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Jeremiah Owyang recently wrote an article for CRM Magazine Social CRM Vendors Don’t Walk The Talk where he puts a number of CRM vendors through the spreadsheet grinder to see how their social media engagement measures up to the social media features their products espouse. BatchBook was not included in the analysis, though BatchFriend and customer Paul Mabray from Vintank.com was kind enough to mention us in the comments.
I agree with Jeremiah, but I think there is a clear distinction between the CRM companies that are now making a social media play versus the social media upstarts who are incorporating some traditional CRM features such as sales and customer service management into their products as they build them. Jeremiah highlighted a number of products that were developed around older (phone, e-mail, direct mail) marketing tools and are now working to add social media as an additional sales channel. Alternately, there are newer products like Jive, Gist and our own BatchBook that really began as social media communication tools and have added sales features as another layer.
Not surprisingly, those with Web 2.0 roots have more integration with social media throughout our products and throughout our company cultures, as well. As he mentions, social media is not a linear channel that can be “added on” in the same way previous channels have been. It is an intricate web of blogs, comments, tweets, direct messages, friend requests, recommendations, favorites and hashtags each with their own sub-culture and mini-dialect that together shape the direction of a conversation. Whether it’s sales, customer service, or project management, this new dialogue is not fully represented unless you can track all aspects of the conversation, and more importantly, understand their meaning in context with your relationships.
I applaud Jeremiah for calling companies out for more engagement. He makes great points about not only supporting customer and developer discussions, but also showcasing those communities as a vibrant component of the product. He’s also given us a few ideas for pushing our community into a more prominent part of the product. And isn’t that what social media is about? Using a public kick in the pants to move your efforts forward.
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Tags: batchblue, batchbook, crm, social crm, Social Media
I’m particularly excited about the launch of our new BatchBook Web Forms today for so many reasons. Because we built the forms to use the super flexible customization of our SuperTags and the super connectedness of our Social Media Tag, there are a great many things you can do with them. You can reach out to your network of business evangelists in so many different ways – to ask for their feedback or connect with them on Twitter. You can find new evangelists by posting a sign-up form or asking them to sign up for your newsletter.
Here are just a few of the great things you can do with the new forms:
- Add a Contact form to your web site with the click of a button. Simply create a new web form, name it and publish it on your own web site. Anyone who fills in the form can be saved directly in your BatchBook account for a follow-ups by your staff or sales team.
- Survey your prospects by adding custom SuperTag fields to your contact form. Learn up front what products they are interested in, what budget they are working with, what their purchase deadline is, or anything else that is important to you when starting a new relationship with an interested customer.
- Survey your customers by creating a custom form with SuperTags and e-mailing a group of customers to determine what new features they would like developed, what their satisfaction level is with your service team or anything else that will help you keep up a good relationship with your customers.
- Manage newsletter Sign-ups in 3 easy steps. First create a web form asking users if they would like to receive your newsletter. Second create a report of anyone who responds “YES”. And third send the list off to MailChimp for distribution to your new best friends!
- Collect social media information from your customers, prospective customers, business partners and favorite pets by including fields from the Social Media SuperTag on your web form. BatchBook will automatically pull feeds of their blogs, tweets or photos instantly giving you a richer insight into their world. What better way to get to know someone?
- Combine all of the above to reach out to your entire network, ask them a few questions and connect with them in social media spaces all at once.
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Tags: batchbook, mailchimp, social crm, Social Media, supertags, twitter
Here’s a quick round-up of some posts from users and reviewers of BatchBook.
Adam & Cheap Trick: A match made in CS heaven
If you’ve ever spent any time in the BatchBlue Forums, you’ve probably experienced the magic that is Adam Darowski. Adam is our User Experience designer known for his passion for good design, our customers and music. So the fact that he crafted an email to someone who was considering BatchBook that included a link to a Cheap Trick song came as no surprise to any of us. But the (potential) customer was so impressed, he wrote up a blog post about it, which was tweeted all around the socialsphere. And the best thing is that we have a new customer who appreciates our sense of humor.
Bedazzled by BatchBook brilliance
Robert Mattar wrote up a nice piece over at Posterous about his experience searching for a CRM that would work well for small businesses. His conclusion? He calls BatchBook “one of the most versatile and affordable applications” out there and even calls us “brilliant” in the post’s title. Thanks, Robert, we’re so glad BatchBook is working out for you since we think small businesses are where it’s at!
We love lists
People love lists and so do we, especially when we are on them! So here goes:
- Our friend (and frequent @sbbuzz participant) Bradford Shimp posted this cool list of 9 Businesses to Follow and Get to Know on Twitter. He has fabulous things to say about BatchBlue, our @sbbuzz weekly chat session, and our own Queen Bee, Pamela!
- One of our favorite small business marketing gurus, John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing, mentioned us as a way to keep track of your customers’ social media activities.
- And last but never least, social media pirate Chris Brogan reveals what’s in his software booty chest (including BatchBook) in his recent post entitled A Quick and Inconclusive List of Software I Like.
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Tags: @sbbuzz, batchbook, chris brogan, Customer Service, john janstch, small business, small business CRM, social crm
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
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Tags: linkedin, small business CRM, social crm, Social Media, supertags
Last night, BatchBlue Onboarding Specialist Stephanie Sweeney and I made the drive up to Boston to attend the Rock Stars of Social CRM event, hosted by Radian6 and Chris Brogan. They had a lot of fun with the Rock Star theme, complete with colored stage lights, concert tees and even a full-blown Rock Band set-up for audience members to rock out with after the panel.
The panelists included were Frank Eliason (Comcast), Paul Greenberg (Author of CRM at the Speed of Light), Michael Thomas (National President, CRM Association), and our favorite CRM go-to guy, Brent Leary (Co-author of Barack 2.0 and Co-founder of CRM Essentials).
Because we consider BatchBook to be a social CRM (slide via Brent Leary), I was curious to hear what the folks at the cutting edge had to say. I was especially impressed with Frank Eliason’s inclusion on the panel, since he represents a company that is actually out there doing all this stuff. While I always appreciate the bird’s eye view from consultants and experts, I have to agree with Doug Haslam of Shift Communications‘ assertion that he’s getting a bit impatient with social media.
After the panel, Doug and I had a brief conversation where I wondered if, when email entered the picture ten years or so ago, there were endless conferences and seminars and articles written about how email (a communication tool in the same way that social media is a communication tool) was going to fundamentally change the business world.
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Tags: @sbbuzz, chris brogan, Customer Service, radian6, rockstars of social crm, small business, social crm, twitter, twitter chats
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