BatchBook is Great for Contact Management
BatchBlue Software was kind enough to give me a big sized account to try out managing my contacts with their BatchBook product. They let me do five things, if I’m so inclined: manage contacts, keep track of my communications, slice my contacts into lists (remember this one), manage to-do lists, and use their SuperTags to build small custom databases of meta information around my contacts. All of that is relatively neato, and something that lots of us aren’t especially doing well today (how many of you use a spreadsheet somewhere to track your important conversations?)
I should state that I know Michelle Riggen-Ransom (marketing goddess) and Adam Darowski (UX prince) through meetings at various social events, like SXSW, the occasional Tweet-up, etc. When you know the people who make the things you’re using, there’s a whole sense that everything could be customized or something. When I talk to Mario Sundar at LinkedIn, I feel the same kind of thing: like they care about their user base. Well, with BatchBlue, they are passionate about their customer base.
Things I Like
In the fun category, I like the little touches they’ve thrown in. I went to upload my latest LinkedIn database into BatchBook and combine it with my Gmail accounts. That ends up being around 6,200 contacts (boiled back down with dupes to 4760). When I uploaded the CSV file, here’s what I got:
Yep, the little touches like that are great.
Because I can tag things lots of ways, it means I can sort them lots of ways:
I further like that I can upload pictures for contacts, should I want a visual reminder of who they are:
But what’s coolest is the list feature.
Messaging Distinct Sets of People
Here’s where BatchBlue does something that most of my contact systems do not. Plaxo shares a lot of features with BatchBook, and it has one over on BatchBook insofar as user data on there updates when the other contacts change their information. Meaning, if you’re connected to someone on Plaxo, and that someone changes jobs, phone numbers, email addresses, your files are updated right away. Okay, cool.
Try messaging more than one person on Plaxo. Ditto LinkedIn. Ditto Facebook.
Grueling.
BatchBook has lists. For every one of the tags you assign a contact, you can sort those tags into lists, then download those lists into distinct addressable groups. So, for instance, if I want to email all the people I know who are related to PodCamp, I can. If I want to message everyone in the Boston area, I can. If I want to message people I’ve labeled as “mediamakers,” I can.
That’s the clever bit.
A Quick Note About SuperTags
They also have this feature called Super Tags. Basically, you can add all kinds of other fields and metadata around certain tags, such that you collect even more useful, sortable data on different kinds of contacts. I haven’t dug into that yet, but judging by the way Michelle and Adam talk about it all the time, I suspect that’s a cool feature and that I’m missing out.
In the End
I recommend BatchBook for the list sorting ability, for the tagging and slicing ability, for the Super Tags (though I’m not 100% clever on them yet), and if you have no other form of client relationship management software, this would be a great lightweight tool. I’m not using their todos or several other parts of the software, but that’s okay. I think it’s worth it for what I’m getting. Hey, I’m not a DBA, and this is a whole lot better for me to manage than a spreadsheet.
If you check it out, I’d be interested to know your take.
BatchBlue Software’s BatchBook might be just right for you.
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Comments
Anything “big sized” just has to be good … but then i am a redhead, so what do I know?
Catherine, the redhead blogger
This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I’ve been trying to figure out a way on how I could organize my contacts via tags, groups, and lists and it looks like BatchBook will be able to solve this problem for me. I just signed up and saw that they had a box for a promotional code - did they give you one to share with your readers?
Chris - thank you for sharing this ! It’s just what I’ve been looking for. I’m testing out the free account to get familiar, but am thrilled to see that this will scale with my business.
Interesting product there, but it’s worth noting that Facebook has lists too. It’s not exactly a tag-oriented implementation like this, but it accomplishes the same ability to message distinct sets of people within your friend list.
What do they have that highrise doesn’t? Highrise has lists too, via tags. How is the search in this app? The reason I stopped using highrise was that the search is very limited, it looks like they finally implemented notes search but it still has big holes like not being able to search for company name.
Chris, I honestly thought you could, but I was wrong. If you go to a specific friends list, there’s a link at the bottom of the page to Message This List. Unfortunately, you can’t message a list with more than 20 members. So no, you really can’t, which makes it not a very useful feature.
@Laura- there’s search. I haven’t used it deeply, but that’s a great question for the Batch team to take on. : ) Maybe they’re around?
@chrisbrogan - Thanks for the great writeup! You rock!
@Laura - In the “Search All Records” field, you can search your contacts and your communications (basically our equivalent of Notes). It will search the body of your communications as well. We also have an Advanced Search that allows you to search just by Name, Email. Phone, State, or Zip. Also, the Contacts page has a live search that will allow you to filter your contacts list as you type.
-adam
User Experience Designer
BatchBlue Software
Has anyone used both Batchbook and Highrise? I’m curious about your thoughts on their respective merits.
I tried Highrise, but found it a bit overkill, and the interface a little wonky (yes, from 37signals… I know… it’s probably me).
I’ve used both BatchBooks and highrise and like both of them. Highrise is easier to use, but not as powerful. Batchbooks still has some UI goofiness, but this is improving all the time.
Supertags are really powerful…allows me to add custom fields that are important to specific types of contacts. So, for example, I could create a supertag called “sales lead” and add the fields: 1) lead source, 2) territory, 3) deal stage, etc. Every time I add a new contact and tag it with “sales lead,” those fields are added to the contact. If I chose a different supertag (for example, human resources), it’ll automatically include the fields for that supertag (e.g., hire date, salary, etc.).
Another thanks for the article Chris. We appreciate your thoroughness and are so glad you found BatchBook useful!
@Ernie - SuperTags are similar to del.icio.us bundles (and other tagging systems), but with the super power of collecting additional bits of information for every person connected to that tag. For example, you might tag a group of folks as “Baseball fans”, and add new fields for “favorite team” and “level of fanatacism”. Easily throw a post season party inviting all the Redsox fans (yay!) and banning all the Yankees fans. :)
@ Laura and Josh - we’ve really focused on giving our customers the ability to get their own unique data into BatchBook (see SuperTags description above) and their useful information back out (with lists, reports, exports and mailing labels). The data is yours after all, we just want to help you more effectively manage it.
@ everyone - thanks for checking us out. Please let us know what you think - we LOVE feedback!
Pamela O’Hara, President, BatchBlue
SuperTags really make this the killer app that it is. Another thing I really like is the affiliation feature which lets me link related contacts to each other.
I like Highrise a lot but the lack of customization made it a no go for me. The UI in BatchBook isn’t as “polished” as Highrise yet, but it’s clean and usable and improving with each release. The recent contact page redesign was outstanding.
SB
Thanks for the kind words, Chris. Would absolutely love to hear feedback form you and from other users on LinkedIn.
BTW, happened to notice the really cool friendfeed widget below. Wish I had the hosted version of my blog so I could add something like that :(
[…] I came across Chris Brogan’s post on BatchBook.com and was floored with his review. The BatchBook features met all of my needs and their plans were […]
[…] I came across Chris Brogan’s post on BatchBook.com and was floored with his review. The BatchBook features met all of my needs. I could organize […]
I’ve not used Batchbook myself till now but it does sound very useful…will let you know about my experience with it when i do use it…great post.
Hey, you might be interested in our site, as you can also put people into customized groups and sort them.. it’s a free social network and contact manager. http://www.octopuscity.com
Does anyone know that has used Batchbook a while, can you search or sort by the custom fields you create in a SuperTag? That is, if you create Baseball Fans as the super-tag and add new fields of Favorite Team and Level of Fanatacism, can you do a search or a filter from your contact page to show just Redsox fans? Or do you have to pull them out using a report? I see you can filter by Tags, but what about the fields within a SuperTag?
Thanks!
@Shannon - The search form (”Search All Records” in the top right corner) does search for content within the SuperTags, so a search for “Redsox” would return all folks with that value in their Favorite Team field. And as you mentioned, you can also build a report including that field to see all fans cheering the right way. And fyi, the reports are dynamic - so you just build it once and each time you view it, it will pull in all the new fans. Thanks for the interest - please let us know what you think!
Pamela O’Hara, President, BatchBlue
[…] our friend and a man with excellent hair Chris Brogan wrote up a product review of BatchBook on his blog (complete with screenshots and everything!) Here’s an excerpt: I recommend BatchBook for the […]
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TripIt concept for your own email?
Supertags sounds like the bundles at del.icio.us