ResearchGoddess

Found this new resource for IT professionals (and IT recruiters too!) – Masterbranch. It’s a network that’s currently only available for IT folks, letting them connect with each other through search based on projects, skills, and available opportunities.

According to KillerStartups review, “…through [Masterbranch] you can have something akin to an intelligent resume that reflects any change that should merit inclusion…This dynamic profile is built by looking at your sites and blogs (IE, your activity on the WWW) and the site also doubles as a sort of networking resource where IT professionals can meet up with each other and build relationships like that.”

This site grabs all your information based on OpenSourceID verification and it dynamically builds an IT ‘resume’ based on your web activity. Obviously, this wouldn’t be a resume that would be suitable to bring on an interview, but it’s a good sampling of your online presence and an additional place for you to build your personal SEO and be find-able to recruiters. For recruiters, this is yet another resource for sourcing! The site pulls your information from LinkedIn, Stackoverflow, Google, Sourceforge, Serverfault, Launchpad, Ohloh, GitHub, BitBucket, and your blog if you have one.

Once your profile is built, you can start looking at other community members based on projects and skill areas. The most popular areas are linked at the bottom of the page, and you can join project “networks” to be found based on skill area.

People search is also intuitive; start typing a name and it will suggest people who are community members. It’s still a small community, but it’s certain to grow quickly. Updates are automatically pulled from the online accounts you add to your profile. No manual updates are necessary once you’ve added an account – pretty sweet!

IT recruiters: this is worth taking a look at. IT professionals – this is another place for you to get noticed!

The Cool Tool Alert has returned! This week, I want to feature a neat iPhone app that is an extension of a service that I learned about way back in June at the Fordyce Forum from founder Lori Fenstermaker. Lori started AutoSearch almost by accident, and what started off as a “side business” has quickly become her main focus, with some pretty notable clients. (you’ll have to ask Lori for that client list!) Lori revealed to me at Fordyce that AutoSearch would soon be coming out with an iPhone app, and as an iPhone user I asked her to let me know when this happened. Well – here it is! AutoSearch Mobile:

“AutoSearch Mobile simultaneously searches leading business and social networking sites: LinkedIn, Twitter, Jobster, and ZoomInfo. AutoSearch Mobile also searches the entire web for matching resumes and CVs.”

Basically, it’s AutoSearch Lite. This is a great way to sample what AutoSearch can do. I tested out this new iPhone app and was very impressed with it. It’s quite user-friendly, compact, and relatively accurate. Keep in mind of course, you’re searching the Internet, which is not a recruiters’ database, so you must have realistic expectations of your search results. But that being said, the results I got from my simple search were actually pretty good!

Things I liked about this app:

1. You can add in your own locations, or simply choose from the ones that are already pre-populated. To add new ones, you simply click on the Setup button
2. It’s VERY simple. You type in some keywords, a job title, a name, or whatever you’re searching for, and you get results all on one screen from Jobster, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Twitter, and regular web search.
3. The app accepts pretty much all Boolean search operators, or you can just simply type in a few keywords.
4. Search results keep you in the app. You never have to leave the app to view them!
5. Search results are easily email-able to your account or wherever else you’d like to send them – again, right from the app.
6. Search results are amazingly refined.

Just a couple of things I’d like to see different:

• It would be great to see the actual Boolean search string in the results.
• You cannot save the searches done on the iPhone app.
• Would like search results to be able to be synched with the full version if you’ve purchased it.

It should be noted that in the full AutoSearch tool, keywords are automatically stored so this takes care of the saved search issue. At only $4.99, this is a great deal as well!

I’d highly recommend checking out the full version, and take a look at the video for the new AutoSearch Mobile app as well as the info video for AutoSearch itself. Definitely worth looking into!

Admittedly this isn’t anything terribly new, but I would bet money that most of you have never participated in a hashtag chat before! So, what is a hashtag chat?

First off, let’s define a Hashtag: it’s putting the pound (#) sign in front of a word or a phrase in order to track conversation about that word or phrase on Twitter. So for example, some of the most popular hashtags at the writing of this post included #iranelection, #jobs, #journchat, and #bachelorette. This means that a lot of the conversation being had was about the election in Iran, people looking for jobs, folks discussing The Bachelorette, and people participating in the hashtag chat, #journchat. Which leads to the next definition…

A hashtag chat is an organized conversation via Twitter that is followed using a hashtag term. The chats are usually moderated, have either pre-set questions or chat leaders, and usually happen at a pre-determined day and time on a semi-regular basis. Since these conversations happen real time, and in the public Twitter stream, they can be participated in by pretty much anyone who’s interested.

Here is a list of some of the more popular and best organized hashtag chats, as provided on www.wthashtag.com:

• #cmtychat – a weekly discussion about the business of online communities, Fridays from 12-1pm CT, hosted by @sonnygill and @bryanperson
• #journchat – a weekly conversation on Twitter between journalists, bloggers and PR pros, taking place Monday nights from 7-10pm CT
• #smchat – a discussion on the power of social media among active practitioners and strategists, taking place Wednesdays at 12pm CT
• #blogchat – a chat on Sunday nights from 8-9pm CT that was started by @MackCollier to discuss blogs and best practices

There are plenty of other topics, ranging from SEO to K-12 education to healthcare communications and marketing practices, and even cars and the automotive industry. I recommend checking out the organizers who have registered with What The Hashtag here.

I’d also encourage those of you in the recruiting business to check out the #talentnet (or #TNL) hashtag chat run by Craig Fisher and Susan Kang Nam. It’s a hashtag chat specifically for recruiters that takes place the last Wednesday of each month at 9pm Eastern.

Some of you may be wondering why I’m listing this as a “Cool Tool” and the reason is simple: large audiences discussing the same topic. This is like you attending an industry trade event. If you work in a particular industry or function that has a hashtag chat already established, it’s a great opportunity for you to network with these professionals. It’s also a great place to learn about a particular topic you’ve been interested in finding out more about. I’ve also noticed that every time I participate in a hashtag chat – I mean REALLY participate by following the topics and adding value when applicable (there’s a tip) – I typically gain anywhere from 5-15 new followers. And usually the new followers work in some capacity related to the chat.

By the way – if you don’t see a hashtag chat listed in YOUR industry, don’t complain, throw your hands up in the air, and say it doesn’t work for you Why don’t YOU start the chat – that’s the beauty of social media. You don’t have to wait around for someone to create content; you can take the initiative and do it yourself.

My Cool Tool Alert this week is 140it (pronounced ‘One-Forty-it’). Having been around since early 2009, this tool will help you condense your tweets into the necessary 140 characters to be sent. No longer will you have to sit there and try to figure out TweetSpeak on your own, or fumble around with going to another site, copy/paste your message, shrink it down, and then go back to Twitter. This neat little bookmarklet can be clicked and dragged right to your browser toolbar!

140it shrinks your twitter messages down to 140 characters by:

• Reducing words, removing extra spaces
• Shrinking URLs with unhub
• Exchanging company names with their StockTwits symbol

Check out their easy instructional video and see how to grab the bookmarklet. It’s as simple as a click and drag to your toolbar:

What you’re lifting from the site is a javascript bookmarklet that will sit in your toolbar. When you go to Twitter and type a message that’s greater than 140 characters, simply click on your 140it link in the toolbar and it will automatically shrink your message for you. Twitter will only shrink your URLs, and that’s only if your entire message, link included, is under 140 characters. Take a look at before the message is shrunk:

…and after clicking 140it in my toolbar:

This tool works with Safari, Firefox, and IE7 and above. Sorry – it doesn’t appear to work with IE6. Take a look and try it out for yourself!

A day late for my Cool Tool Alert of the week, but hey, yesterday was a holiday here in the States!

This cool tool alert will be very helpful for promoting webinars, concerts, networking events, etc. Calendar Tweet allows you to tweet out short links to events you create, promote them via Twitter, and gather lists of attendees. 

Created by Fredrickus Williford and launched about a week ago, this new Twitter service tool has potential! Some of the things you can do with it include:

• Tagging, sharing, and promoting events
• Use as a private Calendar or promotional event management tool for Twitter 
• Monitoring to see if your friends or followers will be attending an event

Calendar Tweet uses the Twitter oAuth System so you can login through twitter automatically without having to provide credentials.

A cool discovery is that when you create an event, the description area accepts HTML code, so you can post links and things in your description area. So, if you simply want to use Calendar Tweet as a quick service to re-direct people to an Eventbrite.com,  Evite.com, or Meetup.com site, you can do so.

You can also either publicly tweet out events or keep them private and then invite just a select group of people. Couple this with TweetParty and you’ve got a completely Twitter-ized event management process. For example:

Say I want to have a quick local geek get-together for lunch tomorrow. I don’t want to take the time to create a big production for invitations but I want to make sure I invite my tweeps. I set up a quick Calendar Tweet for lunch:

Notice I un-checked “Tweet Event” as I want it to be private – otherwise your event will automatically be sent out as a tweet through your Twitter account. When marked private, the link and event are still created, it is just not tweeted out through my account. It ends up looking like this on the Calendar Tweet page:

Once the event is created, you’ll want to go back into your event and edit it to make it publicly accessible, otherwise the link will not work when you send it to people (since it’s private):

Since I only want to send this to a few people, I can then access my TweetParty account and select which group I would like to invite. I have a group for lunchtime tweeters (it’s purposely small):

I then follow the directions for sending a group a private message, and copy/paste in the link to my Calendar Tweet event:

And as people decide to join me for this get-together, I will be able to see them on my calendar event page.

You can also add events directly from Twitter. Just send a direct message on Twitter to @cal_tweet (you must be following first). For example:.

“d cal_tweet Fordyce Forum social media session (follow #VegasRG) @ 6/10/09″

As an added bonus, Calendar Tweet will send out a reminder prior to the event to remind attendees and to help increase turnout.

A couple of things I noticed about Calendar Chat that I’d like to see fixed:

• The date/time selection seems to be a little glitchy; it doesn’t like activities scheduled for noon (changes them to 12am for the following day). You have to rig the actual date for a day early in order to get the correct date; at least this was the case at the time of this post being written.
• I would like an option to not tweet a public event automatically, or a link that can be sent to and actually viewed by select people for a private event.
• It would be great to have a place for people to leave comments when they decide to accept a calendar event invitation.
• I’d like to see the ability to quickly add a Calendar Tweet event to an Outlook / iCal / Google Calendar. Could we get some links on the site to do so?

Some other things you can use Calendar Tweet for:

• Promotional events
• Concerts
• Quick party invitations
• Contests

Give it a shot yourself and see how it works for you!