This little gem of a sourcing tip was brought to my attention by my friend and colleague @joshuakahn, a brilliant social media thinker from Best Buy. (Here's his original post)

Josh writes about Will Moffat who built a tool called Facebook Search. It allows you to search status messages from Facebook: http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/

This works because unless you change the default setting, your Facebook status messages are public, and searchable. And guess what, a great number of people don't change their default settings, making Facebook statuses almost as public as tweets.*

While Will's example is about finding people "playing hooky"  we can use this as a highly targeted sourcing technique by searching for the natural phrase "working at COMPANY" where COMPANY is the name of a competitor whose talent you want to source. For example, if you want to find people from Microsoft, try this:

working at Microsoft

Conducting diversity searches? You could change the "gender" radio button to find only status updates from females. Notice that I did not need to use quotation marks nor Boolean syntax in the above example. In fact, I tried it with quotations and didn't see much change in the results. Give this a try, use other company names and drop me a note to tell me what you find!

* A little privacy note here - you can post status updates just to specific lists so for example your co-workers don't get your family photos and your friends/family don't get your boring work updates.

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