BuzzStream

We’re happy to announce that we’ve added social media monitoring to BuzzStream for PR and Social Media.  If you haven’t signed up for the free beta yet, now is a great time to join.  We’ve made 200 beta invites available to TechCrunch which you can access from their review of the product.

This is our biggest upgrade to the product since our launch and I’m really excited to share it with you.  BuzzStream co-founder, Jeremy, has talked in a previous post about how the process for PR and social media marketing needs to change.  Specifically, the process needs to change from “SEARCH DATABASE>SPAM THE **** OUT OF PEOPLE” to “LISTEN>RESEARCH>ENGAGE>PITCH.”  SocialSteve has a good post on his variation– Listen, Conversations, Relationships. With the addition of monitoring capabilities, BuzzStream now provides a single solution to streamline this process.

While we’re still in beta, we’ll be rolling out the capabilities with some limitations (you’ll have a limited number of searches and results won’t be retrieved in real-time).  We’ll start removing these limitations over the next few weeks.

Some of the new features of the monitoring include:

• Track conversations that are occurring across millions of social media sites to find influencers for PR, blogger relations and link building campaigns. Searches across blogs, news, twitter, video sites, images, Q&A sites and bookmarks. If you want to add your own source, you can also add an RSS feed.
• Tight integration between monitoring and contact management. All information is integrated into BuzzStream’s contact management tools, making outreach activities more effective – if the monitoring tool finds content written by one of your existing BuzzStream contacts, you’re provided with the complete “dossier” for that contact
• Detailed influencer profiles, including automated research of contact info. When you find an article written by someone who you want to build a relationship with, you can add them as a contact and BuzzStream will look for contact info and social profiles they’ve provided on their site. Additionally, for each piece of content, BuzzStream queries the Google Social Graph API to try to find other sites that this person might be associated with.
• Grades articles/content by influence to help you filter out the noise. We’ve partnered with HubSpot to include their TwitterGrader tool to power our rating of Twitter influencers and SEOmoz to include their mozRank tool (similar to Google PageRank) to provide an influence rating for other websites. These are really powerful starting points for getting a quick sense of the influence of someone online…excellent tools for filtering out the noise, so we’re very excited to be including them in the product.
• Collects detailed traffic and engagement metrics. In addition to the high-level influence metrics, BuzzStream can collect detailed traffic and engagement metrics for each piece of content. This includes information like Compete traffic, Technorati Rank, # of tweets, # of comments, etc.
• Automated brand tracking. Automatically tracks brand mentions across the social media landscape and compares them to your competitors
• Workflow capabilities for managing engagement across a team. You can assign content to someone on your team, set the “Engagement Stage” (e.g., “needs a comment”), add notes, etc.

We’d also love to hear your feedback!  Feel free to contact me directly at paul (at symbol) buzzstream (d-o-t) com.