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!

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.

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.

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?

“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.

• Cubit Planning – Environmental impact reports at the click of a button
• Famigo – Mobile games that bring the family together
• Homstie – Person-to-person marketplace for storage space
• Hourville – A marketplace for services by the hour
• PetzMD – Website for Pet Health, from A to Z

BuzzStream is looking forward to helping the companies with SEO and PR strategy through my relationship as a Mentor.  We’ll be using the BuzzStream app to build and manage relationships with bloggers and operationalize on-going link building campaigns.  As AskShane points out (and we agree)– the most valuable skill for building a successful online business is link building.

We’re really excited about the opportunity to help every CapitalFactory company become wildly successful.

• On Friday, March 13 5:30pm at Fogo de Chao, Austin Technology Showcase
• On Monday, March 16 at 3:30pm at SXSWi, BuzzStream co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, is speaking on a panel entitled Building a Web Business After Hours which was the brainchild of our good friend Aruni.

From Eric Ward,who Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land described as “THE authority on links”…

From Robert Scoble…

and from Virginia Nussey at Bruce Clay, Inc and Kate Morris at New Edge Media

Virginia also wrote a post on the Bruce Clay blog titled, “BuzzStream – Link Building at its Best.”

To get this kind of an initial response from people who are as highly thought of is very gratifying.  These are people that we have a ton of respect for and who we’ve learned a lot from.  If we can build a product that they’re excited about, we think we’ll be in very good shape.  But there’s still a lot of work to do, so we’ll enjoy it for a day and then get back to work tomorrow.

Kate’’s tweet alluded to the fact that we’ve got a number of additional capabilities coming in short order in the product.  I’ll follow-up later this week with more information about our plans.

If you’re interested in joining the private beta, you can request an invite from our website.  If you’ve already requested one and you haven’t received an invite code yet, please bear with us…we received many more requests than we expected. You should get it soon.

One last thing.  If you’re in Austin for PubCon, don’t forget to stop by the BuzzStream party at Molotov.