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!

Corry Cummings is the owner and founder of Content Customs, an Internet marketing company specializing in content writing services.

About Content Customs

We conduct large scale link building for over a dozen different companies…What’s made us successful and what we think makes us stand out is that whenever we reach out to someone, we personalize it to the specific needs of each website owner, blogger, etc. Our approach with everything that we do is all about quality. We leverage our content creation skills and resources to build links.

As part of our link building efforts, we reach out to tens of thousands of websites to try to get placement in the areas we’re targeting.  Managing our activities was actually really simple when we were only contacting a few hundred sites, but when you scale this up, things can get out of hand.   It’s also very difficult to stay organized and maintain the quality that our clients and partners demand.  BuzzStream allows us to keep things organized, and to hit the scale we need. We have over 30 individuals who collaborate on link building projects at all times. This would never be possible to do efficiently without a tool like BuzzStream.

Our Workflow

For us, it’s really all about building relationships with other blogs and website owners. We have the resources to create high quality web content for a very reasonable price. That is valuable to many website owners. We want to reach out to them and see what we can do to get our content out there, which will in turn get more inbound links pointing to our sites (and our clients). We primarily use BuzzStream as our database for link opportunities and a workflow system for managing our outreach efforts.

We spend a lot of time researching sites that could potentially be link partners in the future. Our research team spends all day every day adding sites to BuzzStream. When they add a site to the database, they use Tags to categorize them.  We hold a high standard for sites that we are willing to work with. That enables us to basically just look for sites that hold those standards. Since we do such a high volume of link building, we are able to add any site (no matter what the topic) to BuzzStream because we know as long as it is a high quality site, we will have a place to contact and reach out for various opportunities.

When we’re working on a specific project, we use Filters to find the right opportunities for the client and then we move our contacts from our main database to a specific project. As we conduct outreach, we take advantage of BuzzStream’s relationship stages to manage workflow and we take a lot of notes with the note feature.

Why We Chose BuzzStream

It’s actually pretty simple for us…We’ve used a lot of different tools, and there really isn’t anything out there that compares.  BuzzStream is way ahead of the game when it comes to link management tools.  Even if there were comparable products, I doubt we would find another company that would work with us as closely as the Buzzstream team does. We have the need to scale very quickly, and BuzzStream has been flawless when it comes to working with us on that. When we have feedback and concerns about future developments of the product, our voice is heard and the feedback is actually put into work on new features.

Our Favorite BuzzStream Features

The ability to organize and track all of our contacts is absolutely huge for us. We don’t use all the bells and whistles that are offered.  The basics are key. Tracking our progress, and keeping notes on each of our contacts really is a huge time saver. BuzzStream also does a great job of pulling in the site metrics, which saves a lot of time. We have to know who we have already contacted, and who has been added to each project. We want to make sure that one of our team members is not contacting the same site that was just contacted yesterday for another project. That can get messy, and would happen consistently if we didn’t have Buzzstream.

What We’d Like Added to BuzzStream

The only way to check for live links right now is on a specific page.  If there were a way to check an entire site for our links, that would be extremely beneficial for us (and I am guessing most other BuzzStream users).  We’d want BuzzStream to  automatically find all of the live links that we have and add them to the contacts/potential link opportunities that we have added to BuzzStream. The ability to have custom statuses would also be nice. In other words, a way to change and add more relationship stages.

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 .

Lots of new BuzzStream features to talk about.  The addition we’re most excited about is the Outreach Module, which we think has the potential to significantly improve the quality and speed of your outreach efforts…if BuzzStream were an 80′s teen sitcom, then this would most certainly be our “very special holiday episode.”  Some might even say that it’s the most shocking episode of BuzzStream yet.

Now that you’re done rolling your eyes, let’s take a look at the new stuff.

New Feature: The Outreach Module

The Outreach Module gives you a way to conduct broad-based outreach, but without sacrificing personalization.  You’ve told us that the way you often conduct outreach is to create a list, select a template and then customize it for each person to make it relevant to them (based on their interests, your relationship with them, their location, etc.).  You’ve also told us that the process is time-consuming and not as effective as it could be because: a) you don’t have a quick and easy way to segment your list and apply a template to them, b) you’re bouncing between your email client and all of your sources of info for each person, and c) it can be hard to keep track of the status of the outreach efforts (e.g., who still needs to be contacted, who requires follow-up, etc.).

To address this, the Outreach Module makes it easy to segment your contacts into a list, apply a template to your contacts and then view the relationship info needed to personalize your emails without ever leaving the email. It also ties into BuzzStream’s task management and contact filtering capabilities to help you keep track of the contacts that require follow-up.

The Outreach Module is pretty simple…there are three steps to it:

1) Segment your contacts into an outreach list using BuzzStream’s filtering capabilities

2) Create an email template, which will serve as a starting point for each email you send

3) Personalize each email and send

The personalization step is where the fun begins.   For each contact in your list, BuzzStream provides you with the contact record information on the same screen as the email you’re writing to them (populated with the template).  All of the information about the contact is on the left-hand side and the email is on the right-hand side.  You can hover over any articles, links, notes, etc to see all of the info.  By putting this all in one screen, there’s no need to click back and forth searching for emails you’ve sent them in the past, blog posts they’ve written that are relevant to you, notes about them, etc.  And once you’ve personalized the email, just click “Send and go to next contact” and you’ll be taken through your list.

For a full walk-through of the Outreach Module, check out this tutorial.

Thank You!

We took a very different approach to the design of this feature and we owe a big debt of gratitude to all of the people who contributed to the “Help us design the new outreach module” post on GetSatisfaction.  This is the first time we’ve designed a feature in such a public way and I wasn’t sure how effective this approach would be.  The results completely exceeded my expectations. Not only did the feedback have a major impact on the current release, it also gave us outstanding ideas for the next version.  Special thanks to Adria Saracino, Blake Bookstaff,  Jeremy Bencken, Margaret Conway, Jeff Novak, Christine Sadler, and Jools Weller.  You guys rock!

New Feature: Improved Support for Team Discussions

Let’s say you’ve added a contact into BuzzStream and you need to ask a team member if the contact should be added to a campaign.  BuzzStream now better supports contact-specific collaboration by letting you notify people when you add a note.  Just click “notify team members” when you’re adding a note and select the people you want to notify:

They’ll receive an email notifying them that the note has been added and they can access the contact record with one click.

New Feature: Notifications for New Contacts and Overdue Tasks

We’ve added two new email notifications to help you make sure that the activities that are most important to you are getting done.  First, if a task that you assigned to a  team members is due or overdue, you’ll receive notification.  You’ll also receive notification when someone assigns a contact to you.

New Feature: Add a Task to More than One Contact

Suppose you need someone on your team to research a list of contacts to find their email addresses.  Rather than creating a task for each one, you can now associate the task with multiple contacts.  To do this in BuzzStream, I might start by sorting by “email address” to find contacts that don’t have an email address and select these contacts:

Click ‘Edit’ and select “New Task”

If you assign the task to a team member, they’ll receive one email with a link that takes them to the full list of contacts.

New Feature: Bulk Notes

Similar to bulk tasks, we’ve also added the ability to add a note to multiple contacts.  To do this, just select the contacts, click “Edit” and click “Add Note.”

The Outreach Module gives you a way to conduct broad-based outreach, but without sacrificing personalization.  It makes it easy to segment your contacts into a list, apply a template to your contacts and then view the relationship information needed to personalize your emails without ever leaving the email. It also ties into BuzzStream’s task management and contact filtering capabilities to help you keep track of the contacts that require follow-up.  The Outreach Module is available in both BuzzStream for PR and Social Media and BuzzStream for Link Management.

There are four steps to using the Outreach Module:

1. Add your outgoing mail settings in the Settings section
2. Segment your contacts into an outreach list
3. Create an email template, which will serve as a starting point for each email you send
4. Personalize each email and send

Let’s use an example to give you a better sense of how it works.  Suppose I’m working on behalf of a real estate website that’s developed a tool that shows real estate pricing trends by city.  Other sites can plug this tool into their own site to make it more engaging to their readers.  To promote this, one segment I’m going to reach out to is a group I consider “high value, low hanging fruit.”   This group includes local real estate bloggers who:

• we’ve rated as high influence
• have linked to us or written about us in the past, and
• we’ve had conversations with them

The outreach approach will be to:

• send an initial email to everyone in the list
• follow up three days later with anyone who hasn’t responded.

Here are the steps…

Step 1: Add your mail server into the Settings section

BuzzStream sends mail through your mail server (i.e., the same way that you connect to a smartphone), so you first need to enter your outgoing mail server settings..  This can only be done by BuzzStream administrators or someone who is assigned a role that’s been given access to this permission.  To enter your settings, just click on the ‘Settings’ link in the top right-hand corner of the application and go to the ‘Mail Server’ tab.  To see the typical email settings for common cloud-based email services (like Gmail), check out the FAQ.

Step 2: Segment your contacts into lists

To create my first segment, I’ll click on ‘Filters’ and select all contacts with the tag “Real Estate”, with an overall rating of ‘High’ or ‘Very High’, Link Status of ‘Yes’, and a Communication History of ‘Any’.

I’ll then click the ‘Save Filter’ link and name it “Low Hanging Fruit – not started”

I’ll also save a filter for the follow-up email…i.e. “show me everyone in this original group whose contact was modified three days ago.”

Step 3: Select the contacts and apply an email template to the segment

I’ll select the contacts that I want to include in this outreach effort and then I’ll click “Email Outreach (click on the image to enlarge).

In this case, I need to create a new template (click on the image to enlarge).

Note that I can use merge fields for some basic personalization (e.g., first name, city, etc.).  You can use your custom fields as merge fields as well.

Once I’ve completed the template, I’ll click “Save and Continue to start personalizing my emails.

Step 4: Personalize emails and send them

Here’s where the fun begins.   For each contact in your list, BuzzStream provides you with the contact record information on the same screen as the email you’ll send them (populated with the template).

All of the information about the contact is on the left-hand side and the email is on the right-hand side.  You can hover over any articles, links, notes, etc to see all of the info.  By putting this all in one screen, there’s no need to click back and forth searching for emails you’ve sent them in the past, blog posts they’ve written that are relevant to you, notes about them, etc.

Once you’ve personalized the email, just click “Send and go to next contact” and you’ll be taken through your list.

Jeremy Porter has a post on Journalistics today about influence scoring and the challenges associated with it.  Jeremy’s post does a nice job of pointing out some of the challenges with trying to use influence scores like Klout, PageRank, etc..  Most notably, when looked at them by themselves, they’re not particularly useful because, unlike a search engine that includes both relevance and influence/trust in its algorithm, there’s no contextual relevance.  So Justin Bieber may have a Klout score of 95, but if I’m selling fly fishing equipment,  the guy with a klout score of 20 who only writes about fly fishing and who is very active in a number of fly fishing community sites is much more important to me.

I don’t think this problem is unique to klout…this is a very difficult problem to solve.  Frankly though, given the changed face of media, I’m not convinced it’s even a good idea to rely on fine-grained scores like this at all.  Knowing that one influencer has a score of 64 while another has a score of 78 might be useful in a world where a relatively small set of traditional outlets have significant reach (and you’re going to be extremely high touch with a small number of outlets), but when you have a completely fragmented landscape, you just don’t need to be this fine-grained.  It’s a bit of a dirty word, but frankly in a world where everyone is an influencer and where links and social mentions drive search performance, the biggest issue is scale – like it or not, you have to build a lot of relationships in order to move the needle for the business and spammy approaches just don’t work.  So the challenge is this – how do I build REAL relationships with LOTS of people without hiring an army of people to do it?  When you rely on these fine-grained scores, inevitably you get caught in the discussion of  “is this person really more influential than this person in my niche.”  It’s a total time suck and it really shouldn’t impact how you engage.

Given that you need to engage with a lot of people in order to have an impact, I think you’re better off thinking in terms of broad groupings – i.e., a person’s level of influence is either high, medium, or low.  Then you can focus your efforts on the thing that really matters – developing the processes and tools that will allow you to engage with more people (in a real, relationship-oriented manner).  Specifically, you need to reduce the time required to: 1) find out when influencers are talking about the topics you care about (so you can engage), 2) keep track of the conversations you’re having with influencers (so your conversations are more meaningful and relevant), and 3) engage with more people in less time without sacrificing personalization and relevance.

So, given this, you’re still left with the challenge of developing a methodology for classifying people into the “high/medium/low” influence categories as a starting point.   I think the details for this are probably best covered in another post, but at a high-level I think there are three things you look at:

• Are they relevant?  (using tools like listorious, alltop, google searches, monitoring, etc)
• What percentile do they fall into for some of the key engagement and reach metrics? (e.g., average comments, uniques, retweets)
• Who’s in their network (i.e., do they have relationships with some of the known influencers in the space)?

All of this info is available, the key is developing a way to quickly aggregate it and leverage it to classify people.  I’ll cover this in a follow-up post.

We’ve made a major improvement to our date filtering which you’ll find particularly valuable for activities that you conduct on a regular basis. So let’s say your outreach process is to send an initial email and then send a follow up email three days later. Or maybe you’re advertising on other sites and at the start of each week you want to see all payments that are coming due. You can now find these contacts easily using relative date filters. Here’s a screenshot:

Using our examples, if you want to find the contacts that you contacted three days ago, just filter on “Contact Modified exactly 3 days ago.” Or to find payments that are due this week, just filter on “Purchases expiring this week.”

This is particularly useful for activities that you do on a regular basis…just create your filter and then save it so you can access it with a single click:

Hope you enjoy it! Lots more on the way!

Has something seemed just a bit different about BuzzStream lately?  Have you found yourself trying to figure out if it’s a new hairdo, botox or something even more drastic?  Well, neither a trip to the salon nor surgeon is responsible for these “enhancements.”  Just hard work from our engineers, who’ve been on a tear lately with new feature development.  Here’s an overview of these features, as well as some info about a major new update that’s in the works.

Continuous Metrics Collection and more

One of the things that customers consistently rank among their favorite thing about BuzzStream is the ability to build and sort their lists by so many different metrics.  We’ve improved this in four ways:

Automated metrics collection

BuzzStream now automatically collects metrics for a contact on a regular basis.  Also, when you import contacts, the metrics are collected as part of the import.  Metrics that are updated include Google PageRank, SEOmoz’ mozRank, monthly unique visitors (from Compete), number of inbound links, and number of juice passing links.

Numeric custom fields

Is there a metric that you want to keep track of, but that’s not captured by BuzzStream?  To help with this, we’ve added the ability to create numeric custom fields.  So now if there’s a metric that you absolutely need to track, just create a custom field for it.

To create a numeric custom field, click on “Settings” and go to the “Custom Fields” tab.  Select the type of custom field you want to create and in the “Type” section, select Number.

Editable metrics

Sometimes the actual metrics for a contact don’t accurately reflect their actual influence.  To help with this, you can now edit the values for these metrics.

Collection of additional SEO metrics

We’re expanding the metrics we’re collecting from our friends at SEOmoz to include Page Authority and Domain Authority.  These are great comparative metrics for getting a sense of the overall SEO value of a website and of a specific page (note: we’re not yet collecting Page Authority for every link or article added to BuzzStream, but we are capturing it for the home page).

Relationship Stage for People and Media Outlets

Customers using BuzzStream for PR and Social Media now have an optional field available to them called “Relationship Stage.” To activate or deactivate this field, go to “Settings,” click the “Custom Fields” tab and click the Edit icon next to the field.

In addition to disabling/enabling Relationship Stage, you can also edit the stages and change the order.

Scheduled Backlink Checking

If you’re a BuzzStream for Link Management customer, no doubt you’ve used the backlink checker to keep track of links from your partners and to find new link opportunities.  Now you can set up BuzzStream to run these checks for you automatically on a bi-weekly basis.  To set up weekly checks, start by clicking on “Settings” (top right-hand corner of BuzzStream).  If you’re using Projects, click on the Projects tab and select the Project that you’d like to check on a scheduled basis.  if you’re not using projects, click on the Websites tab. Look for the section labeled “Backlink Checker.”

When scheduled checks are enabled, you’ll receive a bi-weekly email that lists all the changes that have happened since your last check.

One suggestion for those of you setting up scheduled checks.  You can still run ad hoc backlink checks from the Links tab.  This gives you flexibility, but since backlink checks only show you links that have changed since the last check, you might not want everyone in your account running them.  Given this, we’d suggest that you limit people’s access to the backlink checker through “Roles,” which we’re about to walk through.

Roles and User Management

In order to support our customers who operate in a large team environment, we’ve made our support for roles more granular, flexible and manageable.  Roles allow you to restrict visibility and access to specific parts of the application.  So, for example, you might create one role called “Intern” that only has viewing access to contacts and another role called “Account Manager” that can access all parts of the application and can view, modify, add and delete contacts.

To add a role, go to “Settings” and select the “Roles” tab.  To create a new role, click “Add Role.”  Select the activities that this role can conduct and the information that they can access.

Once you’ve defined your roles, the next step is to assign the appropriate team members to them.  To do this, just click on the Users tab and select the appropriate people.  You’ll find the “Role” dropdown near the top of the screen.

Setting Values for Custom Fields at the Project Level

Until now, the value you set for a custom field was associated with all projects.  For example, if you had a contact in three projects and you set the value for a custom field called “Industry” to “Automotive,” that would be the value for this contact across all three projects. That works for a field like “Industry,” but it doesn’t work when the value might be different for each project (e.g., “Relevance Rating”). Now, when you create a custom field, you have the option to make it “project specific.”

Other Features and Bug Fixes

• Custom fields are now sortable in the contacts list
• You can now sort on “last communication date”
• You can now show tags for contacts in the list view
• BuzzBox improvements – now handles forwards from the Sent Items folder and handles emails sent to multiple contacts in your account
• PageRank in the backlink checker – PageRank is automatically checked when the backlink checker runs. If it changes, you’ll be notified in the summary email
• Fixed a performance issue that was making it difficult to add tags to a contact record
• When moving or copying a Person to another project, all associated Media Outlets are copied as well.
• Added “bi-annual” as an option to the “Term” field in “Purchases.”
• When copying Link Partners to another project, you can now change their Relationship Stage and who they’re assigned to
• Fixed a performance issue when deleting Media Outlets in “All Contacts” view
• Numerous fixes to the Buzzmarker to make contact information discovery more effective and to make it faster

Added the “Add from Tags” cloud to the Media Outlet section of the Buzzmarker

What’s Coming Next

Sticking with the plastic surgery theme, we’ll be implementing some nips and tucks over the next few weeks.  Then in mid-November we have a HUGE release coming.  I’m as excited about the November release as anything we’ve done since our company launch.  I feel like we’ve been laying the foundation over the last two years and this is the release where all the pieces come together.  We’ve been soliciting feedback over the last few months and the response has been tremendous, but I’m still looking for more input.  If you’re a customer or if you’re on our email list, you’ll likely receive an email from me sometime this week.  You can also reach me directly if you’d like to be involved with the upcoming release.

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.