Buzzstream: A contact manager for PR people (and bloggers?)

Buzzstream is a new sort of “social media” customer relationship system going into private testing today. It’s designed for public relations employees, so they can see who is talking about their clients online. You can do things like BCC emails to people, and have the BCC’d copy appear next to a contact’s name in Buzzstream’s web application. You can do the same thing for tweets on Twitter. Because this is public relations, the software is focused around letting you see how important the person you’re talking to is, so you can see details like how many Twitter followers a person has, or how high their publication’s rank is on web site-ranking service Technorati.

The way founder Paul May explains it to me, it’s not just about figuring out which reporter or well-followed Twitter user a PR person should talk to for stories, but what you should talk to them about. A bookmarklet lets you pair specific web pages, like relevant blog posts, to a contact’s account in your system. So when you’re getting in touch with the person about a story or whatnot, you can easily see what they have to say — and know what to talk to them about. Advanced features, like measurements of your top contacts, help set this apart from other web-based contact managers like Highrise and Saleforce. For May, the biggest competitors are expensive public relations CRMs used in many large PR agencies.

Buzzstream actually look like it could be sort of useful for me as a blogger. Turns out, us bloggers also like to keep track of what we say about each other, how influential we each are (or aren’t), as well as our ongoing email communications with each other. This could be an easy way to do all that.

Here’s a company video with more:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWYlykQa3CE&hl=en&fs=1&]

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