GetSatisfaction is also a great way for you to submit your questions and bugs. If you need help with something or see something that’s not working, just submit it here and we’ll get to it. Better yet, someone from the community may be able to answer the question before we get to it. This way, we’ll all learn together … and we love that!

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As expected, some of you found some bugs, which we fixed as quickly as we could. There are still a couple of issues we’re aware of and which will take a bit longer to resolve. One of them is the +Buzz box, which we know we have to redo. Another is some funny stuff the CSS is doing, which we’ll be addressing.

We’ve also received lots of new ideas and great suggestions. We’ve documented all of them and will revisit them often as we plan out our development map. There’s some very exciting stuff we’d love to do.

But first things first: Twitter Search is now on!

We’ve been talking with the Twitter team to make sure we were complying with the correct use of their API, and we’re glad to say got the green light this afternoon!

What does this mean? In addition to mentions in blogs, you may now also track your mentions within the growing active and passionate Twitter community. Because Twitter is the most widely adopted micro-blogging and public messaging service, news often breaks there first. With its ease of use and brevity (tweets are limited to 140 characters), people run to Twitter with their good news … and their rants.

As Brian Solis, Principal of the PR agency Futureworks, describes:

“The crossroads of traditional PR and Social Media is on an inevitable path to a very public boiling point. In the realm of Social Media, conversations are king …. Twitter is one of the most powerful conversation tools among early adopters.”

The following screen shows what a persistent Twitter search in StartPR looks like. Shortly after we announced we turned Twitter Search on (bottom-most result below) this afternoon, we started seeing results for one of the topics we’re tracking, the keyword “StartPR” (the first three results below). Mentions in StartPR are listed in reverse chronology, with most recent results at the top:

The availability of Twitter Search made our own lives easier and we’d love to hear what you think.

Oh … and if you’re on Twitter, you may find us at: @StartPR, @brbreslin, @xavierb, and @alexdc. If you’re new to Twitter, please sign up and say hi!

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As the creators of a service to track mentions in social media, we track our own keywords using StartPR. This post describes how go about it …

So we log in throughout the day to see whether anyone has blogged about us. The screenshot below shows a dashboard of results for our permanent search on “startpr”. Among the mentions we found, these are the results we’ve “Favorited” (bookmarked):

This is handy because all we had to do was log in throughout the day to check on the progress of these posts, as well as to see if there were new ones. As we read the blog posts and made notes, our activity got recorded in the dashboard.

One of the posts got on Digg, and we came back often to see whether more people had dugg the post. Did someone comment on it? I also checked to see whether Brian or Xavier had assigned me any tasks related to our results today. It was very easy to do as it only required me to login. One of our friends, Fabrice Epelboin, “likened it to a mailbox for blog posts … now you can manage your PR like you do your mail!”. We like the analogy … what do you think?

We’d like to thank Bilal at StartupMeme, who blogged us first and offfered this insightful review:

The most important ingredient of the social web is conversations, StartPR lets you coordinate your teams response to bloggers in order to engage them and build solid relationships over time. In addition to engaging with bloggers and media types, the service enables you to engage with your clients and users who are arguably the most important people for you. StartPR provides features to keep track of your interactions with your clients and whether or not you have been able to satisfy them.

We’ve included a link good for 250 Beta accounts to StartPR in the comments to the post.

By the way, the post got dugg, and we’d appreciate your vote if you can spare a few seconds of your time:

We also got mentioned by KillerStartups.com, which tracks all the new media services. We know it’s a lot to ask, but we would appreciate your vote at KillerStartups as well!

Finally, we got reviewed by Kaye D. Sweetser, Ph.D., APR, who received an invite from the respected PR and social media Professor Robert French of Auburn University. In her thoughtful post, “Gathering the conversation,” Kaye shares her likes, her dislikes, and what she calls a “wouldn’t it be cool” list. We appreciate the feedback - it’s how we learn.

By the way, wouldn’t it be cool if all brands tracked their online mentions?

What are the important keywords you should be tracking? How do you track them today?

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Those who signed up will be getting invites this week. If you’d also like to take part, please sign up here http://startpr.com/public/signup and we’ll include you in our next set of invites.

What is StartPR?

StartPR helps you find, manage and respond to online mentions of what’s important to you. People are engaged in conversations with each other about your company, your brands, your products and your services … but  are you listening? StartPR is the easier, more effective, and more organized way to keep up to date and engage with bloggers and social network users.

How does it work?

StartPR is a social media analysis platform for workgroups. It includes a multi-user environment, user account management, multi-client awareness, and delegation and tracking features.

After you login, you’ll be able to track up to three topics and invite another person to your workgroup. This way, you may track your topics and share and delegate actions with someone else.

To illustrate part of the multi-user functionality, the screenshot on the right shows that Brian B. and I are tracking mentions of StartPR. As we work through the mentions and blog posts about StartPR, our activity is recorded and we can assign tasks to each other, as well as write notes to remind ourselves of what needs to be done.

There are some of the features that will help you manage the online conversation about your interests. We’ll be talking about the other features on this blog, and we look forward to your feedback and suggestions.

We truly hope you enjoy this early preview of StartPR!

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We’ve paired TechCrunch’s CrunchBase with StartPR to return the online mentions of the over 6,000 companies and 5,000 products listed. Now, you can browse through or search for the companies or services you’re interested in, and find the latest buzz about them.

Here’s how it works

When people mention a product or company online, StartPR picks it up. We then combine it with CrunchBase to create a list of popular companies with the latest posts about them. We also pull all the newest companies that are added to CrunchBase and then display all the buzz associated with each one. When you select a company or product, CrunchTrends displays information and links to the latest mentions; it graphs the number of mentions over time; and, it provides profile information about the company.

What do you think? How can we make this more useful for you?

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Whether it’s for your own company or for your clients, we know you need to stay on top of what’s being said online. You have to know about the positive mentions and about the negative ones. Did someone have a problem and is venting online? Who had a marvellous experience? Are there suggestions to improve the product or service? Has a blogger found a new use for the product, or find a flaw in the design? Are people liking or disliking your competitors’ offers?

With the advent of social media platforms and networks, the conversations about these questions have ben amplified. Since people are now expressing their positive and negative experiences online, their individual voices get heard, commented on, and passed on by many more people than ever before. In some cases, these conversations spread very quickly to thousands of people. And, if you are unaware of it, it can feel like standing in the middle of a thunderstorm without an umbrella. You will get wet, and it will take time for the storm to pass and for you to dry off.

What we noticed

Previously, we had been using various tools and alert systems to track online mentions of the brands, companies, and products we were working with. As time permitted, we would respond to certain blog posts, we would ask our team mates to address others, and sometimes we would ignore posts, deliberately or not.

The trouble was, we would miss some of the mentions. We would also lose track of the ones we responded to, over time. It was tedious to report on our blogger relations activity to our team and clients, unless we set up an Excel spreadsheet. We had no way to easily manage and delegate the conversations to our colleagues, other than shooting them an email or instant message. We also had no way of storing or exporting the mentions for later use. Did we read a mention that required no action? There was no way to record our notes for our colleagues to see.

Out of this need, we developed StartPR

We wanted to make it as simple as possible to:

• Track mentions on social networks and on over 100 million blogs worldwide;
• Track our collective blogger relations activity;
• Annotate and store the most important mentions;
• Collaborate with and coordinate responses with our colleagues;
• Create reports detailing the online mentions and our respective activity.

We’re launching very soon and we hope you’ll give our service a try and let us know what you like and don’t like about it. Just sign up at www.startpr.com and then drop me an email at alex [at] startpr [dot] com and we’ll hook you up!

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