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

Three very helpful usability enhancements to talk about this week:

Quick Edit Bar

If you look in the far right-hand side of the first column, you’ll notice a small icon:

When you click on this icon, you now have a number of the common edit tasks available to you without opening the record.

Resizing Columns

Up until now, you could resize all the columns in your list of contacts, except the first one.  I found this particularly annoying, because this column often had a long name or URL in it.  We’ve fixed this, so now, just hover over the right edge of the column header and increase the width to your heart’s content (assuming that’s what makes your heart content).

Bulk Editing of Custom Fields

Adding custom fields to your account gives you the ability to track extra information about your contacts and links.  Now, you can edit the values for a group of contacts or links at once.  To do this, just select the set of contacts that you want to edit:

Click ‘Edit->Custom Fields’

The dev team has been “en fuego” since our last product update post, so we have a lot to talk about.  Lots of powerful new features, including a slew of things to help with prospecting and research.  Without further adieu…

Tools for Researching Influencers and Link Prospects

We’ve added a number of tools for finding influencers and link opportunities, researching contact/social profile information, and determining relevance.

Prospecting Query Tool

This tool is currently only available in BuzzStream for Link Building, but it will soon be available in both products.  By automating much of the manual data collection required for effective link prospecting research, it allows you to significantly reduce the amount of time required to identify good link prospects.  Here’s how it works:

• Enter prospecting queries into BuzzStream (just like you would in Google), BuzzStream pulls the results back, de-duplicates them and converts them into “Link Prospects”

• Once collected, BuzzStream automatically collects metrics, contact info, social profile info and the RSS feed.  In addition to site-level metrics, you can see how well the site performs for the searches in the profile (e.g., how many times it shows up in the top ten across all searches, the highest position, etc.)

• Because these results are saved as contacts in BuzzStream, you can do anything to the links and the contacts that you can do with normal links/contacts in BuzzStream.  This includes documenting/tracking the links you want, adding tasks, adding notes, collaboration, etc.
• Results are retrieved daily, giving you a steady stream of new opportunities

Right now, the toolset is designed for advanced link builders, but we’ll extend it over the next few weeks with tools for intermediate and beginning users.

For more information, check out the FAQ or check out the video tutorial.

Automated Discovery of Contact Information and Social Profile Information

With the Buzzmarker, BuzzStream customers have always had tools for discovering contact information and social profile information. With this release, the same discovery capabilities are available for contacts you’ve added via an import or a manual add.  So if you import a set of contacts or manually add a contact, BuzzStream automatically begins looking for profile information, including email address, phone number, twitter ID, facebook, LinkedIn, and street address. And, to help keep your contacts current, BuzzStream looks for this information on an ongoing basis.

To see how this works, first click on the ‘Columns’ button in the toolbar and select ‘Suggested Profile Info’

In the column, you’ll see all of the information that BuzzStream found for that contact. You can add a single piece of information or click ‘Add All’.  To see where BuzzStream found the information, click the ‘source’.

Additionally, we’ve also enhanced the discovery capabilities to make it faster and to pull from more sources.

RSS Feed Collection

You can now view a contact’s most recent content by adding the RSS column to your list view.  This will give you a sense for the topics that a blog is interested in without leaving your BuzzStream account.

Whois Enhancements

We’ve made major improvements to the way that our whois lookup tool works.  In the past, we’d built our own software for looking up contact information in the whois record.  This was unreliable and hard to support because there are so many whois providers and no standard format for whois data.  We’ve switched to a third party service, which has dramatically improved performance.  Results are retrieved both faster and more reliably.

We’ve also made it possible to look up whois information for more than one contact at a time.  To do this, just select a set of contacts (by marking the checkbox in the far left column), click on ‘Research’ and select ‘Search whois Contact Info’.  The results will be populated in the ‘Suggested Profile Info’ column.

Improved Twitter Conversation Monitoring

Two major changes to how we keep track of your twitter conversations with influencers:

• By default, direct messages between you and your contacts are marked as ‘private.’  and are only visible to the BuzzStream user who’s connected to that twitter account.  So, if you send a DM to one of your contacts, only you’ll see it in the History.   If you’d like these conversations to be available to everyone on your team, just click on ‘Settings’, go to the ‘My Info’ tab, and change the setting in the ‘Twitter Information’ section.

• You can now add multiple twitter IDs to a single contact.  Right now, this can only be done for twitter IDs that are in the ‘Suggested Profile Info’ section, but we’ll make this available throughout the app soon.

Private Notes

You can now mark a Note as ‘private’, which will make it visible only to you.

Minor Features and Bug Fixes

• Outreach – you can now select a different template while you’re conducting outreach
• You can now select a different mail server for each project you’re working on
• “Domain age” bug – the wayback machine changed their html format, which broke our site age lookup
• Custom field values and Notes weren’t showing up in exports
• Deleting a sub-task was deleting the entire task
• Problem deleting projects and users
• Custom field values entered from the buzzmarker weren’t being saved in some cases

Next on the plate:

• Enhancements to the prospecting toolkit
• Easier tracking of email conversations with your contacts
• Tighter integration of BuzzStream for PR and Social with BuzzStream for Link Building

 Sam Bookler is the Director of Online Marketing at eLocal USA, an Internet advertising company that connects consumers with local businesses.  eLocal owns and operates some of the nation’s top online directories as well as OnlineCityGuide.com (“OLCG”), one of the oldest online city guides.  eLocal’s directories help consumers find businesses in their local neighborhood (from roofers to plumbers and lawyers to dentists).  

Our Workflow

We have a team of business development specialists who manage a lot of different professional contacts. When we started, we were using Excel
spreadsheets. However, as time went on and we started dealing with more and more partners, it became difficult to cross check and update our database. We found a few of our specialists attempting to work with the same prospective partner!  It was becoming unmanageable, so we needed to find a system that would allow for easy input and cross referencing.

We focus on developing quality partnerships, where we can develop long-term relationships.  To do this, our Business Development Specialists perform extensive research to find online organizations that are a good fit. We use BuzzStream’s Link Buzzmarker to tag all our contacts and get them into the database.  BuzzStream then cross references all the contacts among our business development team to make sure no two people are working with the same organization at the same time.  We manage all of our communications in BuzzStream, which allows us to effectively manage both present and prospective partners.  We’ve found that adding Buzzstream to our process has substantially cut down on time we used to spend updating excel sheets and cross-referencing contacts internally.

Why we Chose BuzzStream

We follow a lot of leading SEO, social media, and business development blogs and websites. BuzzStream kept popping up across these sources, so we reached out during the site’s launch and became members of its private Beta release. We conceptually liked the service BuzzStream was offering, and we particularly liked how its team was very responsive and professional.  However, at the time we didn’t have a large team of business development specialists, so we didn’t become full-fledged members. As eLocal’s business development team grew, it became more cumbersome to manually manage all our partner contacts. At this point, we knew BuzzStream was the right fit for our needs.

Our Favorite BuzzStream Features

Our experience with BuzzStream has been great. Not only is the system top notch, but the BuzzStream team has also always valued our input and works to regularly add new features and functionality.  We love how Buzzstream is a very easy, reliable system to use for managing the contact information and relationship stage of potential web partners. It cross checks all members of our business development team to make sure no one is working on the same partner, which is really important.  Also, in the cases where we receive links from partners and would like to track them, BuzzStream notifies us when there are changes, removing the need for any manual reviews. This makes our workflow more efficient.

Lastly, we’re impressed with how reliable the BuzzStream staff is. If you have a problem, they respond promptly and do everything in their power to fix it. You can’t say that about every business, and it is something we’ve grown to love about BuzzStream.

What We’d Like Added to BuzzStream

We always love more data and so we’d like to see additional SEOmoz metrics, such as page authority, added to each link’s details. Being able to get the data on all live links on a domain would be helpful, rather than needing to visit each specific page a live link is on. Lastly, as far as data, we’d like to be able to export all the “Notes” we keep on our contacts. We back up our information frequently, but notice it doesn’t export all the notes if you have more than one. This is an important feature for us, so being able to save that would be very valuable to us.

From an organizational standpoint, we’d also like to have the ability to flag a date directly in the column interface, which could then be sorted by date. This would provide us with a great way to monitor upcoming meetings directly from the dashboard view.

We just made another free tool available on our link building tools page to help you build outreach lists.  Pretty simple tool to use…just plug in a set of URLs and this tool will look for any blogrolls on the pages you’ve entered.  Here’s how you use it…

Paste in a set of blog URLs that are related to the category you’re focused on:

Click “Go” and the tool will populate a table to the right:

You can also save it to a CSV file by clicking the link below the table…one thing to keep in mind is that the link is visible while the list is still getting built, so make sure that the full list has been generated before clicking the link.

I’ll write a follow-on post that walks through how I’ve been using this tool to help me find the most influential blogs when I’m researching a community that I’m not yet familiar with.

If you have any questions or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you!

A couple of weeks ago, we released our first set of free link building tools, and we promised that more were on the way.  Shortly after announcing the tools, we started getting “you know what would be a cool tool” emails from our customers.  Well, one came up repeatedly…we liked the idea and so we rolled it out.

This new tool is pretty simple…paste in some HTML and it will generate a CSV file that includes each link in the HTML, the domain for each link and the anchor text.  There’s lots of ways you can use this, but I’ve found it particularly helpful for building outreach lists.  For example, suppose I’m trying to build a list of SEO bloggers for a campaign I come across TopRank’s Big list of SEM and SEO blogs.

This is a great starting point for my list building, but manually cutting and pasting all 400 of these blogs into a spreadsheet would be a pain.  Instead, just do the following:

• Select the content that includes the links you want
• If you’re in firefox, right click and select ” View Selection.” In chrome, select “Inspect Element.”
• Copy the text into text box in the “Extract Links” tool and click “Create CSV”

Now you have a CSV file that looks something like this:

That’s all there is to it.  Once I have this list, the next step I’ll want to take is to collect information about each of these blogs to help me prioritize my efforts.  If you’re a BuzzStream subscriber, here are a couple of additional things you can do to help with this effort.

• Import the file into BuzzStream. If you’re using projects, you might want to create a project that’s simply called “Opportunity Research.” If you’re not using projects, you can either include a tag in the import file or create a custom field.
• Sort by metrics. BuzzStream will collect metrics for each domain and you can utilize this to help you prioritize them.  Once you’ve decided on the priority, select the contacts you want to prioritize and click “Edit>Overall Rating.”  The Rating will be set for all of these contacts at once.