Head in the clouds III: Something to blog about
Who is blogging about cloud computing and how do we find them?
Blogs are a great way to search for potential candidates. For one, there are millions and millions of them. They cover every range of topic imaginable. The thing that we need to do is not only find the blog authors, but also find their contact information. This can be difficult considering that most techies on the internet who don’t want to be contacted will put limited or no information on how to get a hold of them.
Most blogs have a page or section to talk about the author. The main idea is to find those blog authors with some sort of contact information posted. This can be email, phone numbers, cities, states, or countries. With the proper sourcing skills, you should be able to track down the individual with this information and their name.
The following string illustrates how this search would be executed in Google. The technology keywords from our previous posting on cloud computing form the competitive intelligence piece of the search:
NOTE: By adding some “action” keywords like (develop OR developed OR developing), you can focus more on developers for cloud technology and less on the people who are talking about it from a more general focus. Google automatically does word-stemming of your keywords you enter. So by putting develop in the string, I get all variations of the word. If you want to specifically search a word and ONLY that word, then you must add a plus sign ( + ) in front of the word: (+develop OR +developed OR +developer)
Once you’ve conducted the search, you can then evaluate the blog postings, click through to their author page, and then contact them. Depending on what information they give you, this could be a direct email or pieces of information that you use to conduct a people search.
