Spy: Find Prospects NOW

Spy Review

What does this tool do: This deceptively simple robot will find and deliver potential customers who have problems that you can solve.

Cost: Free

Who Needs It: Hate cold calls?

Info Page: http://spy.appspot.com/

Comments:

SPY will monitor social media conversations and deliver those short comments to your screen every few seconds. But SPY will also filter the comments and update them for you, without your having to refresh your screen… as in Twitter.

I first found this site to be an astonishingly helpful tool for monitoring eye witness accounts of the Mumbai terror attacks. As witnesses posted to Twitter and other social networking sites, SPY would aggregate comments around a single topic (#mumbai) and forward them on to me every seven seconds.

The immediacy of these posts is the key to your use of SPY as a business tool. In the SPY search window simply type an issue that your product/service/concern addresses. Then return to your work and wait for queries to appear. Whenever anyone posts something that you might have a solution for, respond (from the SPY site) by clicking through to their link. As with all Twitter-like communication, stay away from overt promotion. But helpful, value oriented references are always welcomed.

You’ll want to register for a Twitter account if you have not already.

TweetDeck, a similar but more sophisticated program, will be reviewed in a followup post.