Enter Buzzzy. (Yes, with three zs.)

Buzzzy is an online search application that retrieves real-time content to harvest “the buzz” on platforms such as:

• Google Buzz
• Google Reader
• Digg
• Twitter
• Flickr
• NewsFit

Figure 1 illustrates the results via Google Buzz that Buzzzy provides for the query, “Toyota Prius”.

Figure 1:Buzzzy’s Results Via Google Buzz  For Search Query, “Toyota Prius”
Click On The Image To Enlarge

Users have the ability to refine their results on the basis of:

• Time (i.e., day or week)
• Source (i.e., specific platform as listed above)
• Media (i.e., images, videos, links)

Figure 2 is a screenshot of a refined search for “Toyota Prius on the basis of the source (i.e., Twitter) and the media (i.e., links).

Figure 2: Refined Search - Twitter & Links - For Search Query, “Toyota Prius”
Click On The Image To Enlarge

Buzzzy is available at www.buzzzy.com

• Expanding your network beyond your region and areas of expertise
• Sharing your expertise with other professionals in the field
• Learning from others located around the world

Below are a few groups that are on LinkedIn that the team at Intelegia are members.

• Business Retention & Expansion International (BREI) - This group is composed of economic development professionals that are dedicated to investment attraction initiatives.  Some of the common issues that serves as discussion points are incentives programs, business retention strategies and marketing initiatives for regions.
  Level of access: Open
  Number of members (as of March 9th, 2010): 129
  Owner: Ernest Strickland

• Economic Development Network - This group is a collection of professionals from around the globe who are concerned about the engagement of research organisations with the economy.  Recent discussion topics include the use of social media marketing applications, marketing strategies and strategic planning issues.
  Level of access: Open
  Number of members (as of March 9th, 2010): 347
  Owner: Steven Brown

• Economic Development Professionals - The Economic Development Professionals Linkedin group is geared towards individuals who wish to share and learn about best practices in field of economic development.  Lately, members have exchanged thoughts on subjects such as website design issues, search engine optimization strategies and incentive programs.
  Level of access: Open
  Number of members (as of March 9th, 2010): 2 468
  Owner:Gary Knight

• Foreign Direct Investment - FDIexecutive - This LinkedIn group brings together professionals from all points around the globe in the field of foreign direct investment.  Issues such as attraction strategy, competitiveness, location selection and decision making are the major themes that members discuss.
  Level of access: Open
  Number of members (as of March 9th): 442
  Owner: Douglas van den Berghe

• Next Gen Economic Development Marketers - As the name suggests, this group is meant for professionals focused on marketing in regards to economic development.  Members include economic development officers and consultants that talk about such issues as social media tools, website design and branding initiatives.
  Level of access: Open
  Number of members (as of March 9th): 171
  Owner: Ben Wright

Are we missing some other LinkedIn groups?  Let us know by leaving us a comment on this post.

Looking for an efficient way to manage your contacts on LinkedIn?  Read Intelegia’s tutorial, “Tag Function In LinkedIn“

Google has created another application that may help out online researchers in a big way.

Google Squared is a tool that attempts to give some structure to results that are available via a typical search query.  Results are presented in a spreadsheet format instead of the conventional listings on numerous pages.  This enables researchers to assess results given the scope of the keywords entered in order to get basic facts about the subject that is being researched.

Case Scenario:

A client from the North American car parts sector is interested in expanding into Europe.  In order to make an informed decision on whether or not to go ahead with the market expansion, an industry profile is needed for Europe.

Solution:

Google Squared permits users to enter the subject into a search interface to begin building the square (or spreadsheet).  The interface is shown in Figure 1 with the keywords, “European automobile industry”:

Figure 1: Google Squared Search Interface

Once users click on “Square it”, Google will provide another input interface in which users must put their additional keywords (or items) to put some context to the search to continue building the square.   As seen in Figure 2, keywords such as “sales”, “trends”, “growth” and “competitors” are entered to obtain information for the elements of the industry profile.

Figure 2: Building A Google Square For “European Automobile Industry”

The square is finally created as users click on “Square it” as illustrated below in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Google Square For “European Automobile Industry”

The square is composed of the following elements:

• Item Name (Keywords)
• Image
• Description
• Price (If associated with paid content source)

The square can be modified to eliminate irrelevant content and sorted.  Figure 4 is a screen shot of the square sorted alphabetically and highlighted in yellow, data regarding sales growth.

Figure 4: Sorted Squared To Find Sales Growth Data
Click On Image To Enlarge

When the “Description” cell of the square is clicked on, a box with web results will appear (as seen in Figure 4) when users can actually access hyperlinks to the web pages with the information.

The final product of any Google Squared search query can be shared with others, exported in a .csv file or a Google Spreadsheet and saved to a Google Account.

Google Squared is available at www.google.com/squared

Interested in using different online search tools to be an efficient researcher? Attend Intelegia’s seminar, “Effective Online Research Strategies“

Below is a tutorial that my colleague, Aicha Habiby, created in PowerPoint to aid individuals in using Hootsuite.

Hootsuite is an application that will allow individuals to manage multiple social network accounts via one interface.

This tool can be extremely helpful for individuals who responsible for their economic development agency’s Facebook, Twitter or blog accounts.

The complete slideshow is available in English and French on Intelegia’s Slideshare page

Want to know more about using social media marketing or Web 2.0 tools for economic development? Attend Intelegia’s seminar, “Optimize Investment Attraction Strategy Through Information and Social Media Applications“

As an economic development professional concerned about how your site for investment attraction is being found by site selectors via search engines, you are interested to know what keywords competing regions or countries are utilizing for their search engine optimization strategies.

Here is a quick tip to do so in five easy steps.

Step 1: Visit the website

Select the website that you wish to extract the keywords from. Keywords are embedded in websites in which visitors may have access to within a few mouse clicks.  For the purpose of this post, the Invest In Scotland website by Scottish Development International was taken as an example.

Step 2: Right click on the page

With your mouse, right click on the index page of a website to open the option menu and select the option, “View Page Source” (if you are using FireFox) or “View Source Code” (if you are using Internet Explorer).   Figure 1 demonstrates this procedure using FireFox.

Figure 1: Accessing The “View Page Source” Option For Invest in Scotland

Step 3: Click on View Page Source or View Source Code

Once the option is clicked upon, you will open a text file which the .html source code as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: HTML Source Code For Invest In Scotland Website’s Index Page
(Click On Image To Enlarge)

Step 4: Find The Keywords

With the file open, conduct a search with the “Find” function using the search string, ” “keywords” “.  Include the quotation marks as seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Performing Search To Find Keywords
(Click On Image To Enlarge)

Step 5: Extract The Keywords

The search conducted in Step 4 will take you to the portion of file that contains the keywords. (See the text that follows the word highlighted in green.) With your mouse, highlight, copy and paste the list of keywords in an MS-Excel document.  In the first cell, enter the name of the site along with the address of the site and the keywords in the second and third cells respectively.   In the case of Invest In Scotland, the following keywords can be extracted:

• “foreign investment, trade, corporate relocation, quality business locations, invest in Scotland, new markets, inward investment, internationalization, internationalisation, invest in europe”

To learn more competitive intelligence practices for economic development and investment attraction initiatives, attend Intelegia’s seminar, “Optimize Investment Attraction Strategy Through Information and Social Media Applications“.

Yahoo! News Topics provides an alternative solution to searching for news content.

Rather than asking users to enter keywords in the query search box, Yahoo News Topics is a directory of subjects that can be browsed through.  Figure 1 is the index page of the news source.

Figure 1: Yahoo! News Topics Index

As users find a topic of interest, a simple mouse click is needed on the keyword to access relevant news content.  Figure 2 illustrates the page of results once the keyword, “Google” is clicked upon.

Figure 3: Results For Google on Yahoo! News Topics

Each subject has news content via:

• News aggregators
• Videos
• Local news sources
• Blogs
• Photos

Yahoo! News Topics is available at news.yahoo.com/topics

Yabigo is a “gadget” in which individuals may submit a query into a single search interface with the objective of having access results from all three search engines on a single page.  Figure 1 presents the results for the search query, “Foreign Direct Investment” + Canada.

Figure 1: Results For Query, “Foreign Direct Investment” + Canada
Please Click On Image To Enlarge

As seen in the image, the results from Yahoo are posted on the left, Bing in the middle and Google on the right.  By doing a scan of the overall results. it can be seen that the rankings for each result differ amongst the search engines.  Yabigo does inform users of  how many common results per page are found for a query.   In the case of the query, “Foreign Direct Investment” + Canada, there were four common results on the first page and one result for the second page.

Yabingo can apply to a search for images and video content as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Images and Videos Results For “Foreign Direct Investment” + Canada

At the end of results page, Yabigo provides a keyword cloud (Figure 3) associated with each query to facilitate finding relevant information.

Figure 3: Keyword Cloud Associated With The Query, “Foreign Direct Investment” + Canada

One element that is missing from Yabigo is the advanced search function.

Yabigo is available at www.yabigo.com

To improve your online research skills, attend Intelegia’s seminar, “Effective Online Research Strategies“

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Flickr
• RSS Feeds

The list seems to be pretty complete however; there is an application that does not come to mind when discussing social media marketing tools.  The application is SlideShare.

SlideShare is a tool that allows individuals to place documents in various file formats (i.e, .ppt, .doc, .pdf) on web.

The use of SlideShare in a marketing context is very practical.   Here are the advantages

1 - Avoid reinventing the wheel

There is a good chance that you may have promotional material in .pdf and or PowerPoint already in your agency that can be easily placed online.  Instead of spending a portion of your budget on new promotional content, use what you have and upload it to SlideShare.

2 - Reinforce Your Search Engine Optimatization Strategy

Having a presence on various Web 2.0 applications will enhance and reinforce your search engine optimization strategy for your website.  SlideShare is an efficient tool to accomplish this goal,  Each word of the document on the application is indexed and allows it to appear on Google’s result page quickly and within the first couple of pages. (if you are creating a new document to be place on SlideShare, keep in mind the keywords that investors are most likely to used to find information regarding investment attraction along with the name of the city, region, province / state or country.  Good examples of keywords would be: “Invest in”, “Investing in”, “Incentive” or “Doing Business In”.

3 - Be Visual

Using Slideshare to publish Microsoft Powerpoint presentation is a very powerful strategy.  The medium allows agencies to communicate facts about their region visually.  Figure 1 is a page from the Chesterfield Economic Development (Chesterfield, Virgina) presentation on SlideShare.

Figure 1: Chesterfield SlideShare Powerpoint Presentation

This particular slide is effective to help sell the region as a location of  growth in terms of the value of new commercial construction by using the ascending set of bars in the chart.

Some may consider SlideShare as the poorman’s YouTube when it comes to delivering content visually however; it can be efficient tool to aid in obtaining your marketing goals for economic development initiatives.

SlideShare is available at www.slideshare.net

Thinking about creating your Economic Development 2.0 strategy?  Attend Intelegia’s seminar,  “Optimize Investment Attraction Strategy Through Information and Social Media Applications“

One challenge that presents itself when using Twitter Search is the tool’s inability to sort the “good tweets” from the “bad tweets” when it comes to a product. service or a region for economic development purposes.

The search tool, TipTop, attempts to solve this problem.

TipTop takes results for a keyword search on Twitter and displays them into the following three categories:

• Tip tweets (Highlighted in green) - “good tweets”
• piT tweets (Highlighted in red) - “bad tweets”
• Other tweets (Highlighted in blue) - “neutral tweets”

Figure 1 presents the results for a Twitter search for “Google Buzz”.

Figure 1: Results Sorted by TipTop For Keyword Search, “Google Buzz”

On the right hand side of the results, TipTop supplies a sentiment trend chart (More Tips) comparing the three types of results.  The chart can be seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Sentiment Trends Chart

Although not perfect, TipTop may save individuals time when going through the countless amount of tweets that are sent on a daily basis.

TipTop is available at www.feeltiptop.com

Which of the following search statements will permit you to access information in a Microsoft PowerPoint document regarding trends in the North American automobile industry?

a) flietype:.ppt, trends + “North American” + “automobile industry”

b) trends + “North American” + “automobile industry”, .ppt

c) trends + “North American” + “automobile industry” filetype:ppt

If you have selected either a) or b), it is recommended that you continue reading.

The correct answer is c)

Although it maybe difficult for some to remember how to structure a search query for a specific file format, there may be an easier way to conduct an advanced search of the web.

Gdocu is a search tool that permits users to find information in a specific file format by entering keywords and clicking within a radio button.  Using such a  tool will assist in filtering search results to locate relevant information efficiently.

Why scan through a number of pages looking for an annual report when you can easily surf through just a few .pdf documents? Annual reports are often available in .pdf.

As of February 18th, the tool can retrieve the following types of document formats:

• PDF
• Word
• PowerPoint
• Other Formats (i.e., Excel, Design Web Format)
• Only Websites
• All The Web

Figure 1 illustrates the search interface of Gdocu.

Figure 1: Gdocu Search Interface

Case Scenario

You are interested in finding a spreadsheet (in Excel) that contains the export levels of petroleum of Canada in 2008.  Figure 2 presents the query that is entered to find the relevant data as specified.

Figure 3: Search Query For Finding Export Data For Petroleum In Canada For 2008

By selecting “Other Formats”, Gdocu will provide only Excel files (XLS).  Results for the query are presented in Figure 4, where the most relevant result is highlighted in yellow.

Figure 4: Results For The Query:: export + petroleum + Canada + 2008
Click On Image To Enlarge

As stated on their index page, Gdoc is NOT a Google product however; it has been created by the Google Custom Search application.

Although Gdoc is a very good tool to conduct advanced web searches however; it is just the beginning when attempting an exhaustive search of the internet.

Gdoc is available at www.gdocu.com

Looking to enhance your team’s online searching skills?  Attend Intelegia’s seminar, “Advanced Business Intelligence Gathering Approaches”