Software for SEO link building, social media marketing and public relations | BuzzStream

 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’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 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 .