It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at BuzzStream.  We’ve had two releases go out with a bunch of new features as well as a number of usability enhancements and bug fixes.  We’re most excited about two things we’ve added: 1) revisions to the dashboard, and 2) the introduction of task management.

Here’s a full list of what we released:

Task Management

Our goal at BuzzStream is to provide tools that help you build and manage your online relationships more effectively, without forcing to change your workflow. To help with this, we’ve added task management.  Now, as your working on a contact record in BuzzStream, you can add a To Do for that person, media outlet or link partner.  The Dashboard provides you with a single view of all of the activities that you and your team are working on.

Task lists on the Dashboard:

• the ability to add a task while Buzzmarking a contact
• BuzzStream will send you 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

Improved Dashboard

We’ve completely overhauled the Dashboard to make it a more useful starting point when you enter BuzzStream.  The changes we made include:

Layout - We’ve completely changed the layout to improve usability.  The changes will also give us the framework we need to plug in our upcoming reporting capabilities
Recent contacts – Added a list of the ten contact records you accessed most recently so that you can jump right back into your previous work when you sign into BuzzStream
Task list – Added the Task List to help you keep track of your team’s activities
Activity history formatting – We changed the format of items in the Activity History to improve usability
Ability to see all activity history – Added pagination to the Activity History so that you can view your complete history (previously you could only see the 50 most recent activities)

For those of you who are familiar with the old Dashboard, you’ll also notice that we took out the “New Links” chart.  We’ll be replacing this with a set of new charts when we add reporting.

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:

• Resolved a bug in our social media monitoring tool that was showing duplicate results  for video content
• To create lists, you can now filter by date ranges (rather than just filtering by “before” or “after”).
• The Projects dropdown and the “Assigned To” dropdown are now sorted alphabetically
• Fixed a bug that was causing e-mails for monitoring results to be sent out multiple times per day
• Fixed a bug in Monitoring that was causing “Filter by PageRank” to miss some items that met the filter criteria
• Changed our credit card authorization when someone signs up to only authorize a $0.01 purchase (so that funds for debit card users wouldn’t be held)
• Fixed an IE 7 bug that was preventing the auto-suggest dropdown menus in the Buzzmarker from working
• Cleaned up the font in the Projects dropdown to make it consistent with the rest of the application

Changes to BuzzStream for Link Management

• Added a field called “Date Link Found by BuzzStream” that’s populated when the backlink checker finds a link on the page.  We’ve also added this to the filters, so you can identify all of the links you’ve added in a certain date range.
• Fixed a scroll bar issue in Internet Explorer on the Link Partners list page
• When looking at a Link Partner contact, you can now hover over a link to see the full link

Changes to BuzzStream for PR and Social Media

• For the “Media Outlet Type” field, we expanded ”traditional media” to make it more granular (e.g., newspaper, radio, trade publication, magazine, etc.).  You can also filter on these types when building outreach lists.  These new types have also been added to the Import Template.
• Modified “Add a Person” to allow you to add the job title without having to scroll down the page
• From a person’s contact record, you can now edit or delete associated media outlets (without going to the Media Outlet page)
• Fixed a bug that made it impossible to edit a person’s job title with a media outlet

Many marketers have noted that PR, blogger relations, and social media engagement can have a positive impact on SEO.   Primarily they point out that links are a by-product of success.  Adam Singer at TopRank Blog writes, “Links earned from PR…can be a major boost in both rankings and referral traffic.”  But what if you have an online business and organic search is worth thousands (or millions) of dollars per month, and links are the most valuable output of a public relations campaign?

So I thought we’d turn the the PR-SEO question on its head and ask, “what would a PR, blogger relations, and social media engagement campaign look like if your  client or company perceived links and organic rankings as the primary benefit?”  How would that change our strategy and tactics?  How can we tweak our PR outreach campaigns to maximize links?  Here are six ways that increased link value would affect a PR outreach strategy:

• Increased emphasis on link authority when creating a media list. When prioritizing your outreach efforts, you should consider online “authority” in addition to relevance and audience.  Factors like site age, inbound links, mozRank (a more precise measure of authority than PageRank), etc. are all signals (or proxies for signals) that matter to Google, and should matter to you too.  For example, GigaOm (331k uv/mo) may have 3x more traffic than InternetNews.com (139k uv/mo) according to Compete.com, but based on link building value, they are roughly similar:
  

  	GigaOm.com	InternetNews.com
  Traffic (uv/mo, Compete.com)	331,000	139,000
  Age (Archive.org)	8.7 years	12 years
  MozRank (SEOMoz)	5.9	6.6
  Inbound Links (Yahoo Site Explorer)	1.8M	2.0M
  Juice-passing Links (SEOMoz)	51000	77000

• Think relevance in addition to audience.  Coverage (and a link) from an authoritative niche blog with medium authority can often be more valuable than a link from USA Today.  This is because Google pays attention to semantic relevance of the sites who link to you, and the stronger the semantic link, the more it reinforces the relevance of your site to a particular concept (read: keyword).  While it may be fun for your mom to see an article about your gnome decorating site  in USA Today, it doesn’t help Google understand that your site is relevant to gnomes as much as a blog post in AllGnomes.com.
• Prioritize media that give links and who keep their content online.  Eric Ward (BuzzStream Advisor) and I were recently discussing whether Google is smart enough (yet) to identify a reference to a website in a news story, even if it’s unlinked (e.g. YourSite.com versus YourSite.com).  The sad fact is, many news organizations will mention a company without linking to them, and many archive their news within a few days of posting (both of these things happened to me at my last company with an A-1 story in the Wall Street Journal).  It’s important to consider how often a media property links to the companies they cover, and whether they keep their news online or move it to paid archives after a few weeks before expending the effort to include them in your media relations efforts.
• Create linkable resources on your website that are easy for journalists to post.  This is something that’s often overlooked in a campaign– if you  build a relationship with a journalist interested in covering your story, then you want to make it easy for them to link to a resource on your website that were specifically created to support the news story.  The best way to do this is to create a page for each campaign that would provide a logical next step for readers.  You should design the target page to have a short URL like http://company.com/HolidayTips and include a prominent link to it on your homepage in case journalists want to link there and direct readers to your news.
• Pitches should incorporate references to your company’s website within the body of the pitch.  Too often the website is mentioned only in the boilerplate of a pitch, as an afterthought to the story.  If your pitch doesn’t incorporate the website, the stories you do attract likely will not either.
• In social media engagement, use SEO-friendly URL shorteners (like kl.am that employ 301 redirects) when posting links to your website.  The reason is that if someone uses the short link to link to your site, you will only get “credit” for the link (in the eyes of Google) if it triggers a 301 redirect to your site.

You know when you’re on a long road trip and after about 500 miles of driving 70 miles per hour, you pull off, fill your tank, and wash all the bugs off your windshield? Well today’s release was the equivalent of a major window washing for BuzzStream. So many bugs squashed. So many things we’ve wanted to fix for months are finally getting fixed. So in that spirit, here’s the full list of features and bug fixes that went out today. 

• Redesigned welcome flow.  We realized that a lot of users got lost when they signed up for their BuzzStream account, so we’ve streamlined the process.  Existing users can return to the welcome flow by clicking here: http://app.buzzstream.com/welcome
• Added feature to import users’ contacts from their existing spreadsheet for free.  As part of the new welcome flow, you can send us your existing contacts spreadsheet and we’ll import it for you (just visit the welcome link above).  You can also do it yourself by following these instructions for PR contacts or Website contacts.  We normally charge $199 for data import, so this is a huge benefit to customers.
• When viewing Monitoring, you now have to choose which search you wish to view, which improves server performance.
• Redesign of the layout of the Monitoring results page.
• Updated some error messages to make them more useful.
• Fix bug with Monitoring that would cause the user to wait 30+ seconds to delete a monitoring search.
• Fixed bug in Monitoring that was causing some items to have a rating of zero or unknown.
• Fixed bug in welcome message that caused the login link to be unusable.
• Fixed bug in email fields that would trigger an error on very long email addresses.
• Fixed bug in Settings on the Users tab that caused the scrollbar to disappear.
• Fixed bug in the password reset process.
• Fixed bug in Monitoring where search terms would not delete.
• Fixed bug editing a Project’s Brand associations.
• Fixed bug adding a new User to an existing account.
• Fixed bug in viewing Monitoring results assigned to “No Folder”
• Fixed over 50 miscellaneous Java exceptions related to a database issue.
• Miscellaneous UI and backend server performance improvements.
• Fixed several typos.

BuzzStream for PR & Social Media

• More improvement to the byline identification rules in the BuzzMarker.
• Modified Import format to not require so that Media Outlet URL is no longer required.
• When adding a new Person contact, media outlets are now sorted by name.
• Updated options in the Media BuzzMarker to enable users to select media outlet types: Blog, Traditional Media, Trade Publication, Forum, Shopping Guide, Other.
• Fixed bug when viewing a Person where clicking “update metrics” would not refresh the Twitter metrics.
• Fixed bug that occurs if you use the Media BuzzMarker to BuzzMark an article that already exists.
• Fixed bug that occurs after you add a new Person and assign them to a Media Outlet; after you hit save, the Media Outlet doesn’t appear on the Person’s profile page until you exit and re-enter the page.
• Fixed BuzzMarker so that it identifies more byline variations.
• Fixed bug in adding a new Person to an existing Media Outlet where an error screen was shown when a space was included in the name.
• Fixed bug in adding a new Person to an existing Media Outlet that already has an existing Person connected to it.

BuzzStream for Link Building

• Improved the time it takes to open the Links tab with 10,000+ links loaded.
• Removed the PageRank field from the add/edit Link page since it’s non-editable.
• Modified the Link Export so that it includes the date a link was found by the Backlink Checker.
• Fixed bug on the Link Partner details page where long names would wrap oddly.
• Fixed bug in Backlink Checker where it found a link that doesn’t actually exist.
• Fixed bug in the BuzzMarker when it identifies existing links on a page, the first link is deleted if the user deletes ANY link.
• Fixed bug in the BuzzMarker when saving a Link where the payment date would somehow be saved as null and trigger an error.
• Fixed bug in BuzzMarker to handle 503 errors and timeouts caused by 3^rd party sites.
• Fixed bug in BuzzMarker that would occur when the site name (title tags) were identical to an existing Link Partner.
• Fixed bug with the Filter pop-up where opening a drop-down at the bottom of the list forces your view back to the top of the Filters pop-up.
• Fixed bug deleting a Person’s association with a Media Outlet.
• Fixed bug in saving a Link where the acquisition method gets “stuck” on Purchase, even if a different method was chosen.
• Fixed bug in saving a Link where the message “not-null property references a null or transient value: com.conducive.data.pojo.Link.linkingFrom” appears.
• Fixed bug that occurs during Link Partner import if there are existing Link Partners in the account that don’t belong to any Project.

We’ve got a release going live tonight, and we wanted to let our customers know what they can find in it.

• Performance improvements.  Our hamsters have been running fast to keep up with the growing usage of BuzzStream, and we’ve made a number of changes that we think will result in noticeable improvements in the time it takes to view your monitoring results, search and filter your contacts, delete monitoring searches, and even to just open and view a contact.
• Fixed our Tweet BuzzMarker (a change in Twitter’s HTML caused it to throw an error).
• Upgraded our Twitter DM and @reply retriever (it now does a better job ensuring we capture tweets when a user’s account is rate-limited).
• Backlink checker provides visual notification of a link status change (i.e. from “not linking” to “linking”) and stores the information in the database for reporting (reports coming soon).
• On our link partners detail screen, we added an icon that links directly to the external website (before you had to edit the link details to get to the actual link).
• Fixed problem with our maintenance notice page caching for some users.
• Fixed problem with pagination monitoring results disappearing from the screen for some users.
• Fixed problem for users with projects turned on where after adding a media outlet, they can’t associate it with a new contact immediately.
• Fixed application error in editing a media outlet when changing the ‘type’ field.
• Fixed application error in project settings when the user re-adds a brand that was deleted.
• Fixed display of mozRank in monitoring results under the “more info” link for a blog post.
• Fixed display of PageRank after adding a new link.
• Fixed link filter to enable filter-by payment currency.
• Fixed application error when adding a person to a media outlet.

We’ll aim to do these posts each time we have a new release going out– which, currently, is every 2 weeks.    Since this is the first time we’ve posted a detailed update about our maintenance release, we figured you might be curious about what else we’ve been working on in the past few of months.

November — BuzzMarker extracts social networks from Ligit & Retaggr widgets.   Misc. sign-up flow changes.

October – Agency Support (projects).  CSV import enhancements.

September – Monitoring performance enhancements.

August – Social media monitoring for mainstream news, blogs, Twitter, and more; sort results by influence; create an influencer’s contact from a result; add notes; assign activities to your team; export your monitoring results (with metrics) to Excel to create detailed coverage reports.

Hi all!  This is going to be a long post, but we had a big release last week and there’s a lot to cover.  We’ve added features that touch just about every part of the product and,  on top of that, we finished a major infrastructure upgrade to improve performance.  Here’s what’s new:

Projects:

Support for projects has been a long time in the making and of all the things we added last week, this is the big one (with all due respect to Fred Sanford).  So what is a project?  A project provides a workspace where a designated group can work on a set of contacts, article, links, monitors, etc.  An agency might designate a project for each of its clients.  An in-house marketing group might set up a project for each product that they’re working on or for each agency that they’re working with.   Access to a project is limited to the people who are assigned to it (unless you’re an admin).  Here are some of the things that you can do when you’ve enabled projects that we’re excited about:

• Share contacts between projects. You can have a single contact assigned to multiple projects, with different information in each of them.  For example, you might have a Person contact named “Walt Mossberg” and a Link Partner contact named “dmoz” that’s assigned to two different projects – one called “Apple iPhone” and the other called “Google Wave.”  The contact info and metrics will be carried with these two contacts in all projects, but all of the other information could be different.  They can be assigned to different people and you can have different values for Relationship Stage and Rating.  Walt Mossberg in Apple might have a set of articles attached that are about mobile wireless services, while the version in Google Wave might have e-mail and collaboration articles in it.  Similarly, the dmoz Link Partner might have different links for each project and the backlink checker might find links in one of the projects but not in the other.
• Copy contacts to new projects. For agencies, when they add a new client, they can easily filter their contacts to find the right influencers and link opportunities for them.  Copying these contacts to a new project can be done in two clicks.
• Copy to multiple projects from the buzzmarker. The buzzmarker also includes the ability to copy contacts to multiple projects.  Quite valuable if you come across an influencer or link opportunity that’s well suited for multiple clients.
• History filtering by projects: For each contact, you can filter the communication history in two ways: 1) view all communications, and 2) view communications only for this project.  This gives you the info about the project that you need in order to communicate effectively with the contact while still giving you the big picture view that you need in order to prevent communication snafus.

Here are two videos that provide an overview of projects…the first shows them being used for BuzzStream for PR and Social Media and the second show them for BuzzStream for Link Management.

Overview of Projects – BuzzStream for PR and Social Media

Overview of Projects – BuzzStream for Link Management

New Filters

We invest a lot of time on our filtering capabilities because, once you have a large number of contacts in BuzzStream, the ability to slice and dice your contacts, monitors, links, article, etc for segmented outreach becomes really valuable.  We added two new filters in the latest release:

• Filter people and media outlets by metrics: on the People tab, you can filter by PageRank, unique visitors, etc. and it will find all people associated with media outlets that match the filter.  You can also filter people by their twitter metrics.  This is useful for segmenting outreach based on level of influence or reach.

• Filter monitoring results by publication date: you can now sort your monitoring results by influence rating and then filter by publication date to quickly find content by the most influential people within a certain time period.

Usability and performance improvements to monitoring

Since we launched it into beta two months ago, the monitoring module has undergone a ton of work to make it more usable and to make it perform better.  Some of the things that we’ve done:

• Monitoring performance and reliability. We felt the bite of the TechCrunch effect after they posted about us and monitoring performance was just plain poor for the first two weeks.  We’ve spent a significant amount of time squashing bugs, adding database indexes, improving our threading, etc., all to improve this.  All of this has made a huge difference on performance.  If you haven’t used the monitoring in a while, you’ll notice a big difference next time you log in.
• Usability enhancements. We haven’t added any specific usability enhancement that’s a “wow” type of feature, but lots of little enhancements that should add up to a much better experience.  Some of the changes:
  • Changed pagination to make it easier to navigate through results
  • Fixed a scrolling bug that would cause the screen to constantly scroll to the top as results were retrieved or whenever you clicked “Block.”
  • Header now shows the number of results for the search that’s selected.
  • Added mozRank and juice passing links to “Export Results” for a monitor
  • Added a “Name” field for RSS searches (so you know what the RSS feed is for when you view it in Results).
  • Cleaner navigation in the Results.

Infrastructure Improvements

To improve performance, we also undertook a major upgrade of our server environment.  The database is now running on it’s own server, we’ve improved our monitoring tools and we’re operating on much bigger servers.  It was a hard-core upgrade, but it’s made a big difference.

What’s Coming Next

After two very big releases, we’re now going to focus on some bite-sized features.  Some of the things we’re working on now:

• Filter by communication history – i.e., show me all people who I’ve e-mailed with, tweeted, called, etc.
• Adding article statistics to Export in monitoring: In the Monitoring module, we integrate with Backtype to provide article statistics like Number of tweets, Number of Comments, and Number of Digg Comments.  We’re adding these to the Export file, which will make it easier for people to add this information to coverage reports that they provide to clients, management, etc.
• “Quick add” for People/Media: When we first launched BuzzStream for PR and Social Media, we focused virtually all of our effort on making it easy to add contacts through the Buzzmarker.  What suffered was the usability of adding people from within the app…right now, when you’re in the app and you’re trying to add a person and associate them with a media outlet, it’s approximately a 746 step process that would make Rube Goldberg proud.  Spectacularly bad interaction design on my part, which we’re going to fix.
• Adding mozRank and Juice Passing Links to the Buzzmarkers: we currently collect these SEOmoz stats in the Monitoring module, but we don’t include them in the Buzzmarker. This is being fixed.
• Projects clean-up: there are still some bugs we need to clean up…things like drop-downs where the values in them aren’t sorted alphabetically, bugs in certain headers, etc.

Once we’re done with these, we’re going to tackle our next set of big features…we’ll start delivering these features in iterations over the next four to eight weeks.

If you have feedback, need help with bugs or just want help understanding how to use BuzzStream, don’t hesitate to contact me at paul (at symbol) buzzstream (d-o-t) com!

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time creating press opportunities… finding people who are interested in your niche, connecting with them, building relationships, and ever so softly pitching your company.

But sometimes journalists go looking for experts. And chance favors the prepared mind. If you know where they look, you can be standing by to help them out. This post covers three free services you can monitor to find PR opportunities.

Traditionally, the major service that connects journalists with experts was ProfNet, which charges both parties experts to participate. I say, “nuts to that” in the digital age. Enter Help A Reporter (HARO). Peter Shankman is an uber-connected PR guru who receives requests from the press (the serious mainstream press) all the time looking for experts of various kinds– anything from professional gardeners to Fortune 100 CTO’s. Peter compiles all of these expert requests and sends out a daily email to his massive subscriber base of PR pros and experts.  Another service, PitchRate.com, launched this year and is similar in concept to HARO but saves expert requests on their website where you can search them (and manage your pitches) and also will send you a daily digest of requests via email. PitchRate is newer, so it has a much smaller user base than HARO.

The newest entrant, ExpertTweet, announced today, was launched by Jeremy Pepper Porter at Journalistics (a fantastic blog, btw).  They take this idea to Twitter. Just follow @experttweet and you’ll see journalists’ expert requests as they’re posted in real-time. I really like this format because the requests are very brief and to-the-point, which makes them easier to follow.  They’re also easier to search and filter using Twitter (more on that in a second).

Filtering

One thing that’s true of all these services is that you’re going to have to read through a lot of irrelevant posts to see the requests that you can act on. Unless you have lots of clients in many different niches, monitoring these services can be like reading through all the For Sale ads on Craigslist to find a kayak.  So, to fix this problem, you need to glue together some RSS feeds and create filters.

How to Filter ExpertTweets

• Create a search Twitter for your keyword like this: from:ExpertTweet “my kw phrase” OR mykeyword2

• Run the search (it’s ok if there aren’t any results at the moment) and right-click “RSS feed for this query” and copy the link location.

• Now go to FeedMyInbox, paste the feed, and enter your real email address (the one you actually have time to read).

Viola. Now you’ll receive an email each time ExpertTweet has a request that matches your keywords.

How to Filter HARO & PitchRate

Since these are email-based services, you’ll need a way to get the email going somewhere you can generate an RSS feed. For that, we’re going to use my buddy Josh Baer’s service, OtherInbox.

• Sign up for an OtherInbox account. OIB gives you an infinite email address like *@[username].oib.com which you use to create custom emails for each site you want to automatically filter into their own folders on OIB.  It’s a great for giving out emails to e-commerce vendors, but it’s also handy for managing your HARO and PitchRate emails because every OIB folder can be exported into an RSS feed.  For example, I subscribe to HARO with haro@[myusername].oib.com and PitchRate with pitchrate@[myusername].oib.com.
• Login to OIB, navigate to your HARO or PitchRate folder.  If you’re using Firefox, click the RSS icon in your browser’s Location bar. Choose the one that says “Inbox messages for HARO” which should cause the RSS feed to appear in your browser. Once the feed loads in Firefox, copy that URL.
  
• Now you have the RSS feed for all the HARO content, but you need a way to filter the messages so you only see the emails that mention your keywords. This is where a service called FeedRinse comes in. Create a FeedRinse account and paste the HARO RSS feed into Feedrinse.  Then setup the keywords that you want to filter your HARO messages by. Feedrinse will generate you a new RSS feed that only contains the HARO messages that matched your keywords.  Copy that RSS feed’s URL.
• You’re almost there…  Now visit FeedMyInbox, paste the RSS feed URL from Feedrinse, and you’re all set. Now you should only see HARO and Pitchrate messages that match your keywords.

Alternatively, you can paste your filtered RSS feeds into BuzzStream and manage them using our workflow tools. As new results appear, you will see them in your monitoring results alongside regular stories, blog posts, comments, and other press opportunities. From there, you can manage ExpertTweet, HARO, and PitchRate requests like any other engagement opportunities– assign them to other users, add notes, and use the BuzzMarker to convert opportunities into contacts and start tracking your outreach.

I realize I breezed over using Feedrinse pretty quickly, so if you want more info about that step, please post a comment and I’ll put together a screencast if there’s interest.

PS: Not familiar with BuzzStream?  BuzzStream is a social media monitoring service that enables you to find press coverage and social media conversations, research and convert them into influencer contacts in one click (automatically capturing contact information and making them searchable by web metrics), and then track your relationships via email and Twitter.  Join our private beta here.

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.

I just spoke to the Austin Web Analytics Wednesday on the topic of PR, Social Media, and SEO measurement. Great group with really thoughtful questions and good conversations. I discussed my view of Inbound Marketing as a funnel: Listening > Engagement > Relationship > Coverage > Links > Search Rankings > Traffic > Leads > Sales. Would love to hear feedback. What did I miss?

A tweet out of SMX Advanced last week got my attention:

posted by Meaghan Olson (@MissDeFacto) from TotalAttorneys.com

We’ve known since March of 2008 that Google factors page load time into the Adwords quality score, which helps determine ad rankings. But there’s been no discussion of whether speed matters for organic rankings, except that many suspect it might.  Even SEOMoz’s factors list deems server response time as “Moderately Important,” and then only from the perspective of being crawler-friendly.

So what to make of this hint dropped over lunch at SMX? As I see it, an algorithm change is in the works, and sites with merely a passable page load times can expect to lose rankings to their speedier competitors shortly.  Don’t be evil; be fast as hell.

Google Giveth

Perhaps it was coincidence, but the very next day, Google released a speed tool for developers built on Firebug. The comments on TechCrunch were pretty much along the lines of this one from Patrick, “Yeah, this is exactly like YSlow. Google has to build all of their tools themselves though to prove how smart they are.”

Maybe.  But why would Google release an app that’s almost identical to Yslow? Perhaps because they need one of their own.  Why?  Because in a few months, Matt Cutts will be holding a microphone telling anxious Webmasters the algorithm now factors in page load time, so they need to focus on optimizing page loads.  Directing people to Yahoo would be a bit busch league, so that’s why Google needs a tool of their own.  To me, it’s totally Google’s style: let’s not be evil by changing the algorithm without giving Webmasters tools to test page load speeds.  So viola, Google Page Speed.

How Big a Factor?

My guess is we’ll see page load speed as a factor impact long-tail SERPs where trusted sites are offering relatively similar information. For example if you search “real estate casis elementary” on Google, you get a cluster of sites like Yahoo Real Estate, Trulia, and Zillow who take feeds from Education.com or Greatschools.net (who also rank) with similar (but not duplicate) content. Which one is best to show– the page from the more-trusted site or the page that loads faster? Increasingly, I think the answer will be “the fast one.”

What to Measure: HTML Serve Time, Page Serve Time, Page Render Time?

If this is all true, I think it’s worth stopping to consider what exactly is Google measuring? The time it takes my server to spit back HTML? The time to retrieve all the Javascript, CSS, and images for a page? Or the time it takes the browser to render everything?

Meaghan told me that the Google engineer focused mainly on page serve time, but said client-side “matters because it annoys users.” So I suspect Google is working hard to measure total client-side page render time, and coincidentally that’s what Page Speed measures.

Also, if you reel back the tape to Matt Cutts’ keynote at Pubcon in Austin, we heard him say, “The team there only thinks about speed. They want to get the results back to users as quick as humanly possible.” Now I realize Matt was speaking about how fast Google returns its own results to users, but if you pay close attention, he was talking about how Google tries to improve client render time. If improving client render times is good for Google users on google.com, then you can bet they believe the same is true elsewhere.

Upshot: Panic!

Just kidding.  If you run a site with highly unique content (e.g. a blog), diverse competition, and solid current rankings, I’d expect to see less impact on you. But if you’re responsible for a site with similar content to competitors (e.g. real estate listings sites) and the competition is clued into the standard SEO tricks, then I won’t be surprised to see faster sites outrank slower, higher authority sites in some cases.

How exactly will Google measure?  In the short term, they’ll probably measure the time it takes your server to spit back HTML.  But in the long term, I expect it will be total browser render time.

I’d love to hear what others think about this situation. Any guesses what happens if you have long, text-heavy pages? Theoretically, they’ll have poor page load times if measured purely by HTML serve time.  Will Google adjust your page load time time for the amount of content you’re serving up? If not, won’t that effectively penalize long, text-rich pages? How well can Google measure the render speed of pages served by JS-AJAX heavy frameworks like Wicket?  How can this be gamed– are there scripting tactics to hide object loads and make pages appear to have less cruft than they really do?

I ran across this post from a few weeks back by Drew Kerr talking about how AllThingsD writer Peter Kafka Tweeted out that he’d hit the breaking point with PR spam.

“Message to clients of ‘on demand’ spam PR firm Vocus PR.  Please stop using them. I’m setting up a filter to delete all their pitches.” — Peter Kafka

Drew then writes, “Let me save you a lot of money and aggrevation: if you want to ‘engage,’ first get an RSS reader like FeedDemon and actually read the journalists and bloggers you are contemplating.“

My eyes filled with tears of joy at that.  Yes, yes, yes!  The problem is the tools.  Vocus is a spam-enabler because it invites PR people to build a giant list of reporters and blast the same pitch to all of them.  PR people aren’t bad people, they just have bad tools.

Drew’s suggestion that you subscribe to the RSS feeds of journalists on your media list is spot on.  I’ll take that one further and say that you should build your media list based on social media monitoring.   There are perfectly good free tools to do this, which I’ve covered in a previous post.

The Vocus process looks like this: SEARCH DATABASE -> PITCH
What I’m suggesting works like this: LISTEN > RESEARCH > ENGAGE > PITCH

Instead of searching for reporters, you start by LISTENING to what people are writing.  All it takes is setting up the right searches in Google Alerts or Social Mention.  Monitor for mentions of competitors, obvious keywords, and a few non-obvious phrases or jargon that pinpoint people who know your space.  Once you find someone, then and only then should they be added to your media list.  And ideally, you should follow them on Twitter, subscribe to their blog, friend them on FriendFeed, and generally try to get as much information as you can about them.  As a side benefit, this technique will surface mid-tail influencers that may be invisible to Vocus, and enable you to get to them before they’re bombarded with pitches.

BuzzStream will soon be unveiling our PR & Social Media product to connect the dots between identifying a journalist (or other influencer), researching them, and managing engagement (i.e. relationship-building) efforts over time and across mediums.

If you want to stop spamming, get the right tools.