We want to thank everyone for their participation in this contest. The competition was the fiercest we have seen and there are some phenomenal sourcers who participated in the challenge. SC’s Mom, Loretta, would have sent her thanks as well, but she is off to a 3 day seniors speed dating event and did not have time. So for those of you who are curious, Loretta was able to find three of SourceCon’s best friends, but SourceCon had left them so he is still missing. It appears that SourceCon has been missing for longer than even we had expected, and while he appreciates all the hard work done in his absence, Loretta A. Smith aka SourceMom will be taking over managing both Ning talent communities until he returns.
So feel free to join us at either community for updates, information, and upcoming conference details. The bulk of information can be found at secretsocietyofsourcers.ning.com while we try to rebuild the other site that was destroyed this weekend. We are still trying to figure out if the dingos ate the site, a fire at Ning destroyed only that site, or if hackers took over. The site will eventually be rebuilt at sourcecon.ning.com and always, you can continue to find information here at The Source Newsletter. Keep your eyes open for the next challenge before the end of the year.
A few people worthy of an honorable mention this time in addition to our winner include
- @TheSourceress aka Katharine Robinson
- @LisaOffutt aka runner up in last year’s #2 challenge
- @miranda50 aka Miranda Hinshaw (who provided me with endless vacation destination ideas)
- @SLCMyers Shannon Myers who won last year so she is not technically eligible to win but gave it her all in trying to solve the challenge anyway.
And the winner is… Irina Shamaeva!
A little bit about Irina:
Irina is an Executive Recruiter, an Expert Sourcer and a Web/Social Media Researcher. For the past five years she has been a Partner with Brain Gain Recruiting, placing senior full-time employees in IT, ERP, strategy consulting, and finances. She has an MS in Mathematics and a strong technical background. Irina teaches Recruiters and Sourcers how to search for prospects on the Internet and on Social Networks. Read about her training webinars and DVDs on her blog Boolean Strings + Social Media. Here is Irina’s LinkedIn Profile. Follow her on Twitter at @braingain.
Irina has created these active and successful recruiting communities: Boolean Strings LinkedIn Group and Ning Network, Twitter for Recruiting Group, and Social Media Recruiting Ning Network and LinkedIn Group (co-run with experts in the field).
Read how Irina solved the first SourceCon Challenge below. It was quite an accomplishment and Irina certainly has earned the title of Grand Master Sourcer. Let her know what you think of her hard work by leaving a comment below or contacting her at irina@braingainrecruiting.com.
When I first read the announcement on The Source Newsletter, I noticed the mysterious “colapts auratus”, pasted it into Google and it turned out to be misspelled “colaptes auratus” which is “Northern Flicker”. It prompted me to go to Flickr to look. A search for “tweety bird” landed on Mary’s profile, which had 7 images, many tags and a profile. Most of the pictures on the profile were taken around Phoenix AZ. There was also a map that pointed to somewhere on the 42nd street which Google maps showed as a place with warehouses and ruins of houses. That was probably where they were growing up.
Mary’s profile mentioned “a rocking good time with Ed Twinge”. Searching for “Ed Twinge” on Google leads to http://edtwinge.com related to shows in Edinburgh; it allows to tweet about actors using the tag #edtwinge.
Searching for this tag on twitter leads to the profile of http://twitter.com/mscott42 with just one message, that was clearly related to our story. The profile had a name of “Lady Denman Drive”. If you search for “Lady Denman Drive” on Google you will discover first that it is in Canberra Australia, and then that it’s the “Canberra Zoo and Aquarium” address. mscott42’s twitter profile pointed to Diigo. I spent quite some time on Diigo till I guessed to look for links to the Edinburgh performance and discovered Mary’s husband Monty Scott’s profile. I also went through the “ate my babies” page and saw that the image on his profiles was of a dingo, the wild dog. I think I was the first one to find Monty on Diigo.
Since anybody can see what you do on twitter and on Diigo I presented myself as an incognito profile and (just for fun) put the glowing egg pic on it from the Edinburgh site. This resulted in lots of DMs on twitter from buddy #scchallenge hunters – which lead me to tweeting a few vague sentences. (Sorry.) A gathering at Plurk called by my friend Jer E My was fun but it didn’t seem to be anything but a chat. After getting in touch with Monty on Diigo it all came to a halt for me. Dozens of people were catching up on Flickr, Twitter and Diigo profiles, and I couldn’t see where to go next.
When the charming Loretta had tweeted about Blondie, Dark Girl and Big Fella, I made a bit of progress, or so I thought. I Googled for “Blondie DarkGirl BigFella” and found pictures of them; they were bears at the Zoo! I landed on a few pages with their photos including tripadvisor.com. I joined tripadvisor and some other photo sharing sites. This didn’t help at all. I then found a Zooquarium PDF file with all the names. It seemed it was a useful file. It had Mike among other animals there and I thought that was “the” Mike. Mike was a “little penguin”. Those are tiny penguins and they are blue. I was thinking that Mike was perhaps a “blue bird” and was looking for Mike Bluebird for a while.
Another day passed. Shannon Myers and I exchanged a few emails and I got some “moral support” from Shannon (thanks!:)). I had to work and to spend time with my son Peter (who is not in favor of me sitting at the computer) and that was good because it’s hard to be stuck for hours… Loretta mentioned “delicious” so many times in various forms that I felt something must be there but couldn’t find anything. Last night Loretta mentioned N.M. on Diigo that a few people had found and I rushed back to Diigo. Somehow I missed the familiar link to the Zoo’s list of animals that I had visited several times.
It was in N.M.’s profile. The profile had some info – but I first went to http://pipl.com/username to see where else naveedmuhammad is a member. After that, it was easy. naveedmuhammad was on twitter at http://twitter.com/NaveedMuhammad; he tweeted to http://twitter.com/mjackson4242 – and that was Mike! Mike had a link to a Facebook page, used #yatchshow tag on twitter for the sailing stuff, and had a BubbleTweet (I’d never seen that before). Lots of info…
Then I went back to Pipl to look for other places where mjackson4242 was. Pipl showed that Mike was on the Pandora and related to the “The Roosters Radio”. Mike was also on Delicious with a link to Kopan Monastery, Kathmandu Nepal, and a phone number to call. I called and it turns out that was the way to reach the real SC Dude!
Thanks to all and especially to:
Boolean Strings community:
http://booleanstrings.ning.com
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1176637
the Social Media groups:
Twitter for Sourcing and Recruiting http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1908171
Social Media Recruiting Group http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2087986
Network:
http://socialmediarecruiting.ning.com – where we all learn from each other.
Please join us!
Thanks so much for the Sourcecon folks for the fun Challenge.