How to get random people to e-mail you
Just a quick continuation of my LinkedIn post – ultimately, even using Google and LinkedIn, it was still hard to get in touch with people. It’s surprising to see this even in cases when you had people that WANTED to be discovered (For example, consultants or other service providers)
I think almost everyone on LinkedIn, ultimately, would welcome inbound e-mails in some form or another. Depending on what you do, perhaps you want to make a couple hurdles to ensure qualified people, but talking to interesting people is fun.
So here were the various levels of contact information obscurity that I saw on LinkedIn. Some of the encouraged me to contact them, others made it incredibly difficult to the point where I gave up:
1) Name but no last name, no profile information
2) Name but no last name, company information or two
Even then, Mary A from Microsoft is not that useful :)
3) Name with last name, company information
4) Name with last name, company information, blog link, etc.
The folks above are generally pretty easy to get ahold of using the Google + LinkedIn method
5) Name with last name, company information, blog, AND e-mail in the profile
Obviously having the full panel is great. A blog is a huge plus. This way, you can very easily identify this person, browse their blog to get a sense of what they’re interested in, and contact them regardless of your connections to them.
So if you want random people like me to contact you, remember to edit your LinkedIn and stop being so introverted :)
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