We love being able to pull in information related to your contacts and their actions on the Social Web. While our ‘Search Social Network’ option lets you pull in some of this data automatically, it’s really very easy to set up custom fields to bring in information from a variety of different sources as well. Our SuperTags are capable of pulling in and populating your contact data with any RSS Feed. (For a quick primer of RSS, check out this handy video from the fine folks at CommonCraft)
For example, I’m a music fan and a long time user of the last.fm service which records all of the music I listen to on my computer. I think music is a logical conversation starter so I’m a big fan of adding information about what my contacts are listening to and adding that to their profile. Here’s how I did that:
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Tags: Dossier, Last.fm, rss, supertag
I just returned from the South by Southwest conference (the “Interactive” portion), which is held each year in Austin, Texas. I’d heard about it for years, but this is the first time I’ve been lucky enough to attend. It’s an amazing scene: lots of interesting panels and discussions, great parties and food, and, perhaps most important from a small business angle, tons of networking opportunites. Here are a few pictures from the week’s events and activities.
Adam attended the year before, and I found him to be a most excellent companion. He has an almost freakish ability to remember names, faces, and professional history. I guess that’s not all that surprising, since he is also a baseball geek. This combined with my freakish gregariousness enabled us to meet and hang out with some really amazing folks. The fabulous boys of Freshbooks wined and dined us (I’ve mentioned before that we’re customers as well as big fans, and they take their customers out to dinner — how cool is that?) We hung out with fellow Providence techies from FuseCal.com, met up with Chris and Kate from the excellent site patientslikeme.com, made a new BatchBlue “Best Friend Forever” in John Eckman (who is as funny as his shuffleboard game is weak) and debated the concept of altruism with Josh Porter until, after several hours, we decided that we all just needed to get along.
But perhaps the best thing of all was meeting information architect and Web guru Thomas Vander Wal and telling him about our new SuperTags feature. He said it sounded like an interesting idea that he hadn’t heard of before, which thrilled us. Our whole team has been working almost non-stop for the past two years on getting BatchBook out there, and to receive such supportive feedback from someone we so admired made us feel like we were on the right track. He even wants us to send him a t-shirt!
Since returning home, I’ve been using BatchBook to log all of my contacts from the conference and I’ve got to say, it’s pretty sweet especially now that we have SuperTags. I created a SuperTag called “sxsw2008″ and added three fields: where did we meet, did we send a follow-up mail, and is there an action item as a result of the meeting. So much more helpful than wrapping a rubber band around all the business cards and tossing them into a box like I used to do.
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Tags: freshbooks, supertag, SXSW, SXSW08, SXSWi
I haven’t written a product update in a few weeks and wanted to let you know about a major piece of work we recently released.
BatchBook allows for powerful customization of your contact data. Our back-end systems will support an impressive amount of customization, but the trick has been to provide it to our users in a logical, easy-to-use way.
Our first attempt at this was Custom Fields. You could create and group custom fields together and then apply those fields to a record. An example would be a custom field set for clients of real estate agents with fields like “Approved for Loan” and “Spending Budget”. When you entered a new contact you could apply this field set to a client and fill out the information for the client fields.
This worked well, but we found it was too many clicks to apply the fields to a record and fill them out User testing revealed that the whole custom fields idea, while powerful, was hidden and thus not getting used very much. It was also difficult for people to grasp conceptually that they needed to create a Custom Field set, the go back in and apply it to their contacts.
A few months ago, we had a brainstorming session around customization. The result was SuperTags. Since tagging records is the best way to organize contacts in BatchBook, we thought why not extend this idea and let tags manage custom fields sets as well?
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, supertag
