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Last week was a milestone week for us. It was the two year anniversary of the launch of BatchBook and the starting week for our three (!) newest employees.
It’s a very exciting time here at BatchBlue. We’ve seen rapid growth not only in BatchBook, but in our weekly Twitter chat SBBuzz and our SaaS coalition the Small Business Web. We have some related major new launches coming up and to help us prepare, we were lucky to have found three amazing new employees.
Allow me to introduce:
Mikey Hougland (@lamikey) is a local artist about the town and our new on-staff designer. We have known Mikey for a couple of years and have attended many Providence Geeks meetings and even SXSW parties together. Not to mention her dog (and Twitter user!) @scoutsprout is a t-shirt wearing BatchBlue fan. We’re thrilled to have Mikey’s help in making the BatchBlue world visually interesting and useful for our customers.
Scott Blitstein (@scoblitz) is living proof that online relationships are the real thing. Scott was an early beta user of BatchBook, he has been one of the most frequent non-employee contributors on our forums, he’s written about us on a number of different blogs, participated in every contest we ran, regularly attends and periodically guest moderates on SBBuzz and helped us develop our new Experts Program. I’ve never actually met him in person, haven’t seen his resume or CV, didn’t ask for writing samples and yet when he expressed an interest in working for us, I knew immediately we had to hire him. And we’re lucky he said yes! He’ll be joining the Customer Experience team, working over on our forums, writing for the blog and just generally being the helpful guy that he is.
Christelle Lachapelle (@stellel) is our newest Customer Experience diva. She found us through our good pals at MailChimp (so we knew she was a smart lady) and told us in her cover letter that she would look good in a pink mustache. Her personality came through in every communication we had with her, so we knew she would be a great addition to our fanatical customer support team.
Please join us in welcoming the latest BatchBluers. We’re glad they are along for what promises to be a very fun and interesting ride.
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Tags: batchblue, hr, Social Media, virtual office
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.
While it’s certainly interesting to watch how the older, more established companies work to fit social media into their product offerings, I think it’s even more interesting to build a product around the new tools as they are being developed.
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Tags: batchblue, batchbook, crm, social crm, Social Media
This past week, I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City. Since we launched BatchBlue Software just over three years ago, I’ve been to quite a few conferences. In tandem with the growth of our company has been the rise of social media, which has been great for us in many ways since our product, BatchBook, is an online contact organizer that grabs feeds from social media sites and lets you read them in one place.
But something seems to be changing in the conference world. In the past, they’ve been great places not only to learn from the leaders in your industry but to make connections, spark new friendships and form potential new partnerships. That sense of the hallway conversations being as important as the sessions themselves seems to be receding, largely because the conversations…aren’t really happening.
At Web 2.0, people were heads-down on their various electronic devices during breaks, not engaging with each other but seeking frenetically to connect with people not actually at the conference. I don’t mean to just specifically call out the Web 2.0 Expo because this is certainly happening in other places as well. And the conference panels were very good, in fact from a business-level some of the most useful that I’ve attended. But that’s another post.
Having recently attended the PopTech conference, which is a place where people connect instantly and constantly to share ideas, discuss sessions, start projects, I was particularily struck by the lack of attendee interaction. Even at the Web 2.0 “Power Up” station (Web 2.0’s version of the Blogger’s Lounge at another highly social conference, SXSW) it felt like we were in a cavernous office, with people quickly clicking and scrolling away in solitude rather than talking about the sessions that they had just attended.
Admittedly, people still have their daily work to do and as someone who liveblogs, I’m guilty of having my laptop up and running most of the time during sessions. But another thing that’s changing is what people are doing while they are online during the sessions. The Keynote speakers had an enormous screen behind them that was at first broadcasting their Twitterstream (hashtagged #w2e) behind the speakers. As an attendee, I found it enormously distracting. danah boyd from Microsoft Research New England, presenting on (ironically) “Streams of Content”, found it so unnerving that the audience was laughing at criticisms of her presentation that she later stated on her blog that she “closed down”.
I’m all for the back-channel and having a spirited conversation about a presentation, but I can tell you that as a presenter, to have it broadcasted while you are presenting sucks, especially once the spammers and the trolls join in. There’s even a term now, “harshtag”, which is when people start tagging their related tweets with something insulting in order to get it to trend.
(more…)
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Tags: chris brogan, Social Media, twitter, web 2.0 expo
This feature release is so big we’re taking the whole week to announce it! For the rest of the week, we will be highlighting some of the exciting new features in our BatchBook for Sales release, including a new tab for tracking Deals, an all-inclusive calendar and permissions-based access to your BatchBook contacts and communications.
We’ve worked hard over the past year and a half to bring the personal side of small business relationships into BatchBook. SuperTags allow you to build a richer profile of your customers, social media integration allows you to engage with them in a more personal and accessible way, and our Small Business Web partnerships provide a single source of information for all of the other systems you are using to run your business.
Now, we’ve combined this with the deals and leads tracking tools of enterprise sales management products so you can better understand how to turn these personal relationships into new customers. Share conversations across your team, track important action items and capture all signals your customers are sending out – whether a complimentary Tweet or a frustrated blog post.
At BatchBlue, we believe that open, on-going communication with your contacts is really the lifeblood of your business. With BatchBook for Sales, the sales pipeline just got a little more personal. Because you should never have to force a sale.
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Tags: contact management, crm, sales, small business 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.
Please let us know what you think and how you are using the new forms. To show off the new web forms we are hosting a Summertime Vacation contest with some HOT, HOT prizes! Enter to win a surfboard for land lovers, some hot new Moo cards or a free BatchBook account.
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Tags: batchbook, mailchimp, social crm, Social Media, supertags, twitter
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