Getting Started with ChatterBox
In 1997 I became a member of the professional services team for a CRM company called Onyx Software. At the time the CRM concept was just taking hold, and the idea of creating a “360 degree view” of customer relationships was something that interested companies in a variety of different fields. As Onyx acquired more customers within verticals such as High Tech, Healthcare, and Financial Services, common business rules and feature requests began to emerge within each industry. In an effort to create a new revenue stream while simultaneously reducing the time it took to deploy a new account, Onyx began combining these common business rules and features into named service packs (ex. the “High Tech Service Pack”) that it could sell as packaged solutions. The advantage of this approach was clear: make the product work in a customized way for the companies whose industries required it, but keep the core product generic enough that anyone could use and benefit from it.
When we put together the development plan for ChatterBox several months back, one of our immediate questions was “exactly how will this application be used??”. We didn’t doubt the value of collaborating around Twitter and other social networks, but we wanted to be sure we weren’t missing industry-specific features that were critical for growth. After discussing our options, we opted to take a generic approach with the ChatterBox feature set. This is not to say we can’t specialize down the road, but for now we’ve opted to provide features that we believe ALL users can benefit from and see where we end up.
The good news about this approach: ChatterBox maintains flexibility, and users are free to dream up any use cases they can imagine. We remain in feedback collection mode, looking to surface common issues & feature requests that we can use to improve the app.
The bad news: some users don’t know how to begin. 
With that in mind, we’re going to begin a series of blog posts for those who are interested in learning how to get started with ChatterBox. We’ll describe some possible ChatterBox setups for the following use cases:
- The Every Company – do you sell products & services? Do you compete against others who do the same? Do you listen to and engage with the analysts who cover your space?
- The PR Firm – do you manage social networking interactions on behalf of multiple clients? Do you collaborate with other team members, or maybe even the clients themselves?
- The Media Person/Power Blogger – are you always on the lookout for interesting topics to write about? Want to do some casual back-and-forth conversation before you pull your story together?
- The Celebrity – do you have more people interested in you than you could ever possibly keep up with? Want to engage with your fans on hot topics now and then to let them know the conversation is a 2-way street?
- The Job Seeker - do you want to keep track of what’s going on in your industry while interacting with the companies who might be your next employer? Are you interested in finding out which hiring agencies can help you? Do you need to keep track of these conversations in a central place?
For the potential ChatterBoxers who fall outside of these buckets, perhaps seeing what can be done for a different use case will stir up some ideas for what YOU can do! Keep your eyes open for more entries in the coming days and weeks. For those who are already part of the private beta, we’d love to hear about all the unique ways ChatterBox is helping people to engage and collaborate around social networks like Twitter.
-Chad
