I’ve been mucking around with LinkedIn. I’ve had an account for ages, passively amassed about 65 contacts on it, but didn’t really do very much with it. Then, someone asked me to write an article on social networking so I went and had a play. Blimey. It’s the new Sourcewire.

Automated pitching services like Sourcewire have been around for a long time. I used to use them a bit, and I programmed my own web site so that PR bods could pitch interviewees for articles. But I ended up binning Sourcewire and turning off my own site, because I found myself wading through lots of PR pitches that were more or less the same. You run the risk of doing journalism by numbers if you fall into the habit of using these services too systematically.

The other problem is that when you respond to a PR pitch, you’re going through a PR consultant before you get to speak to the interviewee. Love ‘em while I do (some of my best friends, etc etc), no matter how good a PR person is, they’re essentially a stepping stone to an actual interview with the expert.

So these days I rarely accept PR pitches for interviews, unless they’re really targeted, and from people I know and trust. Instead, I do more of what I’ve always done and manually find the people that I know I want to talk to. It’s fine, it’s easy and it’s what journalism is all about. ‘Nuff said.

But when I was playing with LinkedIn, I checked out the Answers feature, and oh my, does this contain a lot of possibilities. Given that I was writing an article on it I thought I’d test it out, and asked a question related to another article I was working on, just to see what would happen. I got back about six answers - all very relevant, intelligent, and right on the money. And the answers came directly from people associated with the subject. No intermediaries, no proxies. And I was able to check out their profiles to assess their background. This lets you know where they work, so you could call up their company, ask to speak to them, have a conversation and verify that they’re creditable.

This strikes me as a more honed, targeted way of supplementing your research and unlike some automated PR services it also means that you’re likely to end up speaking with people who haven’t paid for PR (which is a limiting factor elsewhere). It’s not something that you’d use as your only form of research, of course, but it’s a useful tool nonetheless.

I don’t think Facebook (which is trouncing LinkedIn in terms of numbers) will be useful for this. It’s too consumer-focused, even though it’s now being discussed by the business community, and there doesn’t seem to be an ability to reach out across an extended network in the same way.

Danny Bradbury