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.
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Tags: batchblue, batchbook, haro, help a reporter out, marketing, pr, public relations
The second annual NewBCamp unconference was held this past Sunday here in Providence. Last year, I gave a talk on Web Standards while Pam performed admirably in her role as Vice President of Cheerfulness.
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.
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Tags: GTD, marketing, NewBCamp, presentations, providence, word of mouth, wordpress
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
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Tags: batchbook, crm for marketing, marketing, Social Media
Rohit Bhargava, a writer and a forward-thinking, interactive marketer for Ogilvy Public Relations, has just launched a book called “Personality Not Included: Why Brands Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Companies Get it Back.”
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.”
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Tags: marketing, Rohit Bhargava
