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Batchbook Resolutions for a More Organized 2011

We’re all about supporting our wonderful Batchbook users and helping them get the most out of their Batchbook accounts. We also realize that for a lot of folks, starting a new year is a logical time to make resolutions and changes. At its core, Batchbook is a tool for organization and we want to do our part to help you use your Batchbook accounts to the fullest.

We think our screencasts and webinars do a great job of giving you an overview of the features and functionality of Batchbook. We send welcome emails and provide introductions and tips right in the application to get you started and get you on your way to productivity.

We’ve also shared a lot of tips and tricks here that might be useful to bring together in one place as we all prepare for the new year. Want to get more organized with Batchbook? Follow these steps and you’ll enter in a whole new realm of organization and productivity.

Tips & Tricks for an organized New Year

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Using BatchBook for Managing Family Information

Some of our many Batchbabies

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:

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New Web Forms Are Super Social!

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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!
  5. 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?
  6. 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.

socialform

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A Busy Month of Product Updates

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

Batch Updating of SuperTags

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LinkedIn profiles added to the Social Media SuperTag

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:

LinkedIn Profile Widget

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

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