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

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.

We’ve added three new features to BuzzStream that we’re really excited about…now, to be fair, none of these are the “OMG, put the Barry White CD on, cuz I got have me some of that” variety of feature.  These are the slow burns.  You know, the ones where you find yourself spending more and more time with them until one day, out of nowhere, you realize that you’re deeply and madly in love. Sigh.

Okay, it’s an overstatement, but you get the idea.  Let’s take a look…

Revamped Import Utility

We’ve completely retooled the import utility in a way that makes it SO much more usable and powerful.  The first change is that we’ve added “Auto-Update” capabilities to imports.  If you select Auto-Update, information about your contacts will be updated with new values in the import file (e.g., contact information, bios, etc.).  This is particularly useful when you need to sync internal and external lists or when you’re collecting some of your contact/link information in Excel.

The second change is that we’ve completely eliminated the need to use the BuzzStream import template.   Just upload your CSV file and select the fields that you want to map to.  You can even import into your custom fields.

Project Filters

For those of you who have projects enabled, we’ve added a new filter that’s available from the “All Contacts” view.  You can now select the projects filter and view all contacts in a set of projects.   So, for example, suppose you want to find all contacts that have been part of all of your campaigns for a client, just select all of projects for that client and you have your list.

Google Cache Checker

For our Link Building customers, the backlink checker now looks to see if a page you’re adding is in the Google cache and tells you when it was last cached.

Minor Enhancements and Bug Fixes

• Reduced the size of the Note field on profile pages for People, Media Outlets and Link Partners
• Fixed a bug where contact information that the Buzzmarker was highlighting would flash on the screen
• Fixed a bug that was preventing projects and users from being deleted if there was a shared Outreach template in the account
• Buzzmarker filters out twitter IDs if the URL is “\share”

We’re happy to announce the release of a collection of free link building tools.  Over the last three years, we’ve built a number of tools that we use internally, some to help with customer implementations and some as prototypes for tools we’ve added to the product.  It’s great that these tools have helped our customers, but we haven’t been happy that they’re mostly only available to us.  So, we’re cleaning them up and rolling them out to everyone.  The first four of these are available today and we’ll continue to clean up tools and add them to the collection at a pretty steady pace.

Here’s a quick summary of the first tools we’re rolling out:

Email Research Tool

Last week we announced the release of an email research tool for BuzzStream subscribers that’s designed to reduce the time spent researching email addresses. You just select a list of contacts and BuzzStream automatically conducts 23 different searches for each contact.  The free tool for researching email addresses works in a similar way (although only for one contact at a time). For a closer look at both tools, check out this video.

Oh yeah, one thing before you watch the video…sorry in advance for the audio quality.  It’s bad.  Real bad.  I didn’t have access to our good recording equipment, so now, there are all sorts of fun pops, clicks and ridiculously bad audio edits (all layered over the nasally voice that just drives the ladies crazy ).

Link Building Query Generator

Enter in some information about your brand, your competition and your keywords and the link building query generator will generate Google and Bing queries to help you find influencers and link opportunities.  What’s really nice is the tool lets you save the Bing searches as an OPML file so you can easily add them to a feed reader or dashboard app (i.e., iGoogle, pageflakes, etc.).

Domain Name Extraction Tool

Great tool to use if you have a list of URLs and you want to extract the domain.  Paste the URLs into the domain name extraction tool and it kicks out a CSV file with the original URLs and the domains.

URL “Theme” Extraction Tool

The idea for this tool came from an Excel for SEOs post that Mike Pantoliano wrote.  One of the things Mike showed in the post was how you can use excel formulas to take a URL and strip out the theme section (e.g.,  turn a URL like http://www.example.com/snowboarding” into “snowboarding”).  We’d already built a lot of tools for URL manipulation, so extending them to do this was easy.  Now, to extract the theme from a set of URLs, rather than writing excel formulas to extract them, just paste in the URLs and you’ll get back a CSV with the “theme” section of the URL.

One last thing.  Big thanks to Jeremy Bencken, Ann Smarty and Garrett French for inspiring many of the searches in the link building query generator.  Jeremy started the design of a query generator tool for BuzzStream two years ago and many of the original queries are in the tool.  One of the first collections of queries we found was in a post Ann wrote two and a half years ago.  It was still one of our most valuable resources when putting the tool together.  Garrett has taken things to a whole new level with his link building query posts on the ontolo blog.  And if you haven’t checked out the ontolo query generator, you’re missing out.

We’re just getting started with these, so keep your eyes peeled…lots more tools on the way.

Enjoy!

We’ve spent a lot of time watching how our customers do their job and one of the most time-consuming and frustrating parts of influencer research is looking for someone’s contact information.  The typical process we see looks something like this:

• Go to google and search for some combination of the person’s name, company and the word “contact info,” “email,” etc.
• Scan the results, trying to find something that looks like a good match
• Try searching for different combinations of common email formats (e.g., johndoe@company.com, jdoe@company.com, john.doe@company.com, etc.)
• Rinse, repeat, until something reasonably good is found

Our friend, Ken Lyons, at Wordstream documented this process really well in a post about finding contact information. Ken’s gone a lot farther than most in terms of identifying the most effective queries, but the basic process is one we’ve seen repeated over and over by both SEOs and PR pros.  It works well, but it takes way too much time and it’s easy to miss things.  We built contact information research capabilities into the Buzzmarker (our bookmarking tool) to help with this problem (and it’s always been one of our most popular features) but it doesn’t help if you’re importing contacts into BuzzStream and need to research a lot of contacts at once.  It also doesn’t help if the contact information is provided on another site.

To help with these problems we’ve added a new email research tool to BuzzStream.  In a nutshell, it automates the manual process I described.  Here’s how you use it…

• Make sure you have the email column and Contact Name column showing in your list.  To do this, click ‘Columns’ and select the columns
• Sort on the email address so that contacts without an email address are shown at the top.  Select the contacts that you want to research.

• Click ‘Tools’ and ‘Email Research’

Here’s what you get…

For each contact, BuzzStream runs through 23 different searches to try to find contact information.  If it finds an address you want to add to the contact, just click “Add to Contact.”  When you’re done with the contact, just click Next and you’ll be taken to the next one in your list.

Combined with the fact that BuzzStream automatically collects metrics when you import contacts, this should be a big time saver in your research efforts…import in a list you pull from other sources (directories, Yahoo Site Explorer, etc), sort by metrics and then research email addresses.

I’d love your feedback.  You can reach me at paul (at symbol) buzzstream (d-o-t) com (or just plug my info into the research tool and find it on your own .