BuzzStream

When it comes to managing relationships with influencers and managing links, people have a love/hate relationship with their spreadsheets.  On the one hand, spreadsheets become impossible to manage as you scale your efforts.  On the other hand, they’re flexible and fast.  So, for us, the trick is building a system that makes it easy for people to scale their efforts without sacrificing any of the speed and flexibility.  With the release of Inline Editing and Customizable Views this week, we think we’ve made a big step towards that goal.

Our customers have played a big role in the development of both of these. They really drove the vision of these as they were being developed.  So thanks to all for your input and insights as BuzzStream continues to evolve. All right, let’s take a closer look.

Inline Editing (See Video)

This is kind of the “2″ of a “1-2 Punch” that includes Customizable Views. We’ve added in-line editing to the list view. This is a huge time saver when having to make a few quick edits on the fly. Instead of clicking into each individual record to edit you can do so from the list view. Just click the record you want to edit and update the the fields you need. This makes doing multiple edits a breeze.

Customizable Views (See Video)

Now you can see your Contacts, Media Outlets, Link Partners and Links how you want. Select the columns you want to see, and move those columns where you want them be. We’ve made it super-easy to customize the “list view” of all your information so you can work with it how you want to. This is our first stab at it and we will be refining as we go.

Other Quick Fixes and Changes

Twitter Messages

Fixed a small bug that was effecting the collection of Tweets between you and your contacts.

Blank BuzzMarker

Our beloved BuzzMarker would show up blank when reaching your Contact or Link Partner limit during BuzzMarking. You will now receive a handy prompt to upgrade your account.

Relationship Stage Updating

The relationship stage was not updating for individual records copied across multiple projects.

Better Delete Messaging

We’ve cleared up some of the messaging in the product to make it more clear when you’re deleting a contact and when you’re just removing it from a project.

Twitter ID’s in the BuzzMarker

Fixed a small issue where “twitter.com/profilename” was being marked as the Twitter ID.

Twitter OAuth Verification Fail Message

You will now get a friendly error message when Twitter fails to link your Twitter account to BuzzStream.

Import Feature Loading Faster

We were experiencing a little lag time after clicking “Import” and the feature opening up. We thought it was a bit annoying, so we fixed it.

Faster Tag Loading

If you have a bunch of Tags things may have slowed down a bit for you when you needed to edit tags in bulk, edit a records’ details or use the BuzzMarker. We put in a fix to speed things up.

[Infographic Credit]

Yeah, I Foursquare. I even have a Foursquare profile for BuzzStream. You can watch me check into one of three coffee shops in the morning, the office for the afternoon, maybe a happy hour spot around 6pm and then a couple random spots at night. Am I always at where I check in? No. I try to Fakesquare a few places when I’m stuck at a stop light. Foursquare is doing its best to catch cheaters like me. This begs the questions, why do I Foursquare? I’m not sure yet, but I keep doing it and now that Twitter “Places” is live many more will be joining me in the location game.

What does this mean for PR? What’s compelling is the opportunity to integrate location data into a relationship management service. Think of a SCRM or like platform keeps tabs on the location of your contacts in proximity to you. What if you got alerts when specific contacts came with in “range”. A kind of “set it and forget it” option that thinks for you in the background.

Twitter says, “By turning on this feature, you can include location information like neighborhood, town, or exact point when you tweet.” Exact point? That might be a little much. It feels a bit too “big brother” and I see the opportunity for a whole new level of stalking. But the advantage of knowing the proximity of your contacts provides for possible offline interaction. A more memorable and personal interaction that builds the relationship in ways that phone calls, emails and Tweets can not. It builds trust, faster.

For this to make sense we need mass adoption. Twitter is the first step, especially for B2B and last month Facebook said they were getting into the location game. If that’s true for Facebook then the lever for mass adoption will be pulled and with it comes a profound increase in location accuracy because it’s not a game. There’s nothing to win, so trying to game the game goes away. No more random check-in’s but specific locations attached to everyday communication. If done right, this information could be a boon to the busy PR pro wanting to efficiently connect with their contacts offline. Perhaps my Fakesquaring days are over.

We’ve been busy implementing some new features that speed up BuzzStream, allow you to better manage/search your tags and show you a more in depth snapshot of your media outlets, influencers, links and link partners.

Again our customers have come up with some great ideas and we listened. All told this release is pretty deep and adds some solid punch to BuzzStream. Let’s take a look.

Tag Manageability

In the past you’ve only been able to view all of your tags as a lump sum across all of your projects. You told us that this can easily become bulky and overwhelming. Now you can easily view and apply your tags by breaking them down to particular projects or a specific user.

Advanced Filtering Updates

We also added “and/or” filtering to Tags, Custom Fields, Link type, Link Partner Type, Media Outlet Type. This addition gives you a powerful parameter to further distill your search results.

Media Outlet Twitter Metrics

Get an accurate and fast snapshot of the potential influence and reach of your media outlets Twitter metrics (Follower, Following and Updates).

Twitter OAuth Support

We’re now supporting OAuth for our Twitter integration.  You can now keep track of Twitter conversations with your influencers without having to input your Twitter credentials into BuzzStream. Twitter handles this for us now.  Just click on the Twitter icon under Settings > Configuration and you can link your Twitter profile to BuzzStream. If you have a BuzzStream account just click here to make the change!

Faster “Bulk” Actions

We’ve sped up the time it takes to apply bulk actions when moving or copying records across projects, deleting records, changing overall rating and editing tags. You should see a substantial improvement in the time it takes for these changes to apply when you are making changes in mass.

Other Quick Fixes and Changes

BuzzBox VCard

With one click your BuzzBox email address is exported as a VCard for easy importing into your email client or address book.

Easily Import Merged Person’s Names

No longer do you need to separate first and last names that live  in the same cell of your spread sheet. Our import feature automatically separates those into two separate fields in your BuzzStream contact profile.

Hide Custom Fields

Use or don’t use all those Custom Fields you’ve created, it’s up to you. We’ve made it possible for you to enable or disable each you create depending your preference.

Import Now Supports Over 50 New Fields Including YouTube and MySpace

We beefed up our import options by adding over 50 new fields that you can import.

Urls in Custom Fields are Now Linkable

Do you have urls as part of a custom field? It’s no longer necessary to cut and paste those into your browser.  We’ve made them clickable from within BuzzStream.

Easier-to-Read Task Notification Emails

We have cleaned them up a bit so you an quickly see what you need to do for the day and get to it.

Added “Notes” to Import

“Notes” are an important part of any imported record and now you can add one note to each record you import to BuzzStream.

We’ve spent that last couple of weeks taking a look under the hood updating and tweaking BuzzStream. We could offer up a long, banal list of changes but it would read like this, “Updated to Twitter 42j.1 OAuth and Streaming API” or “Resolved null pointer when hiding ResultsMonitor”. Yes, a bit confusing and no fun for anyone. That said we’ve distilled things down to two important updates.

Quick Search: Notes and Articles are now searchable.

There was a lot of information stored in those notes and articles you couldn’t query via Quick Search.  All that info is now accessible for both PR/Social Media and Link Management but you need to know a few tricks to really dig deep.

1. Notes – To specifically search the Note field preface your search with “note:” followed by your search term.

2. Articles – To specifically search article headlines preface your search with “article:” followed by your search term.

Performance Update

We consistently invest time and resources making sure BuzzStream is in tip-top shape for our growing customer base. The last couple weeks has seen a big uptick in this area.  Primarily we focused on improving list views. It sounds like a small change but it’s huge for customers who have a large number of contact records or users in the system. If that’s you, some noteworthy speed increases will be seen when opening up your list of contacts, changing pages, filtering  and searching on lists of contacts. Any action that requires you to manipulate your contacts in mass will happen faster, thus saving you time.

Other Small Changes

-  Added the ability to delete Tweets from contact record.

-  Our import verification emails are more clearly formatted.

-  We added a counter for contacts in pagination.

-  Fixed a bug with text searching on the Media Outlet tab. It was preventing People from being returned in search results.

-  Twitter metrics are now saving in the contact’s details.

We see a lot of generalized link building articles with out there with titles like “Tips and Tricks” or “Top 5 Ways to…”. We wanted to get a bit more specific and hear from our customers about how they operate in their vertical.  We feel context is key to understanding and developing effective link building tactics. Brian Ratzker (@ratzker) of GourmetGiftBaskets.com walks us through a few strategies they’ve recently employed. Brian is a BuzzStream customer and the Online Marketing Manager for GourmetGiftBaskets.com, home to award winning gift baskets, fruit baskets and much more! He is also the personality behind GourmetGiftBaskets.com on Twitter and Facebook.

Linkbaiting is a method of attracting incoming links to your website through a creative endeavor.  Attracting links can be very difficult and the strategies discussed in many articles and blog posts don’t usually make sense for a retail website.  The most successful methods are usually the most creative and not only make your company stand out from your competition but also from everyone else trying to get noticed on regular basis.  This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to come up with an astronomically crazy idea in order to be successful.  There are many tried and true methods of Linkbaiting that can work for your retail website.

At GourmetGiftBaskets.com, we have dabbled in the astronomical as well as the tried and true.  One of the best ways a retail website can attract links is through brand loyalty.  Unfortunately, in the Gift Baskets industry our customers don’t normally buy our products for themselves, which makes it difficult to create brand loyalty.  Therefore, we need to be extra creative and below are some of the ways we are Linkbaiting.

The Astronomical – On August 15th, 2009, we broke the Guinness Book of World Records record for the World’s Largest Cupcake.  We documented the whole process on our website, hired a PR firm for the event and promoted it on Facebook and Twitter.   This was definitely a big endeavor that attracted a lot of attention, especially from mainstream media.

The Blog Basket – We are regularly writing blog posts that our customers and fans might find interesting, such as 148 Margarita Recipes to Celebrate Cinco de Mayo.  We don’t plan on using our blog as a sales tool but a way to connect with our customers on a personal level and hopefully drive some traffic from long tail keywords in the search engines.  If one of our posts goes viral and attracts a ton of links that would be great but we certainly aren’t counting on that.

Social Media – We are very active on Facebook and Twitter and believe these channels can have a tremendous impact on our business.  We give away Gift Baskets on a weekly basis on both websites to build followers and create brand awareness.  We also try to post links to articles that our followers might find interesting as well as find ways to interact with our fans.  During Easter, we created a fun quiz on Facebook, “What Easter Candy Are You?”, which attracted a lot of attention.

Blogger Outreach – There are many Bloggers that are more than willing to accept free gifts to review products on their Blog and provide giveaways for their readers.  The Linkbaiting value of this strategy doesn’t necessarily come from the links that are posted in these reviews but from the audience that participates in these contests and the increase in brand recognition.  We predominantly use these reviews to increase our followers on Twitter and Facebook.  Just make sure the Bloggers disclose that they didn’t pay for the donated product and give them the leeway to write what they really think.

Besides copying the tactics we are utilizing, I suggest you do research on Linkbaiting and try to find methods that will work for you.  There were articles and blog posts that certainly helped me brainstorm ideas, such as Linkbaiting Hooks and How to Write a Blog Post.  Another piece of important advice when you’re conducting your research, read the comments.  Comments in blog posts can provide some of the best ideas and unfortunately some of the worst but that’s just how research goes.

Remember, Linkbaiting is about attracting links but don’t forget that it also needs to be about building your brand and attracting new business.  In most cases, the links you acquire should just be the icing on the cake and not necessarily your primary focus.  Effective Linkbaiting also requires a tremendous amount of effort and dedication of resources; you need to make sure you’re getting an adequate return on this investment.

Look out! It’s a guest post by Elisa Gabbert. She is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, a provider of advanced SEO tools for researching, organizing and grouping large numbers head, mid and long tail keywords. Elisa is a frequent contributor to the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog and you can follow her on Twitter: @eGabbert. Now go ahead and dig in.

Even if your business has embraced search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for its website, your corporate blog may be less than optimized. Because of the fly-by-night nature of blogs (posts go live quickly and then quickly disappear below the fold), it’s tempting to short-change or skip over SEO.

But it’s just as important to optimize your blog as it is to apply SEO to the rest of your site. Because blogs are frequently updated, a signal that search engines look upon favorably, blog content often ranks well in search. Blog posts also present an opportunity to rank for timely searches—for example, a new product that has been launched in your space, or a relevant news story or industry announcement, often leads to a spike in search traffic. Optimizing your blog posts for the right keywords can attract a new audience that may stick around, link to your site, or come back to convert.

Here are three simple ways to improve your blog SEO and increase rankings and traffic for individual posts:

1. Optimize your title tags

As with a conventional web page, the title is one of the most important elements for SEO. First and foremost, your title needs to:

• Include the right keywords so search engines can find it
• Be clear and concise so users know what the post is about

Do keyword research for every post, before you start writing if possible. Aim for a balance between popularity and targeting. “Apple iPad” is an extremely popular keyword, but that means it’s prohibitively competitive as well. Try narrowing broad topics down to a more focused keyword, like “Apple iPad ship date” or “Apple iPad Twitter reactions.” Include whatever keyword you choose in the title.

The title also should accurately convey the content of the post. A clever, punny post title like “The ‘Apple’ Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree” won’t necessarily make sense or stand out to someone searching for specific details about the iPad in Google. Remember, you can always choose a slightly different (and more clever) title to promote the post through social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but search engines and search engine users should see a clear, keyword-focused title.

2. Improve follow-through on keyword research

Getting your writers to do keyword research before they write is one hurdle. Getting them to actually apply that research is another! While including keywords in the title is important, you also need to work your keywords into the body of the post.

A great way to improve follow-through on keyword research is to use an SEO plug-in for bloggers. One such example is WordStream SEO for Firefox, a plug-in that comes bundled with the company’s SEO Keyword Management software.

WordStream SEO for Firefox allows you to conduct keyword research, or consult the research you’ve already done, as you compose a post in blogging applications like Wordpress, Blogger and Drupal.

In the “Enter a Keyword” tab, you can find keyword suggestions related to your topic on the spot, categorized as phrases, single words, or questions. (Questions make great blog post titles, since many people enter them directly into the search box.) This tool is also a good way to generate topic ideas, when you’re not sure what to write about. In the “My Keyword Research” tab, you can access your historical research (via access to your paid WordStream account).

The plug-in also keeps track of how many keywords you use in the post as you write, ensuring that your research actually gets where it needs to be for optimization.

3. Optimize your images

A third way to increase your blog’s search engine traffic is to optimize your images for search. Including pictures and graphics on your blog not only adds visual interest (which is key for keeping readers engaged), it can actually boost your rankings. Why? Because many people use the image search option in Google and other search engines, and images give you another opportunity to include relevant keyword strings.

Keep these tips in mind when adding images to a blog post:

• Include keywords in the file names of your photos: Don’t save an image with a generic file name like “photo1.jpg”—the file name should describe the content of the photo (e.g., “leopard-print-flats.jpg”).
• Don’t ignore the alt text attribute: Many blogs neglect to utilize this useful tag. It provides another signal to search engines of what the photo contains. In addition, if a user’s computer fails to load the image, they’ll still know what the image conveys.
• Use high-quality, high-resolution images: You don’t have to be a pro photographer to add a nice visual dimension to your blog. Many images are available on the Web through creative commons licenses.

While the list of things you can do to improve your blog’s SEO is virtually endless, applied keyword research, strong titles, and attractive, relevant images are three elements that make a huge difference, and you don’t need to be an SEO expert to master them.

Our customers steer the ship at BuzzStream and that keeps the daily evolution of our product going. We add “newness” all the time and it is the our customer’s feedback and ideas that drive us to make BuzzStream the best fit for you! We dropped a few nice features this time around, so let’s get to it.

Custom Fields

In our last release we added Link Type and Link Partner Type fields. This offered a modicum of customization that we needed to build on. Now you can add custom fields to Link Partners, Links (for Link Management) , People and Media (for PR & Social Media). You can easily add custom fields by clicking on “Settings” and going to the “Configuration” tab. Below is a quick run through.

1. On the “Configuration” tab click “Create your first customer field…” under either Link, Link Partner, People or Media.

2. Choose a field name, field type and choices (available in either check box, drop down or text). Click “save”.

3. Your new custom field will show up in 3 places.

The Configuration tab:

The Link, Link Partner, People or Media record:

The BuzzMarker:

Import Templates

We know you’ve got contacts and link partners in all kinds of formats that you need to import. This can be laborious and time consuming process. Let us do the heavy lifting by setting up custom import templates in your account. You send us a spreadsheet and we’ll map that information to the proper fields in BuzzStream, even your new Custom Fields! Once the template is locked and loaded you can select it from the import screen and upload your info.

BuzzMarker: Contact Info Highlighting

Seconds add up to hours when pulling together contact info from the web. Our developer Tobias came up with a cool fix to ease the pain by highlighting all potential contact info on a page that you BuzzMark. A simple but smart time saver we hope you like. ATTN! Delete and reinstall your BuzzMarker to use this feature. Click here to reinstall!

Link Performance Reporting

Slice and dice your link reporting in a multitude of ways and see your reports as tables, charts or both. Need to know the number of new links a user has landed in a certain link partner type? We’ve got you covered. How about seeing the average page rank for each user’s links per partner type across a date range? Yep, we can do that to.

Need to take that data to go? You can export all that data into either PDF, Word, Excel or HTML. We’ve had a lot of requests for this and delivered the particular features you said you’d find most useful. No fluff, just actionable data. This is our first take on reporting with Social Media and PR reports on the way!  We want to know what you think and what else you’d like see from it.

That’s it for this release! We love your feedback so post your comments below or hit us up at customer-service@buzzstream.com.

We always receive great feedback from our customers and the in the last couple weeks you’ve given us some great ideas. We love it as your ideas play a huge role in the feature additions and updates we make; so please, keep them coming. A majority of our recent updates revolve around organizing, labeling, reporting and assigning. Let’s dig in

Quick Search Filters for Links & Link Partners

We love anything that makes a process faster for you. Sorting through your link relationships can be a bit tedious so we’ve added a couple Quick Search filters to ease things along. To use them just click on Filters and you’ll see Quick Search at the top of the drop down. We’ll be adding more search filters in the near future. If you have some that you’d like to see, let us know via customer-service@buzzstream.com.

Ad New Users to Projects

Small changes can equal big differences and we’re glad that this was pointed out. It’s tough for a new user to work on a project when one is not assigned. Now from the get-go, you can assign new users to a project while setting up their profile. The first time they log in they will already have projects assigned and can get cranking on projects.

Added Link Type and Link Partner Type

Categorizing your links can be a big help, especially with large campaigns. To ease the pain we added two customizable fields allowing you to add “types” to both the Link and Link Partner. Name them what you will, it’s up to you. These “types” will show up in Buzzmarker, link partner records, links and filters. The big plus is once we add reporting (coming in a couple weeks!) you will be able to break down link building performance by type (blog/media mention, social bookmark, guest post, affiliate link, general directory, blog comment, etc.).

Here’s how you do it:

1. Click on “Settings”

2. Click on “Configuration” tab

3. Click on “New Link Partner Type” or “New Link Type” (not shown)

4. Enter in link “Type” and click Save

Filter Memory

You’ve gone through all the trouble to set up a bunch of filters and they go up in smoke once you have logged out or leave a page. Yes, very annoying, so we fixed it. If you leave a page or happen to log out you can return with all your filters in place. An added bonus is you can now see what your current filter is with out jumping into your filter preferences.

Backlink Checker Update with Email Reporting
It’s been easy to get the current state of your link but the reporting has been a bit light. You told us you needed help identifying changes to the actual links and wanted those changes sent to your inbox. We are happy to meet the need. We’ve beefed up the Backlink Checker and added some simple email reports that give you an accurate snap shot of any crucial changes to your links.

Backlink Checker

• Changes to the page it is linking
• Changes to nofolllow/dofollow status
• Changes to anchor text
• Changes to the number of outbound links on the pages

Email Reporting

• New links that were added since the last check, including critical info you need to evaluate it (PageRank, #of links on the page, presence of “flagged words,” whether it’s a dofollow or nofollow link)
• Links that you’d previously received that have changed (also includes the details of what changed)
• Links that have been removed since you last ran a backlink check

Upcoming Features

Your feedback keeps us going so please don’t hesitate to comment below or send suggestions straight to customer-service@buzzstream.com. Thanks for helping us make BuzzStream into the tool that you need it be. Check out new updates and features we’ll be adding in the coming weeks.

• Easier Import Utility: Making it a breeze to import your own links
• Custom Fields
• Reporting
• Contact Info Highlighting: When the Buzzmarker finds contact info, we’ll highlight the place on the web page where we found it.

Hi friends of BuzzStream!  Todd Hansen here, the new addition to the BuzzStream crew.

How did I materialize at BuzzStream? They found me wandering aimlessly on the highway while driving back from a weekend in Marfa, TX. I told them I’d do marketing and PR for them if they gave me a lift. They agreed and I haven’t closed my laptop since.

Originally from Minneapolis, I found my way to Austin a couple years ago. 300+ days of sunshine and blistering summer days sounded better than 7 months of  snow and gray skies. In my time I’ve run a record label (now defunct), worked for Ad &  PR agencies and kept my sanity while marketing student housing by running a hospitality network for touring bands.

I’ll be posting here from time to time, or find you can find me @buzzstreamtodd

While your at it. Fan us on Facebook and follow @buzzstream too!

It’s about that time. Time to lay out what we’ve been up to since our last post. It’s been a while; we know it and it’s no OK with us. Why the blackout? A ton of new customers, continued product enhancements and infrastructure upgrades have had everyone juggling fire. We don’t like burns so unfortunately the blog has taken a back seat. Now that the acrobatics are over, we’ve got a bunch to share. Let’s get to it.

Speed of the Link Buzzmarker

If you’re using BuzzStream for Link Management, you’ll see huge improvements in the time it takes for the Link Buzzmarker to scan the page.  This will make your link research and link documentation efforts much more efficient.  I was testing sites last night that had been taking 10-15 seconds to load and they’re now loading in 2 to 3 seconds.  We’ll make similar improvements to the Media Buzzmarker in a future release.  This will be a continuous process…the end goal is to get it to where there’s virtually no wait time when you click the Buzzmarker.

Tag Management

One of our most frequent requests from people who have been using the product for a long time is that tags quickly become unmanageable once you have a lot of contacts or a lot of people using the product.  We’ve taken the first step to addressing this by adding tag management capabilities.  Now you can select multiple contacts and add, edit or delete contacts for those contacts.  So suppose one person was using the tag “social media” and another person was using “social_media,” you can now fix this by filtering on the tag you want to remove, selecting all the contacts, removing the one tag and adding the other.

Enhancements to Tasks

We continue to extend our Task Management capabilities so that you can better track and manage your influencer outreach efforts and your link management activities.   Here’s a list of the things we added since our last Release blog post:

• The ability to add a task while Buzzmarking a contact
• E-mail notifications of your daily agenda as well as notifications when tasks are assigned to you by someone else
• The ability to add follow-up tasks when you’re adding notes, editing links, etc (for example, after adding the note “Talked to John about the product review,” you can create a follow-up task titled “Send screenshots” that’s associated with the note)
• Task filtering on the Dashboard – this will enable you to see tasks associated with a specific project, tasks that are due at a certain time, and tasks that are assigned to someone on your team.

Bulk Operations

In addition to Tag Management, we’ve added  a number of other operations that can be conducted on multiple contacts at once.  This is particularly useful when you’re working with a large number of contacts.  Our bulk operations currently include:

• Select specific contacts to copy or move to a different project: you no longer have to move/copy all of the Link Partners that are in the current filter…now you can specifically select the ones that you want to copy or move.
• Bulk delete
• Ability to change the “assigned to” field for multiple Link Partners at once
• Ability to change “relationship stage” for multiple Link Partners at once

Improvements to Search

We implemented Lucene as our search technology, which will give us much more power for searching.  In the near-term, this means you can now search on any term in the fields we look at.  In the long-term, it’ll mean that we’ll be able to search across much larger data sets.  This will become much more important as we enhance our influencer monitoring capabilities (i.e., you’ll be able to do things like look for any of your influencers who have written about a certain topic in the last X weeks).

Improved Performance

We added a number of large customers last week and we’re optimizing to make sure that performance keeps up.  We’re addressing this both with code optimizations and by adding more hardware.  Things seem to be humming, but please let us know if you see any issues.

Usability Improvements and Bug Fixes

In addition to these new features, we also made a number of usability improvements and fixed some remaining bugs.  Here’s the list:

• The Quick Search box now clears when you click “Clear Filters”
• For monitoring, the “Manage” tab is only available to Administrators
• Fixed a bug that was preventing retrieval of Twitter metrics when you’d click “Update Metrics”
• Links to external websites now open in a new tab (instead of a new window)
• Fixed a bug that was making some social profile URLs unclickable (e.g., some facebook URL formats)
• When you click outside the Projects drop-down, it now closes automatically
• When you finish an Import, the “Cancel” button now changes to “Close”
• Increased the character limit for the “About” fields on People, Media Outlets and Link Partners
• Fixed a set of user interface bugs on Internet Explorer.  These include:
  • Cursor wouldn’t turn into a pointer when you hovered over the Delete icon
  • “Link out” icons were getting cut off on some pages
  • Text in “Recently Viewed” section of the Dashboard was getting cut off

Lots of tasty goodness in our near-term roadmap as well…some of the things we’re working on:

• Reporting: our highest priority for our next major release
• Filter memory: BuzzStream will remember your filter.  So, for example, suppose you’ve filtered your list to only show contacts assigned to you.  If you go to a different page or log out, the next time you return to the list, you’ll only see those contacts (this is a first step towards Saved Filters).
• Highlighting contact info found by the Buzzmarker: When you Buzzmark a page, we’ll  highlight the section of the web page where any contact info is found.  This will reduce the time required for research.
• Complete upgrade of the Backlink Checker e-mail in the Link Management product
• More bulk operations