may have heard, we’re hard at work developing an iphone app for BatchBook. This is something we’re very excited about and in preparation for the big event, we’ve asked two local filmmakers to help us get the word out.
Meet Ethan and Dylan, eight-year old twins with a passion for all things movie-related. The boys, sons of BatchBook customer and BatchBlue friend Anisa Raoof from kidoinfo.com, write about movies as Flick and Flack on their blog FlickFlackMovieTalk.com. They also recently completed a week of film camp at the very cool Kid’s Eye Summer Filmmaking Camp, and their directorial debut (complete with a walk down the red carpet!) screened this past weekend at the University of Rhode Island.
We’re proud to support these local, up and coming filmmakers and look forward to seeing what they come up with to showcase the awesomeness that will be the BatchBook iphone app.
In the meantime, we’re pleased to introduce you to Flick & Flack as they enjoy lunch from Mad Ernie’s Cafe in lovely Wayland Square!
We have been loving the Flowtown integration and have been looking for more ways to leverage the information we get back from Flowtown in BatchBook.
We’ve received some ideas from Twitter as well as a very thoughtful blog post from our customer Hugh Macken. They all agreed on one thing: Add Klout!
Klout, for those who don’t know, is a great tool to measure a persons influence on the social web. Influence is measured on many different fronts including followers, friends, total retweets, etc. You receive a Klout score from 1-100 with 100 meaning you basically rule the social web.
Flowtown gives us this score but until today we were not displaying it. Now, if you are using the Flowtown integration, we populate the score into your social media supertag:
Yeah my score is pretty low…thank you Mom for following me though!
We import the score as a number field so using BatchBook reports you can search for folks with a Klout score greater than, less than or equal to. You can create lists targeted based on Klout score which can be very powerful.
We’re also pulling in job title information from Flowtown if the contact does not have a existing title on their contact record. Let us know what else you would like to see out of this integration — we’re listening!
So there you have it, a small addition to BatchBook but something we think you will find very useful. And you’re welcome, @tsondermann.
Our friends over at MOO cards are running a little promotion that we think is very cool. Over the course of the next few weeks, the Business Card Project aims to re-design the business cards of 500 small business owners for, get this, FREE. That’s a very nice price!
From MOO’s site:
“Business cards are often the only piece of marketing you’ll print for your small business. Why hand over badly designed cards; limp and curling at the edges?
Sometimes there’s no time to redesign, or it’s hard to find a designer. Even choosing the right look for your cards can take time, skill and money.
Well, you’re in luck! We’re running a contest, giving away $250,000 worth of design consultation – our designers are ready and waiting to fix your cards.”
It’s true that even in this age of electronics, a very small piece of paper is often the first thing people see about your business. Go ahead, submit your card and let them help create a business card for you that’s as unique as your business.
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.
