Databasing My Social Graph with BatchBook

Posted by Mashable in Monday, October 13th 2008

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Social sites like Facebook supposedly capture our social graph: the collection of people we connect with on the web. But they don’t really let us do anything with the information. Sites like LinkedIn might let us message people a bit more easily, but there are no on-board tools to segment our information. What if, for instance, I want to mail everyone I know who is a prospective speaker for my upcoming conference? Can’t do it. I just figured out how. BatchBook.

I’ve been using BatchBook as a contact management system for a bunch of months. It’s web-based, so I can access it anywhere, but it also lets me download my contacts into a CSV file to use in other ways. Where it gets cool is that it’ll let me segment out a list based on tags that I’ve created, and download that as a segment. So, I can mail exactly the kind of person I want, based on any kind of tag I’ve given them: geography, where we’ve met, their capabilities, etc.

With BatchBook, I can get in there and do some extra things, too. They have a concept called “SuperTag.” Anything that you’ve used as a tag can be turned into a small database of its own, such that I can have a tag like “CommunityManager,” with subfields like “type,” so that I can make some of my community managers “enterprise,” some “startups,” and some “freelance.”

In the end, what I’m doing is making a database without having to be a database administrator. What does this mean? Apply it to how you do business, and how you will do business in the coming economic downturn. Maybe now’s a great time to get together all the web developers you know, all the virtual assistants, all the people in DC, etc. Having good contacts and knowing who to reach and how is always important. When you absolutely need the information, it’s indispensible.

You’ll no doubt recommend any number of applications that can do this differently, in Ruby on Rails, on my iPhone, whatever. What I like about BatchBook is that the people behind the product actually listen to their customers (me!), and that they’re growing the product slowly around expressed needs. But most of all, 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, and with lots of variation on the them.

Chris Brogan blogs at [chrisbrogan.com]

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