There was a time when building links anywhere and by any means—via social profiles, page footers, directories, anything you could get your hands on—was an effective linking strategy. This is no longer the case. Google’s modern-day algorithm eschews linking schemes, low quality content and links they see as irrelevant or untrustworthy.

Now, link building looks a lot like public relations (PR). It includes identifying key sites and contacts and then developing relationships. This new relationship building is being conducted (mostly) online, via social networks, email and blogs.

That’s why Raven has created a new Contact Relationship Manager (CRM) for SEO and social media marketing. It helps marketers build and manage better relationships online. The CRM is tightly integrated into our platform, and it greatly complements our existing link building and social management tools.

CRM features

The CRM is important to Raven. A large part of the future of Internet marketing is relationship building, and the new CRM is designed to help you do just that. It introduces a entirely new way to manage contacts inside Raven, including tight Twitter integration, message templates, contact-related task management and lead management from services such as AWeber and Wufoo.

Here are the highlights:

Centralized management of contacts

You can access the CRM from the Raven navigation bar. The menu can take you to the main CRM page, the Contact Tasks page or the New Contact page.

The main CRM page provides a summary of your tasks (overdue tasks, social tasks and total number of tasks) and the number of new leads for you to review. It also has a contacts table that you can quickly search or filter.

Contact records

Click on the name of any contact you have added to the CRM. When you view a contact record, the first thing you’ll see is a summary view. This view includes the Contact Type and Contact Status (which can be quickly customized and changed), related task, contact details (email, Twitter account, etc…) and any recent notes left by you or a team member about the contact.

Contact records have additional tabs and functionality, which include Task, Messages, Twitter, Links and Notes.

Contact related tasks

Tasks related to the contact record can be accessed on the initial summary page or by clicking on the Tasks tab.

You can create new tasks for the contact by clicking on the Add Task button.

After you click on the button, a New Task modal window will appear. The task automatically will be associated with the contact record and the website you’re currently managing.

Each task can be assigned a Contact Method and Due Date. If you assign a Due Date, there’s an additional option to make the task recurring.

If you choose a Twitter username for the Contact Method, Raven will treat the task as a Social Task. In Raven, social tasks are smart tasks. For example, if you reply to a contact’s tweet or mention their username in a tweet (using Raven’s Twitter tools), the task will automatically be marked as complete. This is one of my favorite features of the new CRM.

Message templates

The Messages tab keeps track of any message you send to the contact. You can create new messages for the contact by clicking on the New Message button.

After you click on the button, a New Message modal window will appear. Messages support customizable message templates. You can create a new message template or choose from one you’ve already created.

Once your message is ready, you can click on the Send Message button. Otherwise, you can click on Save as Draft to work on it later or Cancel to discard the message.

Messages that have been sent are saved on the Messages tab for reference. Messages that are in draft mode can be edited and then sent when they’re ready.

Integrated Twitter feed

The Twitter tab displays a summary of the contact’s Twitter profile and provides fully functional Twitter management tools for interacting with their Twitter feed inside of the CRM. The combination of social tasks and Twitter functionality located in one place—the contact record—makes it easy and efficient to build relationships online.

When you have a social task connected to a Twitter account, the task includes a link to the contact’s Twitter tab.

Clicking on the Twitter link will take you to the contact’s Twitter tab, enabling you to view their profile and latest tweets, and to easily reply or mention them in a tweet.

After you post the tweet, Raven will automatically mark the task as complete.

Related links

The Links tab displays any link records that are associated with the contact. If a link association exists, you can click to view the details of it in the Link Manager. If a link association doesn’t exist or you’re wanting to add a new link record, click on the New Link button.

Team notes

The Notes tab allows anyone with access to the contact record to leave comments about the contact. The three most recent notes are displayed on the Summary tab, and notes can be created on the Summary tab or the Notes tab.

Lead management

Since lead management is a crucial part of link prospecting and social media outreach, we’ve included a Leads tool that can import leads captured with Wufoo, AWeber and Campaign Monitor. The Leads tool allows you to authenticate with any of those services from within Raven, pick the lists you want to import and add relevant contacts to the CRM.

Search all and filter sets

With the new CRM we’re introducing functionality to Raven that affects how you view data in tables. We’re calling it search all and filter sets. This functionality gradually will be adopted into all of the tables on the platform.

The first option for searching tables—search all—enables you to do a quick search for all of the data in the table.

The second option—filter sets—enables you to do fine-grain filtering of the table data. You can filter the data based on multiple criteria.

When you use filter sets, you can also save them, much like a saved search.

You can then quickly access them from the table’s gear icon.

Tight integration with Raven

In the coming weeks we will be launching a completely redesigned link record page. There will be a Contacts tab that will take full advantage of the new CRM. This is a mockup of what the page will look like, minus multiple Carlos Santanas.

More features coming soon

This is just the beginning for Raven’s CRM. We are already working on several enhancements that will be available very soon. They include more importing options and additional functionality that didn’t make it into this release.

We want your feedback on how we can make Raven’s new CRM even better. Please email support@raventools.com with your questions, comments and suggestions.

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