As a key account manager, wouldn’t you want to find out about your contact before your first visit? Or say you were a student who wants to call a sponsor to raise funds – wouldn’t it be nice to have more than the weather as a topic for your small talk? And if you are invited as a speaker or consultant for a product management related issue, why not impress your contacts with knowledge of what is said in social media conversations about the brand?

A student team addressed this challenge and devised a structured search approach with a special focus on social media. For those who have good reasons to invest more than 15 minutes in preparation of a customer contact, we recommend to have a look at the tutorial.

Presentation on Slideshare: Information Broker 2.0 – Recherche im sozialen Web

For detailed insights, see our project report („Leitfaden zur strukturierten Suche in sozialen Medien“ – 28 p., on Scribd and Calameo) for the structured search approach (Core Information Search – Specific Information Search – Visualization of Results) and a commented overview of more than 50 (mostly  free) social media search tools (as of Nov. 2010). The video and report have been produced by a team of students Albrecht/Grubisic/Ickelsheimer/Stadelmann in our overarching project „Information Broker 2.0„, supervised by my teaching assistant Sammer and me.