[chrisbrogan.com]

How to Listen for Opportunities on Twitter

Posted: 25 Aug 2008 09:52 PM PDT

Twitter Search is a powerful tool for businesses, once you learn how to search, and once you better understand the terms your prospective customers might use on Twitter.

This won’t apply to every industry, but I was quite surprised with the tests that I ran, because I was able to come up with prospects for most anything I could think of searching as a potential business opportunity. Let’s go through an example, step by step, so that you can try it out for yourself.

How to Listen for Opportunities on Twitter

Go to http://search.twitter.com
Enter a search term. In my example I put in “hosting.”

hosting

Review the search to see if it found accurate or useful results. If not, try several other potential search terms.
Click the “Feed for this query” button next to the orange RSS graphic.

rss feed

Add this to your RSS reader of choice. I use Google Reader

google reader

Repeat step 4 on variations and alternate search terms until satisfied.

Once you understand this process, click the Advanced Search button to the right of the Search button. You’ll note there are all different kinds of variations on how you can narrow your search, including:

Specific words, phrases, hashtags (#gnomedex, for example).
Locations and proximities.
Time spans.
From specific users.
With happy or sad emoticons. :) :(
With links.
And more.

With a bit of noodling, you can refine your searches such that they could potentially find business. For instance, on my above example for hosting, I found several people complaining about how their site had gone down, or that they were sick of bad lag time, etc. If I were selling web hosting, I’d at least offer a hand.

There are lots of variations on the theme. Have you tried it? What were your results? Would could you do next?

By the way, the Social Media 100 has been completed. I’m going to do “How to” posts as my next series. Feel free to suggest new ones.

Note: I use Skitch to do screenshots. It’s cool.

Photo credit, apbeatty

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Mixing a Great Idea with Clever Blog Promotion

Posted: 25 Aug 2008 11:07 AM PDT

bloggerslug Todd Defren just killed some birds. In this post, Todd comes up with a really simple way for bloggers to explain to PR professionals how that blogger feels about PR pitches. It’s so simple, and yet, I bet it will be reasonably effective.

But what’s secondary and excellent about this idea is that people (like me) are going to blog about it, and we’re going to blog it with links, and we’re going to bookmark it, and stumble it, and spread the idea around.

Simple idea that’s useful to me gets TODD a bit more link and traffic love. See? There’s an idea on top of the idea right there, and that should be what you think about for your own business or organization.

Right after you bloggers do what Todd advises here.

Note: I use Skitch to do screenshots. It’s cool.

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Take the Tools and Run With Them

Posted: 25 Aug 2008 04:42 AM PDT

It dawned on me that there’s a risk of us all falling into the space of learning, writing about, and talking about the same tools. That as more people come and get passionate about how social media and social networking can be used, we may run the risk of adding more workers to the lab, and not promoting more uses of these tools out in the wild. The point of what I do here, in case it’s not completely obvious is this: I learn about things and share the information with you so that you will run off and do amazing things with the tools that have nothing to do with this space.

Does that make sense? My goal is that you pick up stuff here, and then run out and do things, and then maybe come back later and show me your great podcast about circus life (note: I had nothing to do with inspiring this podcast. I’m pointing to it as an example of a neat podcast about the circus, since disbanded).

Realtors, teachers, book sellers, bankers, farmers, whoever - the idea is that you learn some how to, figure out which tools make sense, and then you run far away from here (social media blogs) and do top shelf amazing things.

Come back often to say hi, if you’d like. I’m not shoving your learning process away. But make the CONTENT of what you build with these tools such that it focuses on your universe and the relationships and stories you want to build.

Make sense?

Photo credit, Jurvetson

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