The Pedestal Group

There are many ways to find people out there, but the free ones are always my favorite. Recently, I tried http://wink.com/ and at first thought it was just another search engine. But when I started to look at it in more depth, I realized that this site lets you find people by not only their name and location, but by their personal interests, groups they belong to, school they attended, and their career! With all the social media sites out there, more and more data is available on people and what they like to do, what they specialize in and where they are located. Wink searches those profiles and let’s you pull them together all in one place. They claim to search over 200 million on line profiles. Wink also has an option for a person to claim their profile and fill it in. It is recommended any small business owner create these profiles because you want to own the information out on line about you (see page 1 on Social Media). Wink is getting smart by offering tools that plug into other applications like Google, browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 only at this point), and ways to promote yourself. This one is definitely worth trying!

GOOGLE. If you aren’t using Google to find candidates or client information, you have not only missed the boat, but the other people have gotten on the boat, gone on the trip, are home and unpacked.

One command in particular is invaluable to finding people.    site:www.website.com “keyword” “keyword”
(Did the lights brighten and music play as you read this?) This one command searches the website you enter for the keywords in quotes.

If the site you use is LinkedIn, (site:www.linkedin.com “title” “location”) you get profiles of people who aren’t in your network, may only have one or two connections, and are often not found anywhere else on the web. These people have been told by a friend “You should get on LinkedIn!” so they do and connect to that friend. That’s it. No effort put in, no network building, no nothing. But, a savvy recruiter can still find them just through this command. Try it with industry organization sites too—you’ll be amazed what you find!

How can I use this for marketing? EASY. Same command, using LinkedIn, but this time put a company name in the quotes. The tricky thing with companies is be sure to use the name people use casually. LinkedIn profiles aren’t resumes so they aren’t perfect. If you were to do a search for 123 Widgets Limited Inc., you would miss people who just used 123 Widgets.

Now you get results that show you contacts at that company. But wait! Do more! Take a look at the locations and titles of the people you have found. Can you tell anything about the structure of the company? What divisions are where? What kind of work is done in each location? HOW CAN YOU USE THIS INFORMATION TO MAKE YOUR CALLS WARM???

Pretty slick, huh? Best part is, when a person at one company joins LinkedIn and likes it, they tell other people at the company. So all of a sudden you have a big influx of people all at the same company—the one YOU are trying to target! Not sold yet? How about this—the data on LinkedIn is more accurate than any other source because people put it up about themselves.

Great—you got it. But what if you need contact information because you don’t want to call at work? I usually go to these sites in the following order:
www.zabasearch.com
www.411.com
www.peoplefinder.com
www.google.com
So go get Googling!!!