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

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 .

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.

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.