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.
I recently did some customization of the BatchBlue fan page on Facebook. We thought it would be fun to have a little give-away for our friends on Facebook, so I added one of our very own BatchBook Custom Forms to our page. Now, when friends sign up on our Facebook page, their information is magically transported to our BatchBook account so we’ll have all the important information we need to notify the winners.
One of our super smart customers, Alex Webster, outlined the steps for adding a BatchBook form to your Facebook page in our forums and I thought I would share some steps and screenshots here for you.
Step 1:
The first thing you will need to do is set up your form in your BatchBook account. We have a handy FAQ which explains the process. Create the form and save it in your account. I would suggest that you set the return URL to the URL for your Facebook Wall. Then, you’ll need to take a little trip down memory lane to visit Adam Darowski’s post on customizing BatchBook forms. Grab the source code from your form and pay particular attention to step 2 so your form will work with your BatchBook account. Save the code in a text file. If you would like to add your own custom css you can add it at the top of this file between some style tags or use inline styles for the elements you would like to customize. If you don’t use your own styles, then the default Facebook styles will be used for your form. If you need help customizing the css in your FBML tab, here is a great tutorial.
Step 2:
Head on over to your Facebook fan page. Click on the edit button below your profile picture. You will need to add the FBML application from this page. If you don’t see it listed at the bottom of the page under “More Applications”, then click on “Browse More” and do a quick search for it. Adding this application to your Facebook page will allow you to create a custom tab on your Facebook page.
Step 3:
Click edit to customize the tab.
You will need to give the tab a name and then you will paste the form code from your text file into the large box of the FBML application. Click “Save Changes”.
Step 4:
FBML can be saved as a box or a tab. We will be setting this up as a tab, so you will need to make the following edits. Find the name of the FBML tab that we just created and click on Application settings.
You will need to change the settings to look like what we have in this image. The wording is a little confusing, but make sure that you change it to “Box: Available” and “Tab: Added”. That will make your form appear on it’s own tab.
Step 5:
You can set the form tab to be the default landing page for new visitors to your Facebook fan page. You can do this by clicking on the “Edit” link under “Wall Settings” and selecting your form page from the drop down menu.
Ta Da!
You now have a new Custom Form on your Facebook Fan Page. Who’s cooler than you? Please share your Fan Pages with us, we’d love to see them!
As fans of diversity and champions of doing your own thing, BatchBlue has always loved the idea behind MOO cards, a company that lets you create business cards using your own images. Who says business cards need to be boring? Certainly not MOO, who display the many different ways their customers have used their product to create funky, artistic stand-out business and calling cards in a Flickr group.
Our new MOO cards!
BatchBlue’s latest batch of MOO cards feature Twitter quotes from some of our happy customers. What better way to show off how social our CRM BatchBook is than by displaying some of the nice things people are saying about us on Twitter!
Backstage at MOO (Providence, RI)
Since we’ve been customers for a while, we were thrilled when MOO opened an office right in our hometown of Providence, RI. A couple of weeks ago, Pam and I had a chance to stop by to say hello to our MOO Crew friends Lisa Rodwell and Rebeka Fluet and get a tour of MOO’s new(ish) facilities. If you’re a MOO fan like us, you’ll enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at what goes into making the coolest business cards around!
Thanks for the tour, guys! Keep on doing what you do.
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.
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.
