Introducing the Orbit Chrome Extension: community data at your fingertips

One thing our customers love about using Orbit is the rich historical context we can provide about their customers and community members, including how long they’ve been in the community, their Orbit Level, tags, where they work, their customer status, and a full timeline of their interactions across forums, social platforms, GitHub, and more. 

This kind of deep context helps every customer-facing person make better decisions about who to reach out to and how to craft messaging that takes into account the person’s understanding or affinity for the brand. It’s this deep context that helps Orbit customers better understand their customer funnel, taking into account key community touchpoints that happen well before the traditional MQL stage.

Orbit has always helped users deliver more personalized interactions, but for the most part, you had to log in into Orbit or your CRM to see the data. Of course, we’re very happy to have you login, but we also realize community building happens across the whole internet – not just in our app. 

That’s why today, we’re making it even easier for teams to take advantage of Orbit data all over the internet, right where you’re already doing your work, with a new way for you to welcome Orbit into your workflow. Introducing: the Orbit browser extension.

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Put community data in the hands of your whole team

We want to empower every customer-facing member of the organizations who use Orbit with as much robust context as possible. We know that every click is an action that takes time, and can cost money. So we built the Orbit browser extension. With it, you’ll be able to access several important data points and context, all without leaving GitHub, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Gmail.

Reasons to love the new Orbit browser extension

• It’s easy to install and connect your account, there’s no need for API keys
• You’ll see rich data, including member's name, company, job role, tages, contributions, and more
• The widget for the Orbit browser extension has a clean and modern UI, showing useful information, all at a quick glance. You’ll see:
• You can add a member directly from the extension
• Access the widget in GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Gmail

And, because it’s important to know any time a browser extension is dealing with personal data (like your email) you should be able to see the code to make sure it’s not doing anything nefarious, the Orbit browser extension is open source. This means not only can you feel secure about how it’s using your data, but anyone can extend the extension and add Orbit to other sites.

Finally, we’ve approached the design with accessibility in mind, ensuring that the widget is fully usable with keyboard-only control.

Install the Orbit Chrome Extension

Data For All

We know - because we use our own product - that this tool is powerful in the DevRel space. For example, if you’re reaching out to someone who’s been contributing in your forum and in your open source project for 4 years, you’d definitely want to include a mention and a big “thank you” for all that work. But the new Orbit browser extension goes beyond the DevRel community into other parts of your organization.

As a Marketing Manager using Orbit, you can research speakers or attendees for an event you’re hosting. With the Orbit browser extension you can easily check out and view all of their community data from their social profiles to determine if they have the right background for your event’s audience. You can even click into their various social profiles to see the kinds of conversations they’re having, to confirm that they’re a good fit for your event.

If you’re a developer advocate and you’re vetting someone who has applied to join your champions program, you can use the browser extension to quickly and easily view all of the touch points and interactions they’ve had with your community, including when they were last active, saving you hours of hopping around between different data sources before you accept them into your program.

For account executives or SDRs researching leads, you can open up the Orbit widget from within your gmail window and you can see all of your prospect’s Orbit community data, allowing you to craft a great customized outbound email in minutes rather than hours. Or, for sales reps working in LinkedIn, when researching an account in Sales Navigator, they can quickly identify prospects who are already connected to your organization, then dig into the details of where and how they've been active. This enables reps to make more targeted decisions about who to reach out to and what to say.

Those are just a handful of examples we’ve been working with during our internal testing. 

If you’re ready to try it yourself, you can add the extension right from the Chrome Web Store. To get started, you’ll simply login with Orbit and choose your workspace. 

If you’re an open sourcerer like us, head over to the repo, checkout the code, and if you’re up for it, submit a PR to extend the capabilities. Stars also welcome 😀

Finally, we’d love to hear your thoughts, so join us in Discord to share ideas or give us feedback. 

Modern communities are built across a multitude of platforms and by everyone in a company. Our hope is to empower everyone with the right information at the right time so they build stronger relationships and generally do more interesting things with people. Our new browser extension is just one more step along our path of enabling everyone in your company to become community-driven. 

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