Our customers steer the ship at BuzzStream and that keeps the daily evolution of our product going. We add “newness” all the time and it is the our customer’s feedback and ideas that drive us to make BuzzStream the best fit for you! We dropped a few nice features this time around, so let’s get to it.

Custom Fields

In our last release we added Link Type and Link Partner Type fields. This offered a modicum of customization that we needed to build on. Now you can add custom fields to Link Partners, Links (for Link Management) , People and Media (for PR & Social Media). You can easily add custom fields by clicking on “Settings” and going to the “Configuration” tab. Below is a quick run through.

1. On the “Configuration” tab click “Create your first customer field…” under either Link, Link Partner, People or Media.

2. Choose a field name, field type and choices (available in either check box, drop down or text). Click “save”.

3. Your new custom field will show up in 3 places.

The Configuration tab:

The Link, Link Partner, People or Media record:

The BuzzMarker:

Import Templates

We know you’ve got contacts and link partners in all kinds of formats that you need to import. This can be laborious and time consuming process. Let us do the heavy lifting by setting up custom import templates in your account. You send us a spreadsheet and we’ll map that information to the proper fields in BuzzStream, even your new Custom Fields! Once the template is locked and loaded you can select it from the import screen and upload your info.

BuzzMarker: Contact Info Highlighting

Seconds add up to hours when pulling together contact info from the web. Our developer Tobias came up with a cool fix to ease the pain by highlighting all potential contact info on a page that you BuzzMark. A simple but smart time saver we hope you like. ATTN! Delete and reinstall your BuzzMarker to use this feature. Click here to reinstall!

Link Performance Reporting

Slice and dice your link reporting in a multitude of ways and see your reports as tables, charts or both. Need to know the number of new links a user has landed in a certain link partner type? We’ve got you covered. How about seeing the average page rank for each user’s links per partner type across a date range? Yep, we can do that to.

Need to take that data to go? You can export all that data into either PDF, Word, Excel or HTML. We’ve had a lot of requests for this and delivered the particular features you said you’d find most useful. No fluff, just actionable data. This is our first take on reporting with Social Media and PR reports on the way!  We want to know what you think and what else you’d like see from it.

That’s it for this release! We love your feedback so post your comments below or hit us up at customer-service@buzzstream.com.

We always receive great feedback from our customers and the in the last couple weeks you’ve given us some great ideas. We love it as your ideas play a huge role in the feature additions and updates we make; so please, keep them coming. A majority of our recent updates revolve around organizing, labeling, reporting and assigning. Let’s dig in

Quick Search Filters for Links & Link Partners

We love anything that makes a process faster for you. Sorting through your link relationships can be a bit tedious so we’ve added a couple Quick Search filters to ease things along. To use them just click on Filters and you’ll see Quick Search at the top of the drop down. We’ll be adding more search filters in the near future. If you have some that you’d like to see, let us know via customer-service@buzzstream.com.

Ad New Users to Projects

Small changes can equal big differences and we’re glad that this was pointed out. It’s tough for a new user to work on a project when one is not assigned. Now from the get-go, you can assign new users to a project while setting up their profile. The first time they log in they will already have projects assigned and can get cranking on projects.

Added Link Type and Link Partner Type

Categorizing your links can be a big help, especially with large campaigns. To ease the pain we added two customizable fields allowing you to add “types” to both the Link and Link Partner. Name them what you will, it’s up to you. These “types” will show up in Buzzmarker, link partner records, links and filters. The big plus is once we add reporting (coming in a couple weeks!) you will be able to break down link building performance by type (blog/media mention, social bookmark, guest post, affiliate link, general directory, blog comment, etc.).

Here’s how you do it:

1. Click on “Settings”

2. Click on “Configuration” tab

3. Click on “New Link Partner Type” or “New Link Type” (not shown)

4. Enter in link “Type” and click Save

Filter Memory

You’ve gone through all the trouble to set up a bunch of filters and they go up in smoke once you have logged out or leave a page. Yes, very annoying, so we fixed it. If you leave a page or happen to log out you can return with all your filters in place. An added bonus is you can now see what your current filter is with out jumping into your filter preferences.

Backlink Checker Update with Email Reporting
It’s been easy to get the current state of your link but the reporting has been a bit light. You told us you needed help identifying changes to the actual links and wanted those changes sent to your inbox. We are happy to meet the need. We’ve beefed up the Backlink Checker and added some simple email reports that give you an accurate snap shot of any crucial changes to your links.

Backlink Checker

• Changes to the page it is linking
• Changes to nofolllow/dofollow status
• Changes to anchor text
• Changes to the number of outbound links on the pages

Email Reporting

• New links that were added since the last check, including critical info you need to evaluate it (PageRank, #of links on the page, presence of “flagged words,” whether it’s a dofollow or nofollow link)
• Links that you’d previously received that have changed (also includes the details of what changed)
• Links that have been removed since you last ran a backlink check

Upcoming Features

Your feedback keeps us going so please don’t hesitate to comment below or send suggestions straight to customer-service@buzzstream.com. Thanks for helping us make BuzzStream into the tool that you need it be. Check out new updates and features we’ll be adding in the coming weeks.

• Easier Import Utility: Making it a breeze to import your own links
• Custom Fields
• Reporting
• Contact Info Highlighting: When the Buzzmarker finds contact info, we’ll highlight the place on the web page where we found it.

It’s about that time. Time to lay out what we’ve been up to since our last post. It’s been a while; we know it and it’s no OK with us. Why the blackout? A ton of new customers, continued product enhancements and infrastructure upgrades have had everyone juggling fire. We don’t like burns so unfortunately the blog has taken a back seat. Now that the acrobatics are over, we’ve got a bunch to share. Let’s get to it.

Speed of the Link Buzzmarker

If you’re using BuzzStream for Link Management, you’ll see huge improvements in the time it takes for the Link Buzzmarker to scan the page.  This will make your link research and link documentation efforts much more efficient.  I was testing sites last night that had been taking 10-15 seconds to load and they’re now loading in 2 to 3 seconds.  We’ll make similar improvements to the Media Buzzmarker in a future release.  This will be a continuous process…the end goal is to get it to where there’s virtually no wait time when you click the Buzzmarker.

Tag Management

One of our most frequent requests from people who have been using the product for a long time is that tags quickly become unmanageable once you have a lot of contacts or a lot of people using the product.  We’ve taken the first step to addressing this by adding tag management capabilities.  Now you can select multiple contacts and add, edit or delete contacts for those contacts.  So suppose one person was using the tag “social media” and another person was using “social_media,” you can now fix this by filtering on the tag you want to remove, selecting all the contacts, removing the one tag and adding the other.

Enhancements to Tasks

We continue to extend our Task Management capabilities so that you can better track and manage your influencer outreach efforts and your link management activities.   Here’s a list of the things we added since our last Release blog post:

• The ability to add a task while Buzzmarking a contact
• 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.

Bulk Operations

In addition to Tag Management, we’ve added  a number of other operations that can be conducted on multiple contacts at once.  This is particularly useful when you’re working with a large number of contacts.  Our bulk operations currently include:

• Select specific contacts to copy or move to a different project: you no longer have to move/copy all of the Link Partners that are in the current filter…now you can specifically select the ones that you want to copy or move.
• Bulk delete
• Ability to change the “assigned to” field for multiple Link Partners at once
• Ability to change “relationship stage” for multiple Link Partners at once

Improvements to Search

We implemented Lucene as our search technology, which will give us much more power for searching.  In the near-term, this means you can now search on any term in the fields we look at.  In the long-term, it’ll mean that we’ll be able to search across much larger data sets.  This will become much more important as we enhance our influencer monitoring capabilities (i.e., you’ll be able to do things like look for any of your influencers who have written about a certain topic in the last X weeks).

Improved Performance

We added a number of large customers last week and we’re optimizing to make sure that performance keeps up.  We’re addressing this both with code optimizations and by adding more hardware.  Things seem to be humming, but please let us know if you see any issues.

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:

• The Quick Search box now clears when you click “Clear Filters”
• For monitoring, the “Manage” tab is only available to Administrators
• Fixed a bug that was preventing retrieval of Twitter metrics when you’d click “Update Metrics”
• Links to external websites now open in a new tab (instead of a new window)
• Fixed a bug that was making some social profile URLs unclickable (e.g., some facebook URL formats)
• When you click outside the Projects drop-down, it now closes automatically
• When you finish an Import, the “Cancel” button now changes to “Close”
• Increased the character limit for the “About” fields on People, Media Outlets and Link Partners
• Fixed a set of user interface bugs on Internet Explorer.  These include:
  • Cursor wouldn’t turn into a pointer when you hovered over the Delete icon
  • “Link out” icons were getting cut off on some pages
  • Text in “Recently Viewed” section of the Dashboard was getting cut off

Lots of tasty goodness in our near-term roadmap as well…some of the things we’re working on:

• Reporting: our highest priority for our next major release
• Filter memory: BuzzStream will remember your filter.  So, for example, suppose you’ve filtered your list to only show contacts assigned to you.  If you go to a different page or log out, the next time you return to the list, you’ll only see those contacts (this is a first step towards Saved Filters).
• Highlighting contact info found by the Buzzmarker: When you Buzzmark a page, we’ll  highlight the section of the web page where any contact info is found.  This will reduce the time required for research.
• Complete upgrade of the Backlink Checker e-mail in the Link Management product
• More bulk operations

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.