GroupHigh, the online tool helping public relations professionals streamline their blogger research and outreach, has just added a Bookmarklet to their service to make your individual research easier and instantly integrate your best  finds with their own databases. If you haven’t heard of them yet, what GroupHigh does is allow PR professionals to search through a filtered blog database listing the 1 million most active blogs in the world, and save tons of time on blogger research that would otherwise be done manually.

What the new GrouHigh bookmarklet does is allow you to combine the use of their blogger outreach platform with your own individual research. If you stumble across a great blog not listed in their database, you can use the bookmarking feature to add it to your existing lists of blogs saved in your GroupHigh account.

GroupHigh will automatically do all the research they normally do for the blogs in their database, providing you with relevant details on blog activity and reach (traffic, pagerank, comment activity, social followers and fans, etc), as well as contact details.

The Bookmarklet works on all browsers, according to GroupHigh  and installing it is extremely easy – drag and drop it on your favorite browser. Using it is even easier: saving a blog requires only a few mouse clicks – first click the bookmarklet, then select the list you want it saved to, and finally click the Save & Close button. For a quick view on how the new bookmarklet works, watch this video:

The purpose of pitching a story is to get coverage for it. That means that if someone offers to write about the topic you’ve proposed and asks for the product you mentioned or simply for more info, you need to reply to their emails. Not keeping track of who you’ve pitched to is a bad idea in such a case. Especially if instead of following up, you resend the same pitch and fail to reply to the second inquiry.

If you don’t know how to keep track, here’s a simple idea: get a list of names and emails of people to contact. As you send your message to them, mark them in a different color. If they reply and need more info, use a third color. It’s easy and a bit playful. And if you’re good at mixing colors, it looks good too.

Following up is a must. For both those who have shown interest and for those who’ve not replied. Those interested will actually publish after you give them what they need to do so and a friendly reminder with some interesting details might help others decide to publish your story in the end.

Why is this such an important matter? As it happens, lots of pitches are released in the wild – as a recent comment by Karen Swim also shows – and bloggers’ emails are never replied to. For example, yours truly received an email asking her to review a business book. The book seemed interesting enough, so I replied, asking for a copy. Of course I never got one. Judging by the semi-standard message, I wasn’t the only one who received that email. And  I can bet I wasn’t the only one not to get a proper reply. Which translates into missed opportunities.

Pitching is not always a single-action task. Sometimes you need to follow up, provide more information, be able to answer additional questions. In all honesty, most times it’s not as easy as just sending out an email. If you’re not going to seize all opportunities and focus on getting as much coverage as possible, don’t do it in the first place. You’re not only missing out on something really good, you’re also making sure you get yourself and your client one of those nasty, negative  images.

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