Better Social Insights Needed for BatchBook.com Social CRM

Hugh Macken • Jul 16, 2010

I like everything I've seen about Batch Book social CRM except the inability to easily bring into a record that person’s public social media profile accounts. The post Better Social Insights Needed for BatchBook.com Social CRM appeared first on VMR. Better Social Insights Needed for BatchBook.com Social CRM was first posted on July 16, 2010 at 10:11 pm.©2015 "VMR". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at hugh@vmrcommunications.com

I admit my expectations were quite high given all the positive press to date. In a post for Mashable.com, Brogan narrowed down exactly what he liked the most about Batch Book:

I like that it’s solving a need of mine: getting my social media “friends” into a database where I can actually reach out to them the way I want.

John Jantsch, one of the leading small business development and business planning experts in North America also gave it two thumbs up:

The killer feature, in my opinion is the elegant way that it also gives you the ability to bring into a record that person’s social media activity.

You get the picture. Renowned small business experts like Jantsch and social media community experts like Brogan have sung the praises of Batch Book. And built-in social network insight reporting seems to be what those who really like it love the most. The company itself seems to practically hang its hat on this feature.

Maybe I’m being overly critical but the important first part of contact-centric social media monitoring that involves bringing into a record a person’s social media profiles is something Batch Book could do a lot better.

Here’s specifically what I mean. Here are two examples of profiles I tried to create for two people – Avinash Kaushik and Paul Miller – I don’t know much about other than the insightful things I’ve read from them online. I wanted to learn more about them, their social footprint, and follow the other insights they are sure to share in the future.

So, when you first go into a contact record in order to start adding contact details you see a “Search Social Network” button, as you can see below:

Here’s an example of my search for Paul Miller’s public social network accounts. Note that I did enter Paul’s individual work email address before doing this search.

In fairness to BatchBook, they do offer a nifty feature called Super Tags which enables you to manually add social network account URLs associated with your contacts.

But having seen what contact-centric social search tools like Gist.com can do, I was hoping for more sophisticated profile search technology from Batch Book too.

Having said all this, there is one option with Batch Book that I figured might reverse my disappointment with the limited social profile account search capabilities. It’s something with which readers of this blog will already be familiar:

It’s Flowtown.com and it too has taken the small business email marketing world by storm. For good reason, in my opinion. For those who don’t know, Flowtown is a service that, to quote from the Batch Book website

uses your contacts’ e-mail addresses to search through social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others to create a media rich social profile of all of your contacts… Use Flowtown with BatchBook to easily build and maintain relationships across multiple social platforms.

I had a feeling that the integration that Batch Book offers with Flowtown would resolve the issue I’ve outlined above. At least, that is what I was hoping.

In order to integrate with Batch Book, though, I had to upgrade to a paid Flowtown account which starts out at $17 per month, which I did.

I then tried out the service on one of the contacts above and here’s what I got:

So the integration definitely solved problem #1  (not narrowing things down enough) but I was a little disappointed still that only 3 social network profiles were included and nothing else.

What even more interesting is that Flowtown itself does a spectacular job of building a complete profile of someone as long as you have their email address. With just an email address, Flowtown came up with the following in a matter of seconds:

Do you see all of the blanks that Flowtown just filled in?

Let me list them:

  • Klout.com influence score (nice!)
  • Location
  • Occupation (cool!!!)
  • Company
  • Social Network URLs for
    • Facebook
    • Plaxo
    • Costco  (hmmmm, not sure i need that🙂
    • Flickr
    • Twitter
    • WordPress (blog)
    • Linkedin
    • Amazon wish list
  • Shared Twitter connections between Avinash and myself (excellent!!!)
  • Most favorited tweets (!!!)
  • Who Avinash is most influenced by (yup!)

Please chime in here. Social CRM is hugely important for today’s marketing and PR professionals and its in our best interests to share ideas with one another to help inform the decisions of those who are building the exciting social business technologies of tomorrow.

Full Disclosure: Neither Batch Book nor Flowtown are clients of VMR Communications, LLC or Hugh Macken.

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