Erin McCune and I had a lot of fun today teaching our Workshop on Social Media (aka Web 2.0) and Financial Services. As seems to happen more and more these days, an informed and interested group adds their experiences into the mix and the combined information shared and mutual learning that results is much greater than the sum of the parts!

In our afternoon “hands-on” workshop, I mentioned I had recently come across a small business CRM company that was doing a really unique set of “mashups” as a Customer Relationship Manager solution designed for small business. That company is BatchBlue and their most interesting product is called BatchBook. They’ve got a great 4-minute video introduction to their contact manager which is really worth watching – it really brings the whole concept of what they’re doing to life.

Unlike today’s typical static contact manager, BatchBook is mashing together the other online activities of a contact – their Twitter tweets, their blog activity, and more – with the result being a much more dynamic, informative and up-to-date view of what your contact has recently been up to online. This would be valuable information to know about your contacts before reaching out to them. I suspect we’ll start seeing this kind of “extended CRM” information in other contact managers before long – it’s just too valuable to add and, frankly, easily accessible to add in.

By the way, we’ve started a new LinkedIn group to discuss Social Media in Financial Services. You can post your comments here – or join this new group and post them over there!

A hat tip to John Jantsch of Duct-Tape Marketing fame for bringing BatchBook to my attention – here’s his blog post on BatchBook!