So, as you should get by now, the power of Twitter is that you only need to get in contact with a few people to do some real marketing damage, unlike with email spam for example where you have to procure a list of 100k+ people and then annoy them by spamming them. Therefore, the most important thing is that you find the best people to contact.

How do you define the best people to contact? The best people to contact are individuals (not usually companies) that have a large and engaged following, who are not so important/famous that they won’t be interested in you and never respond to your @mentions. You’re looking for experts that are out there repping their knowledge who feel a responsibility to respond to people that @mention them (provided you send a genuine, thoughtful and insightful @message to them). We’ll cover how to @mention and generally interact with these tastemakers in the next tutorial.

Ok, I got it, the first thing I must do is build a list of these people, but where do I find them? Let’s run through an entire example, and then we’ll summarize it.

My friend, Emilio Santana, is a funny guy right. He does funny Youtube videos and the like. Here’s his site: http://www.emiliotelevision.com/. He’s hoping to eventually get picked up by Hollywood Agents and get professional acting or sketch comedy writing jobs.

So we need to find the employees of these agencies. Finding the agencies themselves isn’t enough. That will just allow you to mail them your kit, which most of the time won’t even get opened. So the goal will be to find these agencies, and then pinpoint their employees.

1) Let’s start by finding the agencies. Here are some example google searches:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=hollywood+actors+agents

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=list+of+hollywood+agents

Adding “list of [...]” is the key takeaway that you can apply to the specific job position you’re looking for. Here are some more examples of keyword phrases you can search for:

-"list of entertainment manager"

-”list of actor managers"

-"list of of comedy production companies"

-"list of comedy agents"

-etc

2) Grab the URLs of the the pages that list the agents. Here’s 2 examples of 2 such found pages:

Acting Agents:

http://www.actorspages.org/agent.php

Writer Agents:

http://www.wga.org/agency/agencylist.aspx

3) Now here’s how you find the employees at those agencies:

SEARCH: Amatruda, Benson & Assoc site:linkedin.com

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Amatruda%2C+Benson+%26+Assoc#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=Amatruda%2C+Benson+%26+Assoc+site%3Alinkedin.com

SEARCH: Amatruda, Benson & Assoc site:twitter.com

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Amatruda%2C+Benson+%26+Assoc#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=Amatruda%2C+Benson+%26+Assoc+site%3Atwitter.com&pbx=1&oq=Amatruda%2C+Benson+%26+Assoc+site:twitter.com

Notice how these people are found on Twitter and Linkedin saying they worked at the agency, Amatruda, Benson & Assoc. The precise trick was to write your keywords in the google search, and filter the results to just results from twitter.com, for example, by appending to the search phrase: “site:twitter.com”.

I know I mentioned this was all about twitter, but LinkedIn is very good at keeping a record of who works where, and from there you can generally find links to twitter profiles, or simply search for a person’s name on twitter or again on google while appending after the name “site:twitter.com” again. Another trick is to put the agency name or employee full name in double quotations so only results that have the complete name you’re looking for come up. That’s very important.

4) Now make a google spreadsheet of all these influencers you’re finding like this:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AoURnKZh8J-SdFMydHhGdnNud3ZicTFFUUlhX0QxV1E&hl=en_US

In this case, the columns to use in that sheet are:

-Agency        

-Agent Name        

-Twitter URL        

-LinkedIn Url        

-Other URL (e.g. personal blog)        

-Noteworthy Tweet URL         (often you’ll find one important tweet that gives an idea who the person is)

-Misc

5) Consider other data you may want to collect. For example, in that sheet you will see I also added an “actors” sub-sheet. That sub-sheet was not originally part of the plan, but I realized that while searching for all these agents, that it may be useful to find actors at these agencies, as they can also offer in an “in” to getting picked up by one of these agencies. Getting to know these actors on Twitter will also give you an idea of what agencies will be the best match for you. In essence, you’re doing spy work to get to know the entire terrain of the niche you’re interested in, not just pinpointing good contacts. The better you know the people in your niche and its inner-workings, the more informed you will be about how to interact with everyone in the niche and who to focus on, which I’ll describe in the next tutorial. So feel free to add as many sub-sheets to this spreadsheet as you want to collect any data you learn along the way that is also relevant. Use the spreadsheet and its sub-sheets to learn and document your niche.

6) And finally, you can also cut right to the chase using sites like Listorious.com which provide categorized lists of Twitter users. Here are several lists of industry peeps Emilio may be looking to interact with:

http://listorious.com/jamesdburch/film-and-video-people

http://listorious.com/Cj_McGinnis/industry-peeps

http://listorious.com/jamesdburch/film-and-video-entities

Those lists specifically have the links to these people’s twitter profiles with their bios right there so you can immediately decide if they’re worthing adding to your spreadsheet.

And ere's what i searched on listorious.com to find those lists (check the right column):

http://listorious.com/search/people?rpp=25&q=acting+agents&submit=Search

So that’s the technique for finding these influencers. There's so much going on over there in Hollywood. If you’re looking for an agent as Emilio is in this example, you’re going to want to sniff it out, and know your niche on twitter in and out, until you know exactly which agents will want you. In 2011, you're armed with info you didn’t have even just 3 years ago. Before it was near impossible to take a look into these important companies--because their employees had no where to share their involvement with them. For instance, you can see all the tweets of the actors that sign with them, and the agents working for the agencies. Previously it would be hard to find out their whole roster of actors and agents. In general, you can do a lot of spy work here that wasn't possible in previous years since everyone is stating their involvement at these companies on their blogs, twitter accounts, linkedin accounts, facebook accounts, etc.

Let’s summarize the technique: basically you’re looking for back-doors in your niche to find real people involved in it. You’re looking to pinpoint pockets of them. Those pockets will be companies (e.g. Agencies in the above example) that will definitely have tons of real people in your niche, and those pockets might straight be a Listorious list, or other list listed on some blog/website. The trick will be what you do when you find a pocket, or in this example a company, but that pocket/company doesn’t actually list all its members/employees. In Emilio’s example above, we went and found people that were posting they worked at agencies in the list. In short, we did a new search working backwards. And then sometimes, you may not find the user’s twitter profile, but some other profile (such as one on Facebook or Twitter), in which case you need to then search their full name within double quotations followed by “site:twitter.com” and boom you have their twitter profile you were looking for (if it exists).

I’ll repeat the secret trick one last time: work backwards by finding the trail people leave on the web. You’ll know what keywords the people you’re looking for will be saying across the web. Search for those keywords, filter the results to a social network like Twitter, and you’ll find the people associated with them. That’s the trick here in a nutshell.