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Several people sent me the link to NYC VC Fred Wilson’s blog post in which he asks his readership for suggestions for a “Family CRM” service. He explains that he and his wife Joanne Wilson a.k.a Gotham Gal are looking for a way to share basic contact/calendar information, build some e-mail lists for social correspondence, planning and general family-managing.
In the thread, a few BatchBook customers recommended our CRM BatchBook (thanks Boris, Sri, Stefano and Sandro!), so I’d talk about how I use my BatchBook account to help manage my busy family.
First, I should explain that BatchBook was not designed for managing families, but it WAS designed for those small businesses that are about the same size, shape and energy level of an on-the-go family. I think the folks who recommended us recognize that the flexibility of BatchBook makes it work for all sorts of situations, including the work/life balancing (or is it juggling?) act that we small business owners face every day. As we know all too well, the line between business owner and family member frequently blurs.
My other co-founders and I started BatchBlue so that we could build a business deeply integrated with our family lives (I have three small children; they have two). Part of the solution for me has been using a personal BatchBook account to manage my family life. Here’s how I do it:
- I use my personal BatchBook account for my holiday mailing list, I’ve created a separate record for each person in a couple and link them with a “spouse” affiliation. I also created a field for how I want to address the collective them – ie “Dr. and Mrs. Allen” for my best friend’s older parents vs. “Sean Ransom & Michelle Riggen-Ransom” for my modern dual-name friends. I also created a field for their kids names so I can include them in the addressing.
- I’ve created tags for #doctor (which includes custom fields for hospitals & medications – my son has medical issues), #poker (my husband organizes a monthly game), #house (I seem to always call the plumber from the road), #holiday list, #teachers (with comments for gifts given so I don’t duplicate as multiple kids go through the same classes), #coach (same as teachers), #travel (my sister and I plan our family’s annual vacation so I’m usually dealing with hotels, house rentals, etc.)
- I am now the official keeper of my extended family’s official birthday and anniversary list, so I’ve created custom date fields for birthdays and anniversaries. My husband and I share a Google calendar and events I create from these dates automatically feed to it.
- I don’t keep my daily task list in BatchBook, but I do add events for recitals, performances, doctors appointments, etc. that feeds into my professional and my husband’s calendars.
- If I wanted to I could see my friends’ and families’ most recent Tweets, Flickr images, blog posts, etc. from within BatchBook, but honestly I don’t use this feature much in my personal account. These are all the same people I have on my special private Twitter list and I tend to keep up over there.
- I keep these all synced to my Android (and before that Blackberry) through Gmail. There is also a mobile version of BatchBook, and we are working to release native apps for the iPhone and Android soon.
My favorite criteria listed in the comments of Fred’s post (from wife Gotham Gal) is that the application they need should be built by a mom (we have a lot of those at BatchBlue, though we would add that a busy Dad’s probably just fine too!)
When it comes down to it, running a family is about managing relationships. No need to pie chart the likelihood of closing the deal, or dole out sales scripts to new employees. Just give me my son’s last prescription data when I need it, help me manage three different soccer schedules and keep me in good graces with my elderly Southern relatives who expect to hear from me no matter how busy I might be with work. Thanks to BatchBook, all that I can do.
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, how-to, supertags, work/life
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
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
Ever want to update the SuperTag field on dozens of contacts at once? Use the checkboxes on the Browse Contacts page to select a whole bunch of contacts (tip: filter by tag first!) and choose the “edit SuperTag field” batch action. With a couple quick clicks, you can update hundreds of contacts at a time!
Google Contacts 1-way Sync
Sean posted an update on the forums about Google Contacts sync becoming a one-way sync.
More Ways to Filter and Search
We known your contact list can grow quite large. Ours sure has! That’s why we’ve added a whole bunch of new ways to filter and search your contacts. Many of these were very popular requests on the forums.
- New Browse Contacts filter: Not contacted in past month: Will filter your contacts to show only those you have logged a communication with in the past month.
- New Browse Contacts filter: Not contacted: Will filter your contacts to show only those you have never logged a communication with.
- Advanced Search: Contact Type: In addition to “Individuals” and “Companies”, we now have an option for “Individuals & Companies”. Why? Because we also have one just for “Communications”!
- Advanced Search: Record Created: Search for records by date they were created. You can search for an exact date or for records created before or after a certain date. (Tip: Use multiple search criteria to search before a certain date and after another date to get a specific window of time).
- Advanced Search: Record Last Updated: Search for records based on the last time they were updated.
- Advanced Search: Record Last Communicated With: Search for contacts based on the last time you logged a communication with them (including an option for “never”.
Twitter and Google Search Widgets for all!
The live-updating Twitter Search and Google Search Dashboard widgets are now available for free accounts as well. Monitor your personal brand, your company brand, your competitors or your industry at large right on your BatchBook Dashboard!
New Dashboard widget: Lists View
This brand new widget gives you a dropdown menu of all Lists in your BatchBook account. Pick a list and see the contacts. There’s also one-click access to the List Report.
LinkedIn now part of Social Media SuperTag
As reported last week, LinkedIn profiles are now officially part of the Social Media SuperTag.
Default Tags & SuperTags
Last but not least, this is another popular one from the forums. Affectionately code-named “sticky tags” by forumgoers, you can now choose a tag or tags to be automatically applied to all contacts (or all individuals or all companies).
We hope you’ve enjoyed the recent updates. We promise more will come soon!
Want to see the complete list of updates?
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Tags: linkedin, small business CRM, social crm, Social Media, supertags
One of my favorite BatchBook features is the Social Media SuperTag. This week, we enhanced it by adding support for LinkedIn profiles. All you have to is enter address to a public LinkedIn profile. When you save it, we’ll replace the link with a widget that looks a lot like this:
Out of the box, the Social Media SuperTag allows you to enter a contacts usernames on Twitter, Flickr, or Delicious and we’ll show the last three tweets, photos, or bookmarks. You can also enter a Blog feed and see excerpts of the last three posts. This will actually work for any RSS feed. In the screencast below, I add a Slideshare presentations, Last.fm recent tracks, and BatchBook forum feeds to a contact record.
We think this is a great way to see what’s on the mind of your most valuable contacts right before you pick up the phone or start that email. Watch below to see the Social Media SuperTag in action!
Screencast: Social media integration with the Social Media SuperTag
The Flash Video runs 5:18 and is 34.9MB. (Download iPod compatible version, 17.5MB)
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Tags: delicious, flickr, linkedin, rss, small business CRM, social crm, Social Media, supertags, twitter
If you take a look at our website, you can pretty much tell what BatchBook is—a social CRM and contact management web application for small businesses and freelancers. There are many things BatchBook is not. But BatchBook is also very flexible (thanks to features like SuperTags and affiliations), which opens the possibility of people turning it into something we never imagined.
New forum user dcis-steve is one of those people. He went from “newbie user” to “BatchBook for Project Management” pioneer in two days. We had a good discussion on the BatchBook Forums about what he was up to. Here is his summary of how turned BatchBook into a project management application.
Prerequisite
First of all I have a supertag for “Projects”. The fields for this SuperTag I use are:
- Bid Amount (text field for dollar amount)
- Type of work (multiple choice – for my various types of services that I do bid work for)
- Status (multiple choice – bid/proposal, active, completed, on hold)
Having this SuperTag attached to each project/company record allows me to easily call up all my projects by clicking the tag in the tag cloud. I have also created reports for Active Projects Only, etc.
Creating the Project
Since there is currently no place to create a project, I use a company record to represent my project.
- Create a new company labeled with an @ on the front and then title it accordingly (ex: @New website for ABC, Inc.)
- Tag it with your Project SuperTag and fill in the fields for the SuperTag as needed
- You can optionally provide contact info for the project if you want, but I don’t bother since I will be affiliating the project with the company it belongs to.
Setting up the Affiliation
I create two different new affiliations to use with my projects:
- Project : Company
- Project : Customer
When I am affiliating the project with a company record, I use the first affiliation, and when it’s associated with an individual, I use the second one. This may or may not be the best way to do this, but it works for me.
Now that your affiliations are set up, you can create the affiliation for the project. Assuming you are affiliating the project with a company, you just enter the company name and then select the proper affiliation that you just set up. You’ll know if it worked right if you see the company listed under affiliations on the project. If you click the company name to go to that record, you should see the project listed under affiliations for the company.
That’s pretty much it. Now you have a project associated with the company or individual, which you can log project specific comms and to-do’s against.
Pretty smart, huh? I thought so. Thanks Steve… you’re so smart!
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Tags: affiliations, Customer Service, project management, small business CRM, supertags
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