Stephanie Corbin

Trolling the Internet for Sources

Most of the time, sources I interview for stories are people someone at Tradeshow Week has met or knows of in some way.

For an article I’m working on for the TSW issue we’ll distribute at Expo! Expo! IAEE’s Annual Meeting & Exhibition, it’s a different story. I’m looking for members of the millennial generation who have recently graduated from or still are in college. It’s not as easy to find those sources – for the most part, they don’t run their own companies, and they’re not prominent members of industry organizations (yet).

So I did something I never thought I would do for work: I started looking for those people on Facebook. That’s right, I’ve been messaging potential sources through social media to try and connect.

I joined Facebook in 2005 at the prompting of my cousin. At the time, you only could sign up if you had a college e-mail address. I’ve been using it to reconnect with old classmates and friends scattered across the country ever since.

Using it for work reasons, though, was new. I never expected to utilize social media in that way. But then, I never expected to conduct e-mail interviews, either, and that’s happened several times since I started at TSW in March 2007 because of time zone differences and busy schedules. So, it seems only natural that the way to reach sources changes as generations change, too.

So far, I have one source (and a couple potential ones).

I know that Facebook won’t always help me find sources, but, for this particular story, which needs the particular demographic that uses social media, it’s a great tool.

Posted by Stephanie Corbin on October 29, 2008 | Comments (0)