ResearchGoddess

These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I recently wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

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Spotlight: Ken Burbary
Title: Director of Social Media
Employer: Ernst & Young
Who paid it forward: Jennifer Leggio

What Jennifer had to say about Ken: “Ken is a stellar blogger, though he still flies slightly under the radar and he shouldn’t. He is a master in the practical application of social media and is also a growing thought leader, as evidenced by his blog posts and tweets. He’s definitely a rising star.”

Ken works at Ernst & Young and  heads up social media practice  as their Director of Social Media. They provide advisory services to brands globally in a variety of areas. He helps his clients better understand the digital space and use web analytics to better strategize. He was originally approached by Ernst & Young recruiters about this position via LinkedIn.

Ken attended college at Central Michigan University where he studied Psychology. He ended up spending more time in the computer lab where he taught himself programming and started doing this as a freelancer. This ’sidetrack’ turned into twelve years of working with agencies doing ditigal marketing and advertising. Ultimately, Ken began running digital operations and analytics projects and found himself moving away from the nuts and bolts of the tech side. Of his formal education, he says that his time studying psychology has helped him be a good communicator. It helps him with management – when you’re working with many different people all day long you need to understand different personalities.

Why Ken believes Jennifer recommended him: Jennifer is a very “pay it forward” kind of person. Ken does alot of this through sharing posts and links – he reaches out to people to learn about others and find ways he can help out. He tries to positively promote data and analytics professionals and help people understand and champion the analytics of social media. Not a lot of people spend time in this area, and Ken believes that’s what caught Jennifer’s eye.

What Ken loves about social media: Ken got involved in social media primarily to focus on brands and clients with regards to strategy and analytics. He hopes to help blaze some new trails with thought leadership for analytics, namely how to standardize and formalize it, and how to use this data to make good business decisions. Ken also believes in developing the use of social media for internal purposes. While working with a consumer healthcare company at one point, he helped them develop an internal social network for the company’s employees. This particular company primarily had an older demographic of employees who were not very comfortable with the tools, but had a lot of knowledge and wisdom to share. They wanted to create a culture of innovation, and Ken worked with the company’s leadership to help them understand the audience. Ultimately, he assisted them with selecting the appropriate technology to reach the audience, actively engage them, and develop community.

Where Ken sees social media going in the future: Ken says that we’re past the “what is social media” question now, and over the next year, companies big and small will start getting serious about this in ways that make sense to them. Companies will begin exploring the right social media ‘prescription’ for them based on industry, culture, customer base, and so forth. The ‘Why’ and the ‘What’ will be replaced with the ‘How’, best practices will be brought forth, and we will see niche uses evolve.

Connect with Ken on:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Blog

Yesterday, I spent about 30 minutes in the Arbita Sourcing Lab at SourceCon showing the participants how to search Twitter profiles. We were supposed to get into how to manage and clean up our Twitter friends as well, but we ran out of time. As I mentioned in the session, here are some of the resources I had lined up to share with the lab participants. Enjoy!

MyCleenr – sorts your friends by their last tweets, and allows you to get rid off all the inactive and useless accounts that you are following. However, it only works if you’re following less than 700 people.

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Friend Or Follow – searches to find accounts you follow but that don’t follow you back. Sortable by Username, Name, Location, # of followers or # following, last tweet, and account age. Great tool for looking at reciprocity.

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Twitoria – allows you to quickly view the accounts you follow sorted by their last tweet. You can sort from 1 day up to 1 year. One of my favorite tools, but unfortunately the website doesn’t always work.

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UnTweeps – unfollows accounts that don’t have much activity. Enter the number of days in the past you want to check and then check off the accounts you want to unfollow. You can use this resouce up to three times per month for free; after that, they start charging.

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Tweepler – lists out new followers and classify them in one of two “buckets”: Follow (meaning you wish to follow them back) and Ignore (meaning you don’t wish to follow them and want to archive them out of the way, reducing clutter). Gives you a quick snapshot of each person’s profile & recent tweets. Quick and easy way to manage your followers, especially if you get lots of new followers each day.

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TwitIn (BuzzOm) – log in with your Twitter account, and you can follow new people, flush those who aren’t following you, or reciprocate follow to those who are following you. You also have the option to flush and block users from following you back. Good tool for a quick clean sweep. Some interesting features:

• Lock: “locks” certain results so they do not come up in future searches
• Grow: provides you the list of people who are likely to follow you back (cool)
• Cross Follow: shows data for either all of a user’s followers or all of the users they are following to allow you to add to yours (sort of like Twiangulate)

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Tweepi – Good if you have multiple criteria on which to remove a user. More robust and customizable results. You can use it to Flush, Reciprocate, and Cleanup. You can also check out an interesting profile and bulk-follow all of their followers using Geeky Follow. Very thorough tool that lets you sort your followers by so many categories, not limited to:

• Location
• # of followers or following
• # of updates
• times retweeted by others
• last tweeted

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Do you know of any other Twitter cleanup tools? Please leave a comment with a link!

Earlier today, I spent about 30 minutes in the Arbita Sourcing Lab at SourceCon showing the participants how to search Twitter profiles and clean/manage their followers. We had fun and learned how to make good use of the information that people provide in their bios to aid in our candidate searches. Below are some of the resources I shared with the lab participants. Enjoy!

Tweepsearch – allows people on Twitter to search their followers bio and location information. Twitter doesn’t currently have a bio search and as your Twitter network grows, it’s nice to be able to look through your tweeps. Limited advanced Boolean search (i.e. no near: location search). This is a good service be cause it is:

• Sortable by username, # of followers, or # followed
• Able to download search results to .csv file

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Tweepz – does the same thing as Tweepsearch, but allows you to create an RSS feed from your search results. You can:

• Use advanced Boolean operators (location, specific name, etc.)
• Create an RSS feed of search results

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Followerwonk – lets you search bios as well as do Twitter account comparisons. Can be either a very simple keyword search or a more complex, detailed SQL full-text search (using the documentation available on the site). For account comparisons, you can run up to three accounts side-by-side and get Venn diagram information on:

• Shared connections – followers & following
• Days on Twitter
• # of new followers per day
• # of tweets

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LocaFollow – a Google-powered Twitter profile search engine. It allows you to search bio, location, name, AND tweets. By logging in to your Twitter account from LocaFollow you will be able to:

• Bulk follow the resulting Twitter accounts, or follow them individually
• Create a Twitter list directly from the search results
• Create a TweepML list as the service is integrated with LocaFollow (see my post about why I love TweepML)
• Tweet a particular Twitter user’s search results rank

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Twiangulate – lets you search for who your friends, enemies and peers are following (see my Cool Tool Alert post about Twiangulate). Allows for three comparison searches of up to three Twitter accounts, as well as a keyword search. Only simple Boolean can be used in the keyword search (AND, OR [using | ], NOT [using !], and phrase [using “ ”]). This is an awesome service because:

• You can keywords search for profiles of individuals whom a specific Twitter user is following – for example, let’s say I wanted to find out what Account Directors a recruiting colleague is following… I would type “account director” into the keywords search, and the Twitter username I wanted to parse into the next field. I would get the results listed below
• You can instantly tweet out your search results directly from Twiangulate
• You can search for biggest or most common followers, or most common or most obscure friends

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Do you know of any other Twitter profile search tools? Please leave a comment with the link!

I am so pleased to have another article published on Mashable!

12 iPhone Apps for Surviving Conference Season

Next week, I’ll be in San Diego to attend both SourceCon and ERE Spring Expo, and I wanted to share some of the apps that I’ll be using while attending both. Please take a look at the article, and if you have any suggestions for other good conference apps, leave them in a comment either on the Mashable article or right below!

These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I recently wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

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Spotlight: Venessa Miemis
Title: MA Candidate in Media Studies, The New School
Who paid it forward: Brian Solis

What Brian had to say about Venessa: “Venessa is a philosopher and a futurist, exploring the advanced art and science of human connections and conversations and bringing observations and revelations from the edge to the center. ”

Venessa earned a BA in Psychology from Miami University of Ohio, and currently she is pursuing an MA in Media Studies through the New School, a progressive university located in NYC. Back in 2006, a friend asked if she wanted to be involved in a social media start-up company he was planning to launch. At the time Venessa had never even heard the phrase “social media” before, but was eager to explore a new direction. She spent the next year just learning the basics of how technological developments were affecting the way we communicate and understand the world. Since then, she hasn’t been able to stop. Each new evolution of the social web is allowing unexpected behaviors to emerge that are challenging the norms of how our society operates. Venessa believes it’s only going to get more disruptive as time goes by.

What interests Venessa about social media: How we can better access and use information, and how we might leverage the power of social networks. Unfortunately, the internet is rife with marketing and spam, and the noise is growing exponentially. Venessa believes we need systems that will help us quickly cut through the crap to get to the credible, quality content. Then we need to know what to do with the information. She has been experimenting a lot on Twitter and is finding that by building a network of knowledgeable people in her interest area, she is being exposed to information and ideas that she wouldn’t have been able to find from a quick Google search. As a result, there’s a really interesting informal learning process that’s being recognized there. Venessa has noticed a lot of people taking advantage of it in order to stay on top of what’s going on in their industries and to exchange ideas with peers around the world. She believes it’s going to become clear that businesses that aren’t integrating social media into the culture of their organization are going to be at a disadvantage against the competition. And not just because it isolates them from the opportunity to interact with their customers, but also because they’re going to have a less educated workforce.

With that in mind, she also thinks there’s a tremendous opportunity now for people to do things on a scale that has just never been possible before, from facilitating innovation in businesses to sparking movements that will lead to true social change. She had the opportunity to share some thoughts on this recently on Nokia’s IdeasProject website.

Where Venessa sees social media going in the future: Venessa says, “It’s easy to get caught up in the tools themselves and forget about what it is that the tools enable. Social media is just a means of communication. People are interested in sharing knowledge and information, in making life easier, and in having fun and being happy.” She thinks we will see some of the following stem from these interests:

• The mobile phone will play an increasingly important role as the medium for connecting online because of its portability and reduced cost in comparison to purchasing a desktop computer.  We’ll also see more tools emerge that will enhance the mobile experience, from augmented reality apps like Layar to portable credit card payment systems like Square to location-based services.
• We begin to embrace a new oral culture. Venessa thinks social media has established a new type of communication, and businesses and individuals are still figuring out how to use it effectively. But people have always enjoyed a narrative, so we’ll begin to see approaches to business that move more along the lines of storytelling and visualization. It’s not enough to sell a product or service anymore. People want to see messages that are visually appealing and understandable, like infographics, and they want ideas packaged into stories, whose foundations are built on values instead of material things.
• Tools will be built that make tasks feel more like fun and games. There’s a site called thefuntheory.com that has some really neat videos embracing this concept. Same with Foursquare – why would you want to constantly be updating your location for anyone to see? Because you can earn badges and become Mayor of the local cafe, of course! Whether for educational purposes or on the job, Venessa believes that there are going to be interesting social media tools developed that give us incentives to complete tasks because they feel more like games than work.
• Better tools for search. As mentioned earlier, information streams are already polluted with noise, and there isn’t enough time or attention to be given to filtering it. Tools will be developed that do a better job of catching spam and enabling us to find the kind of content we want.

Connect with Venessa on:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Blog