In-depth research gives you insight into the functions, industries, and organizations of interest to you.
Social media sites with their collection of people and organization profiles contain a lot of useful information. The career paths, project descriptions, and titles of people in your target function, industry, or organization reveal what is typical in that field. LinkedIn has a feature where, when you view a profile, suggestions are made for other matching profiles. A box on the lower right of the profile is titled, “Viewers of this profile also viewed…” and contains a list of other profiles. Even if you have only one name of someone to view, you can easily find more by using those suggestions. People in these other profiles often work at other organizations, and this can lead to discovering new organizations to target.
The ability to search by a wide combination of keywords enables you to identify very specific people for informational interviews and networking overall. You can look for specific alma maters, organizations, skill keywords, geographic locations, or a combination of keywords. Without social media and its reach and searchability, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to efficiently find someone from a specific school who has done a specific project or job, has a certain skill, has worked at a specific company, and lives within your target geography.
When you research, especially in preparation for networking meetings and interviews, you want to be current on the trends of your target industries, functions, and organizations. The continually updated statuses and dialogue of social media sites enable you to get breaking news. Follow discussions and see what subjects, ideas, and concerns are trending.
Finally, the organization profiles in LinkedIn or Pages in Facebook contain a summary of the organization and often include job postings. When you follow specific organizations in LinkedIn, you get a daily or weekly update on promotions, arrivals and departures, as well as job openings. This information is invaluable to finding possible relevant people profiles to view, having the latest organization news, and getting a jump on job openings.
If you are positioning yourself for a job in PR, the following information might help you:
- Look at specific companies for whom you’d like to do PR, but also look at PR agencies.
- PR might be called media relations or be handled within a broader department such as marketing. Use different keywords when you search.
- When you see late-breaking news for companies you are following, think about how this would impact your job in PR. Get into the habit of questioning and really analyzing your research.
If you are positioning yourself for a job in the nonprofit intersection of children and the arts, use some of the following techniques:
- Find nonprofits, foundations, and ancillary programs of bigger nonprofits that might be children and art related.
- Look at people’s backgrounds—do they have teaching experience or performing experience? What common threads are present among the people active in this space?
- Don’t just look at the professional part of someone’s background, but also look at volunteer work, special interests, and groups to which people belong. Are any organizations cited new to you, and can you add them to your target list?
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