Last Friday I had the opportunity to speak at the Talent Net Live conference in Plano, TX. It is a social recruiting conference primarily attended by recruiters from Texas, but in it’s second year, it is garnering attention nationwide. Mark Sullivan describes it best HERE.
It was a good gig because I got to speak about social media and blogging, two things I am passionate about. But, it was even better because I didn’t just fly in, do my thing, and fly out. I stayed. I sat through some sessions and spent time after the conference with other speakers and some attendees at the MonsterSocial Tweetup hosted by Monster. Do you ever come across those “speaker types” who just breeze around and are too self-important to actually slow down and learn something? I hate that. They miss out on so much of the opportunity that is in front of them.
Had I done that, I would have missed a great session ‘Cool Tools Panel’ led by Craig Fisher and Jim Schnyder. In the session we covered many cool tools for business pros today. Here are some of my favorites:
BlastFollow– This is one I’ve been using for awhile but was new to many at TNL. I recommend this tool because it allows you to enter a hash tag and it will then follow anyone who has tweeted using that tag in the last five days. This is especially helpful if you’re at a conference because you can follow everyone who is tweeting about the event without having to follow them individually. HUGE time saver.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking– This is speech recognition software designed for Windows by Nuance Communications. I’ve used similar technology on my phone but what a cool tool for day-to-day work. This tool listens to your voice and converts it to text on your computer. Especially handy for any type of dictation, it can also be used when interviewing candidates. Jim demonstrated that if you interview someone on the phone and repeat back what they said (in summary), the tool will capture the information in text for you. There are a few glitches, like the phone apps have, where once in awhile it gets a word wrong. However, I think the overall capability is worth having a couple words incorrect.
ManageFlitter– This site helps you unfolllow people who are not following you, those who are no longer active on Twitter, and those who rarely tweet. It also shows who you follow that tweet at least five times a day. It gives you the capability to easily choose who to continue following.
Brupt.com– This is a search engine that uses filetype parameters to find documents on topics you are looking for on the web. It’s a great way to filter the information you need.
So there are some new tools to check out today. What tools have you heard of lately that you like? Share them in the comments.
*Special thanks to Craig Fisher for inviting me to participate in Talent Net Live this year. It was an amazing opportunity and experience.
