Introduction
It has often been said that the secret to sales is to know your customer. D&B has been a leader in providing products that allow sales and marketing personnel to get a technical view on perspective and current customers. With the explosion of social media being used by companies and their employees, it is now possible to catch a glimpse of the soul of a company. By combining both the D&B technical indicators and the social aspect of a company, a deeper understanding can be formed helping to target marketing with better precision. Also, by comparing one company against another, a salesperson can understand opportunities that an entity might be missing.
Background
Although there are many avenues to pursue in the area of social media, the application that will be developed in this article will use the Twitter API v1.1 to discover the categories of information for a company's tweets as well as the Twitter accounts they follow. Using the data provided by D&B in the Windows Azure Marketplace, searches for specific industries with further filtering by attributes such as green, minority, woman, veteran, or disadvantaged will allow for the easy comparison of like companies.
History
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