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.

---

Spotlight: Sarah Evans
Title: President/Founder
Employer: Sevans Strategy (herself)
Who paid it forward: Peter Shankman

Sarah attended Millikin University near Chicago where she started off as a Musical Theater major. Within the first month, she decided that major was more of a hobby for her and she switched to Communications based on recommendations from some of her advisors. Early on in her PR career, she discovered a deep love for non-profits and last year she decided to venture out on her own to create Sevans Strategy, where she works with non-profits and “social good” companies to help them craft their communications campaigns. Sarah also blogs at www.prsarahevans.com and was recently listed in Forbes’ 14 Power Women to Follow on Twitter, invesp’s Top 100 Most Influential Marketers of 2009 and ereleases’ 30 PR Experts to Follow on Twitter.

How Sarah started learning about social media: Online communications is what she loves. Sarah wrote her first computer program in 6th grade and won a state award for it. Her mother is a librarian, and she had Sarah and her siblings using computers at a young age. She was constantly looking for ways to stay in touch online with people. Back then, Sarah says these resources weren’t even called social media – they were called ‘emerging technologies’.

Who has influenced Sarah: Peter Shankman has been a big influence on Sarah. She says that he has been very generous with his time and advice, particularly in support of her venturing out on her own last year. Sarah also appreciates the guidance she received from Jackie Mitchell, her first boss, who was a MarComm Director for the Red Cross in Chicago at the time. She says that Jackie challenged her to never be afraid to share her ideas, and to work like you’re not afraid to be fired. (great advice that all of us could take!)

Where Sarah sees social media going in the future: From a PR standpoint, Sarah believes it’s going to become more integrated – social media itself will be less of a separate entity unto itself and more integrated into marketing practices. She also feels there will be even more interest generated in location based applications, and wider acceptance and embracing of these tools. People will be checking for a company’s presence online as well as looking for its community involvement and participation in activities, and we will see more companies ‘crowdsourcing’ for ideas from customers. Sarah feels we will see more practical uses for social media, not necessarily innovation-wise, but more day-to-day uses for them.

Connect with Sarah 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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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)

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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!

Olympic athletes are tweeting from Vancouver, sharing first-person accounts of what it’s like to be on a world stage as a competitor. I think it’s a good indication of the impact of social media and micro-blogging on instant access to world events.

For those of you who are like me and enjoy watching world-class athletes compete and put multiple injuries, failures, and successes, and years and countless hours of training to the test – here is a collection of many Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Athletes who are on Twitter: Winter Olympic Athletes on Twitter. These Tweeps are broken out by their respective Olympic events, and you can take a look at the tweets coming from each sport’s athletes collectively. (You’ll also notice that there are various other professional sports categories in the left menu)

I think this is a fantastic way to get a personal experience of the Olympics through the eyes of the athletes who are actually competing. It’s one thing to attend an event; it’s an entirely different experience to actually compete. I don’t think this has ever been possible before – estimations are that over 1/3 of the US Olympic team in Vancouver is on Twitter. Even during the Beijing Games in 2008, Twitter was still relatively unknown except by early adopters, and thus much of the limited buzz came from spectators. This will present an entirely new way to experience the Olympics. For example:

• On Saturday, Ryan Bedford, US Olympic speedskater, tweeted: “Great day on the ice this morning! Off to cheer on @ChadHedrick! He is a big reason why I’m here today, he’s the best teammate ever! GO CHAD”
• Scotty Lago, US Olympic snowboarder, shared: “Me and @louievito and @gregbretzz are moving over to a house closer to cypress [one of the outdoor venues], I’m going to miss all the hott Russians though.” (lol)
• Kristi Leskinen, US Olympic freestyle skier, lamented: “Olympic tape delays are already killing me! It’s far too easy to stumble upon results online. Guess I don’t need to finish watching moguls..” (guess they share the same frustrations as the casual observer!)
• Ben Kilner, British Olympic snowboarder, after training: “just back home from practice. Halfpipe kinda lost it’s shape due to the rainy weather but managed to get on ok”
• Jeremy Teela, US Olympic biathlete, after competing: “9th place today… Not podium but ok start to the games.”
• Chandra Crawford, Canadian Olympic cross country skiier, in response to the first Canadian gold medalist Alexandre Bilodeau: “YEAH ALEX! The nordic crew is so stoked for you!!”

Other collective lists to check out:

• Twitter’s verified list of Olympians (not broken out by sport)
• Sportsin140.com’s Olympians on Twitter Google doc (current and former summer & winter Olympic athletes)
• AssociatedContent.com is following Olympic athletes (looks like it’s manually updating…)
• Hashtags: #vancouver2010, #Olympics, #van2010
• Official Vancouver2010 Twitter account: @2010Tweets