Real Time Conversation Monitter-ing and Spy-ing

Josh — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:03:19 +0000

Throughout the election, Twitter has been getting some pub on CNN and other news outlets. If you Twitter, you’ve seen the election based features that have been promoted on the site in recent months. This inspired me to post about following conversations to a sourcing/recruiting end.

One big challenge we have as sourcers is that we’re not generally conversant in the lingo of the people we seek. Even if we have experience sourcing talented people in a certain industry we’re still not doing the work that they do. In other words, we’re not exactly speaking the language they speak. We may know a few words, or phrases, but we don’t have context, jargon, acronyms, and syntax down pat like the prospects we seek.

Here’s a thought at how to peek into real conversations happening that may allow you to both learn the professional language of the people you seek, and find some of those people to boot.

First off is a little Google app called Spy. This app was created by a colleague of mine at Best Buy, Ben Hedrington. Ben’s a smart guy, you should follow him on twitter @benhedrington. Spy tracks content posted via Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Google Reader, Yahoo News, and Blogs (via friendfeed). In the snapshot below I entered ‘SQL’ as my keyword, and set it to look at the last 30 minutes.

Click Image to see Spy in Action

As I’m writing this its scrolling through all posts with SQL in it. I’m learning about journals, conferences, individuals, and other SQL related stuff. Oh, and I’m learning about the people that post too. A real nice way to quickly find and connect with people in an industry.

Another interesting way to use Spy is to project it on the wall during a conference or any large meeting. Assuming you have Twitter savvy people in the room and they all use a standard ‘hashtag‘ in their tweets about the meeting, you can watch the collective consciousness of the room (or anyone using the key term) displayed on the wall.

The second conversation watcher is called Monitter. I just learned of Monitter the other day from Thomas Knoll, community manager for Seesmic. Monitter allows you to watch three different keywords and their ’stream’ from Twitter, again, relatively real-time. One really cool feature of Monitter is focusing on location. The picture below shows three streams following ‘Oracle’, ‘DB2′, and ‘SQL’ within 40 miles of Reston.

Click Image to enlarge

This takes the conversation watching idea to a new level. Notice RSS is enabled here as well.

What tools are you using to understand your target industry better?

find+attract » spy

Real Time Conversation Monitter-ing and Spy-ing