i have a lot of posts to write about Social Media Monitoring, and the material and ideas are  all bubbling up waiting to be written about, but before I get to it I wanted to share FollowerWonk care of @tamar and @cecipf.

First, you can enter a search that has both subject, geolocation and a range of followers or friends  – I was thinking about helping come up with a list of people to reach out to for #msmbc10 (Monitoring Social Media Boot Camp) next month in London on March 31st (hope you can join me if your nearby).

One reason I like FollowerWonk better than TweepSearch – it’s much easier to export the list into a spreadsheet.   TweepSearch has great search functionality but isn’t designed to create a nice report or list you can give to someone else – and yes, if I was a programmer – that would not be a problem to me as I could use the TweepSearch API – but I’m not a programmer and it makes a big difference using FollowerWonk because it cut out 90% of the work I did have to do with manually formatting the TweepSearch data in Excel.

Here’s what the results look like and just in time to send to my friends in London.

I saved the entire list in Excel – here it is ….  Social Media Contacts for London- and it took me about 30 minutes to do the whole thing – and to be honest – the information looks pretty darn good.

Why?

Paradoxically, many people use Twitter for business – and so many people are getting on it – and filling out their profiles dutifully and truthfully, that Twitter is a far better and easier place to draw up a list of Influentials than any other platform I’ve seen.

Also, try going to a party that’s packed and trying to figure out the occupation of everyone in the room by  listening to what each person is saying – you’d be wrong 9 times out of 10.

Listening Systems are like listening to people’s chatter at the party – there’s too much mis-information the platform can’t decide about.

Therefore, it is much more direct, efficient and simple to believe people describing themselves, including what they do for a living.  Even if a person is misrepresenting themselves you’ll still have a lot better information this way than  by using one or more of the  Listening Systems.

There are other aspects of FollowerWonk that I won’t explore in this post (such as Comparisons between any two or three Twitter accounts)