This week, we’ve checked off two more features that many BuzzStream power users and team accounts have been clamoring for. We’ve added more flexible ways to filter your contacts and better ways to manage tags.

Tag Management

In BuzzStream, tags are one of the primary ways you classify your contacts so that you can quickly create lists. The great thing about tags is that they’re flexible and they’re super-easy to create. The not-so-great thing about them?…well, they’re flexible and they’re super-easy to create.  If you’re not careful, you can end up with multiple tags for the same category, tags that are no longer used, overly granular tags, etc. For those of you that operate in a team, things can get particularly messy, since you have to wade through the tags that you and everyone else has created. 

To help with this, we’ve added a ‘Manage Tags’ page in you settings. From this page, you can control which tags are shown to you and you can delete unwanted tags.

Hiding Tags

If there are tags in your account that are relevant to others team members, but you don’t need to see them, you can now hide them from the ‘Manage Tags’ page. 

When you click ‘Hide’, the tag will still be visible to other people in your BuzzStream account, but it won’t show up for you. 

Deleting Tags

You’ve always been able to delete tags (by bulk editing them), but until now it was very time consuming. You had to go to ‘All Contacts’, filter on the tag you wanted to remove, select all the contacts and then click ‘Edit Tags.

Very [click]

Slow [click]

And [click]

Clicky [click]

Now you can delete the tag with one click from the ‘Manage Tags’ page. 

In case you accidentally delete a tag that you need, we’ve included an Undo option.   When you delete a tag, it’s logged in the Activity History. From this record, you can undo the deletion.

If you want to edit or merge tags for a set of contacts, you can still do this by filtering on the tag and then bulk editing the tag. 

Improved Filtering on Tags and Relationship Stage

We’ve also made filtering for both tags and the ‘Relationship Stage’ field more flexible. Before now, you could only use the Relationship Stage filter to build lists of contacts that were at one specific stage. So you could easily build a list of contacts that were ‘Not Started’, but you couldn’t build a list of contacts that were either ‘Not Started’ or ‘Not Yet Researched’. With this release, we’ve now enabled this. Additionally, we’ve added the ability to find all contacts where the Relationship Stage hasn’t been set for the project.

With tags, you can now conduct “negative filtering.” So if you want to find all contacts that don’t have a set of tags (for example, show me all contacts that are type “directory,” but aren’t tagged with “local”). 

We hope you enjoy the new features! 

We added support for projects in BuzzStream almost four years ago and almost immediately, they became one of the most popular features in the product. Adding a project in BuzzStream gives you a workspace where a designated group of people can work on a set of contacts. They’re powerful because they let you build a master database of contacts (influencers, prospects, people who have promoted you before, etc.), filter your database to build relevant contact lists and then apply them to the specific projects you’re working on. Within each project, you can keep track of your outreach efforts, you can manage your team’s workflow and you can limit access to certain team members.

While projects are popular, some of the most common feedback we get from customers is that there needs to be better ways to organize them and they need to be easier to create, edit and find. To help with this we’ve made two major changes: 1) Added project folders for organizing projects, and 2) completely redesigned the projects list dropdown.  

Project folders and project search

Until yesterday, the projects dropdown was just a list of all projects in your account. This works fine if you have a small set of projects, but if you have a large list of projects or if you want to group projects by clients, landing pages, campaign types, etc., it becomes a problem.  

To help with this, we’ve added support for project folders. Now when you click the project dropdown, you’ll see an option to create a folder:

So, for example, if you’re an agency, you might create a folder for each client and include a project for each campaign within it.

Or if you’re part of an in-house team, you might create a folder for each website or landing page that you’re working on and include individual campaigns/efforts within it. 

We’ve also added a search bar to the projects dropdown to make it easier to find projects.

Adding and editing projects

Until this week, to add or edit a project, you needed to go to the ‘Projects’ page within Settings. To make it faster and easier, we’ve now made it possible to add, edit or delete them directly from the projects dropdown.  

These capabilities have been a long time in the making and we’ve had a lot of help from our customers. Thanks to everyone for your feedback! We hope you enjoy it!

Ryan Pitylak is the CEO of Unique Influence, a full-service search marketing and digital PR agency. Unique Influence is not only a BuzzStream customer, they also provide content creation and link building services to a number of other BuzzStream customers.  I’ve known Ryan for a long time and I’ve heard great things about their work from our customers, so when he offered to explain how BuzzStream and Citation Labs ties into his processes for link prospecting and relationship management, I jumped at it. 

Background

75% of a website’s ranking in Google comes from its link profile, according to SEOMoz.  This means that the quantity and authority of the links pointing into your website are critically important to its performance. At Unique Influence, we help our clients increase the number of organic, high quality links from relevant websites across the web.

We build relationships with top quality websites that are:

• Contextually relevant – Websites that are in the same industry or share the same audience
• High authority – Websites that have a high number of quality inbound links
• High quality – Websites that maintain a high level of quality in the content that they post on their site

Two of the key challenges to building high quality links are:

1. Finding acceptable websites
2. Contacting the sites in order to establish a relationship

Our Workflow

We use SEO tools like Link Prospector from Citation Labs (in collaboration with Whitespark.ca) and Buzzstream to build these relationships.  Here’s how you can use these tools to find and create relationships with relevant websites:

Citation Labs

• We brainstorm search queries that will return websites that are relevant to our client. 
• We then use the Citation Labs Link Prospector tool.  Under the appropriate Campaign, we click on “Find Prospects” and define the search type, search depth and date range.  Then we enter our queries and hit submit.
• Once the report is complete we export a CSV file of the “paths” to get the full list of URLs that resulted from the search.

Excel

• We open this CSV file in Excel and filter the results.  For example, we may decide to eliminate duplicate domains or sort by a specific keywords etc.
• Then, we visit the websites in the list and check to see if these websites meet our quality filters.  We have a long list of qualitative quality filters, so most of the websites get rejected at this stage.  This is a critical step in the process because you want to make sure that you’re only building relationships with high quality, relevant websites.

Buzzstream

• In Buzzstream, we import the qualitatively relevant websites into the appropriate project.  These websites are imported as “Link Partners”.
• Buzzstream examines each URL for authority information, such as PageRank and MozRank. We look for sites that pass our quantitative screening process and weed out the websites that have low authority.
• Once we have a list of websites that have passed both our qualitative and quantitative filters, we will contact the owner of each website.  Buzzstream can track your communication history if you give it your imap server information.  Alternatively, you can BCC Buzzstream during your email conversations.
• We change the “Relationship Stage” for the Link Partner to “Attempting to Reach” in Buzzstream after we contact the website owner.

We update the Relationship Stage once we are successful at establishing a relationship with the website owner.

Using Citation Labs Link Prospecting tool allows us to define a universe of potential websites with whom we can develop relationships.  Buzzstream allows us to filter out websites with low authority and track the conversations we have with the website owners.

The fact that these tools work together is a critical factor in delivering success for our clients.  These tools allow us to successfully develop high quality link profiles for clients across industries and business models.  Citation Labs, Buzzstream and Unique Influence are the ingredients in a recipe for search engine optimization success.

There are a number of great products available that help find prospects for link building and PR campaigns and one of our goals is to make it as easy as possible to access these prospects within BuzzStream. By pulling in prospects discovered by other tools, you can use BuzzStream’s research capabilities to qualify them and, more importantly, you can make them actionable. 

To enable this, we’ve improved our integration with three services that many of our customers are using – SEOmoz’ OpenSiteExplorer, MajesticSEO, and Citation Labs Link Prospecting Tool.  Now, when you click on ‘Import’, you’ll see options to upload websites and links from the most commonly used reports in these products:

So let’s look at how this works, using a Majestic report as an example…

I’ve identified a list of sites that are focused on a specific vertical by running competitive backlink reports in Majestic.

After consolidating the reports and conducting some initial clean-up, I can import them into BuzzStream by selecting one of the Majestic Backlinks import template. Once they’re imported, BuzzStream will do four things to help with your research efforts:

• Check to see if the sites are already in BuzzStream. These are often particularly good prospects, since many times these are site owners that you’ve already developed a relationship with
• Check the links to make sure that they’re still live (particularly important if you’re using Majestic’s historic index for your reports). Once the check is complete, you’ll get an email with the results of the check…click on the “view” link next to the “Unable to check” line to see the links that are no longer live. You’ll want to delete these.

• Collect metrics for the each website and page, including PageRank, mozRank, DomainAuthority, unique visitors, inbound links, etc.
• Look for contact information for each website, including email addresses, phone numbers, twitter IDs, facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles

Once you’ve researched these prospects, you can use BuzzStream to take action on them. The steps that people typically take include:

• Add websites to projects that they’re well-suited for, assign the contacts to the appropriate team member (if it’s a team-based environment), assign tasks, etc.

•  Segment contacts into lists (based on metrics, topics, relationship history, etc) and create outreach templates for the campaign

• Conduct outreach campaigns in the Outreach module

One of the reasons we built BuzzStream was to make it easier to conduct outreach that’s highly relevant and personalized, but to do it at scale. The Outreach Module is a big part of this, and we’ve made a number of recent improvements to it.  

Send Emails Directly through Your Account

BuzzStream now connects to your email account in the exact same way you’d connect with a smartphone, Microsoft Outlook or any other mail client. This means that any emails you send from BuzzStream are coming directly from the email account you’ve connected with. By connecting this way, you don’t have to worry about deliverability problems caused by others who are connected to the same server. Additionally, the “sent from” information in the email will match your account. 

To connect BuzzStream to your email account, just click on Settings:

 Select “Connect to Email:”

And select your email provider:

For gmail and google apps, BuzzStream uses OAuth to connect to your account with one click. For other providers, just put in your email credentials and BuzzStream will take care of the rest. If you need help, check out the help documentation or email us (support@buzzstream.com). 

Improved Support for Team-Based Outreach 

If you’re conducting team-based outreach, there might be times where multiple people are reaching out from the same email address. BuzzStream supports this by letting you connect to an email account and mark it as a shared account. When you send emails from the Outreach Module, they’ll come from this email address, but within BuzzStream, you’ll be able to track who actually sent the email. This is valuable for any future outreach efforts, since you’ll know who sent emails to the contact and how they responded. 

To set this up, look for the “who can send from this account” option when you’re connecting to the email account and select “everyone.”

“Do Not Contact” List

One of the things that’s unique about BuzzStream is that it’s built to serve as a central repository for all of your link building and PR relationships and it gives you a way to apply them to specific campaigns. To better support this, we’ve added the ability to mark a domain or an email address with a “Do Not Contact” flag. 

Once you mark an email address or domain as “Do Not Contact,” any time someone tries to add a contact with the same domain or email address, they’ll be notified that it’s flagged. Additionally, contact information in the List View is replaced with the “Do Not Contact Notification” and the ‘Send’ button in the Outreach Module is disabled.

To mark a contact as “Do Not Contact,” simply click the link in the ‘Contact Information’ section of the record:

Once you’ve clicked this, select whether you want to block the contact by his/her contact information or by the domain. 

Usability Improvements and Bug Fixes

In addition to the Outreach enhancements, we’ve squashed some bugs for you and implemented a number of usability enhancements:  

• Contact info for a person is shown on all associated Media Outlets and Link Partners (and vice versa)

• When you set up BuzzStream, the account owner can now set the date format for the account…something our European customers will appreciate. To set this up, just go to ‘Settings’, select ‘My Info’, and scroll to ‘Other Settings’ 

• Fixed a bug that was preventing Numeric Custom Fields from sorting correctly
• You can now edit contacts when you’re in your master database (i.e., All Contacts)
• Results from Link Prospecting searches are now retrieved much faster (typically within minutes)
• Addressed performance issues that were preventing metrics from being collected in a timely manner
• Added support for semi-colons as a delimiter for Imports   
• On the ‘Links’ page, we’ve added an icon next to the ‘Linking From’ field that will open the link in another tab. 
• Fixed a bug that was preventing custom field values added through the Buzzmarker from being saved.
• Fixed a bug that prevented people from changing ‘Editing’ permissions when creating/modifying Roles. 
• Links from URL shortening services are now excluded from auto-discovery

We’re excited to announce that the new BuzzStream user interface is now live. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback to us over the past few weeks!

We revamped the UI to make the app more visually appealing (obviously), but that was only one factor in our decision to do this. The deciding factor was that we were finding that a significant amount of our development effort was focused on supporting custom UI components. We’ve invested pretty heavily in back-end infrastructure designed to increase development speed, but this was the one area that was slowing us down. By moving to a new UI, we’re now leveraging third party UI toolkits (mostly open source) that will address this bottleneck. These toolkits also let us retire some code that was impacting performance. So not only does BuzzStream look better, it should be faster and new features should come out even quicker…a nice three-fer.   

What’s Changed

We’ve tried to be careful to avoid major changes to the interface (most capabilities are still accessed in the same way), but there are some changes. Let’s take a look.

Changes to the Navigation

One of the biggest problems that we saw in usability tests was that people would have trouble finding contacts because they weren’t aware which project they were in. To help with this, we’ve moved the Projects dropdown to the far left-hand corner of the app and made it more visible. You’ll see this change if you have projects enabled.

 We’ve also reduced our navigation from two levels down to one level. In the old interface, your list of People, Media Outlets and Link Partners was housed within the ‘Contacts’ section. We’ve eliminated ‘Contacts’ and placed them at the top of the navigation. 

Pagination and Filters

We’ve cleaned up the pagination and moved the “number of contacts in this list” notifier into the bar that shows the filter that’s currently applied to your records. 

We’ve also changed the way you edit and clear filters. Instead of clicking on a button in the toolbar, they’re edited directly in the Filter bar.

Changes to the “List of Records” View

The list of contacts and links has undergone a significant clean-up, with new fonts, better use of whitespace and automatic image capture. The interaction design hasn’t changed though, so you’ll still access all the functionality the same way you have in the old interface. 

Changes to Contact Records

We’ve made two major changes to the contact records and a number of minor cleanups. Here’s a look at the full screen (click to enlarge)

The first thing you’ll notice is that we’ve moved the main section of the contact record (links, articles and history) to the left-hand side and the “contact info” section to the right. The other major change is that we added a new ”Add Note/Call/Task/Link” widget. This should make it much easier to add information to a contact record.

Some other changes you’ll notice include:

• Revisions to Links and Articles: We’re now showing more information about each link and article, which has been one of the most common complaints about Link Partner contact records and Media Outlet records. In a follow-on release, we’ll add a hover over that will show you all of the information about the Link without requiring you to go to a different page

• Cleaned up ‘History’ section

• Cleaned up ‘Contact Info’ section

Again, thanks to everyone who provided feedback. We’ve tried to incorporate as much of it as possible into the new UI and we think it’s made the release much more usable. Now that it’s live and your able to test with your actual data, we’d love to hear more of your thoughts. Overall, how are you finding the changes? Any specific things that you like or dislike? 

We’ve added two features that should help you with activities like list building and activity tracking.

Starred Items

If you’re a gmail user, you may have noticed that the familiar “starred items” has been added to BuzzStream.

Starred items give you a way to quickly mark a record as one that needs follow-up, merits attention, etc.  So, for example, if you’re going through your master database and evaluating contacts’ relevance to a campaign you’re planning, you could star them as you qualify them and then continue evaluating your contacts.  Once you’re done, simply click ‘Filters’ and click ‘Starred’

Then select all items and copy them to a new project, add tags, etc.

Multi-Select Improvements

Until now, we’ve given you two options for selecting records: 1) Select all records on the page, 2) select a specific record.  But if you wanted to select something in between this, you had to select each item individually. We’ve made selecting multiple records on a page much easier with this release.  There are two new ways to multi-select records:

1. Select the checkbox next to the first record you want to select, go down to the last record you want to select and hold the shift key while you select the checkbox next to it.  This will select all items between these two records
2. Select a checkbox next to a record and then simply drag your mouse while selecting the item.  Everything you drag over while the mouse is clicked will be selected. 

Other Features and Bug Fixes

• Hover over for Long “about” sections on a contact record – if you have an “About” section for a contact record that’s too long to display, simply hover over it and the full About section will be displayed
• Top-level domain added to export – There are two new columns included when you export a set of links: 1) the top level domain (TLD) for the link, 2) the domain for the “linking from” website
• Fixed bug with “last communication date”- ‘last communication date’ wasn’t being reported correctly in some cases.  This was a problem if you wanted to do things “like find records that you’d contacted 3 days ago and follow up.”  This has been fixed.
• Bug with ‘Relationship Stage’ workflow - when you email a Website or Link Partner that hasn’t been contacted yet, the Relationship Stage field changes to “Attempting to Reach.” There was a bug that was preventing this from happening when a contact was in multiple projects. This has been fixed.
• Import bug for Custom Fields – If you’d selected “update contact info” and changed the value for a Custom Field, they weren’t getting updated.  We fixed this issue. 
• “Copy to Project” bug – When you copy a Person to a different Project, only the primary Link Partner or Media Outlet was being copied.  Now all Link Partners or Media Outlets are copied to the project.
• Chrome issue – the application was freezing in Chrome when you selected multiple records. We fixed this bug.
• Bulk Edit Improvements – We’ve removed two steps in the workflow for bulk editing items to make it less clicky.  We’ve also added a scroll bar to the ‘Custom Fields’ screen when you’re bulk editing so that they’re easier to view

We have a number of new features to talk about that should make your link building efforts more efficient.  Let’s take a look.

Auto-Discovery of Links

We’ve made it easier to manage your existing backlinks in BuzzStream by automatically discovering them when you first set up your account and when you add a new project.

To auto-discover links for a new project, follow these steps:

• Go to ‘Settings’ (top right-hand corner of the app) and click on the ‘Projects’ tab
• Click ‘Add Project’ in the top left hand corner
• In the websites section, enter the websites you’re managing and make sure that “auto discover inbound links to these sites” is selected.

That’s all there is to it! 

This is just the first step for us in this area…expect the following improvements in the near future:

1. In addition to the initial discovery of links, we’ll add continuous discovery so your account always has the latest backlinks
2. We’re using the SEOmoz Links API to discover your backlinks.  We’ll add additional sources to discover your backlinks in the near future (to fill in gaps in SEOmoz’ link index) 

Improvements to Backlink Monitoring

The BuzzStream backlink checker can be setup to conduct bi-weekly checks of your links and to notify you of new links and links that have potential issues with them.  With this release, we’ve improved the email report that’s sent to you in two ways:

Usability

The email that you used to receive…

now looks like this…

Summary of All Links Checked

Previously the report only included a summary of change activity since the last check (i.e., new links discovered, removed links, and changed links).  We’ve added another summary section that shows you the results for all the links that were checked.

So now you’re able to view the report as a starting point to drill into all links with potential issues or links with specific types of potential issues (e.g., all links that are pointing to the wrong page).  

When you’re conducting outreach to a lot of people across a lot of touchpoints, it’s easy to end up in scramble mode.  Have I already emailed this blogger or webmaster?  When did I last contact them?  Did they reply?  Are they due for a follow up?  Has anyone else on the team contacted them?  By not having this information at hand at all times, you end up wasting time searching through email and excel, you reach out to people who other team members have already contacted, and you miss out on follow-ups that could lead to links and buzz.

To help with this, we’re happy to announce a major improvement to the way that BuzzStream helps you keep track of your communications with your contacts.  BuzzStream now integrates seamlessly with Gmail, MS Exchange and other standards-based email servers, so all emails sent between you and your contacts are automatically added to their contact records.  No need to remember to bcc or forward emails.  No need to manually add notes to BuzzStream contacts.  Once you enter your email information in BuzzStream, just send your emails and BuzzStream will take care of the rest. 

Here’s how it works:

• Go to the My Info page in your Settings, select your mail provider and enter your mail settings. 
• Once you’ve added your credentials, BuzzStream will periodically check for new emails between you and your contacts (approximately every hour)
• Any emails that are found are automatically attached to the record in BuzzStream

That’s all there is to it!  For more information about setting this up, take a look at the FAQ.

We work hard to make it as easy as possible to work with your data in BuzzStream, but there will always be times where you want to import in some data and you want it to update existing BuzzStream records.  We’ve now enabled this in the import utility.  Just click on import and put a checkmark next to “auto-update existing contacts.

A couple of things to note.  If the column in the import file is empty or if the value in the import file is the same as in the record, it won’t be changed in BuzzStream.  If it’s different, in most cases it will add the new value to the BuzzStream record (the existing value won’t be removed).  So, for example, if ‘John Doe’ in BuzzStream has an email address of ‘jon@doe.com’ and the import file has the email address ‘jon.doe@doe.com’, after the import, it will have both addresses.

There are a few cases where the existing value will be replaced.  To see a full list of how each import column is treated, check out our help file:

Help for import in BuzzStream for Link Building

Help for import in BuzzStream for PR and Social