The goal of this article is to help you more effectively recruit executives and industry experts as candidates for your qualitative market-research studies.
Let's assume two points: (1) your studies are not appropriate for participants found on purchased lists, and (2) the participants will take part in a series of in-depth interviews (IDIs).
So how do you find your interviewees?
Rather than typing words or phrases blindly into search engines in an effort to find that "center mass" of expertise, you'll have more success if you follow the tips outlined in this article.
Google, or any search engine, has a great deal of potential when it comes to identifying candidates for a series of IDIs. Although anyone can search for anything with Google, the search engine supports many advanced techniques that are particularly useful for identifying interview candidates.
For example, Google can help you identify people who have given presentations on a particular subject.
Since PowerPoint is the lingua franca of presentations, you can use the "filetype" directive to narrow your search. By typing "solar power filetype:ppt" (or filetype:pptx or filetype:pdf), for example, you can limit the results to presentations on the topic, and those presentations often contain the presenter's contact information.
If you know of particular places where likely candidates "hang out," you can further constrain your search to those URLs by using the "site" directive, as in "solar power filetype:pdf site:ciomagazine.com."
Similarly, you can direct your search to a conference website or an organization that hosts several conferences for a given industry (e.g., Gartner or O'Reilly for the software industry) and get useful results.
Use Google Images (images.google.com) to search for corporate organizational charts, which can tell you the roles that might exist in a target industry and potentially the contact information for key individuals in the organizational hierarchy. Searching Google for filetype:vsd returns organizational charts developed in Microsoft Visio.
SlideShare.net
Another place to look for industry experts is SlideShare.net, a website dedicated to hosting presentations. A simple search of your topic can lead you to recent presentations by thought leaders, members of key business or software organizations, and other enthusiasts. Contact information is usually embedded within presentations.
Corporations, Case Studies, and Interviews
Most corporations spend a lot of time interviewing their customers to determine what successes those customers have had in deploying the companies' products.
Such interviews can prove to be a treasure trove of profile and title information for senior and midlevel members of an organization. Google can make your search easier by constraining it so that it points directly to a case-study site (e.g., "solar powers site:www.acme.com/casestudies/*").
Summits
Look for summits or regional conferences on the topic you are researching. If it's a B2B or a sizable B2C topic, odds are good that a slew of conferences, seminars, and one-day events relating to the topic have been held during the last year.
Lists of speakers who appear at those events can be comprehensive resources for gaining access to experts on the subject.
When looking for individuals around the world, search the regional magazines of a larger publication. For example, CIO magazine has several regional websites and regional magazines. Those sites and their associated print publications target a singular country or locale.
CIO magazine's Finnish site contains articles and information different from those on its US site, so if you can't read Finnish or Swedish, don't worry. The rough translation provided by www.google.com/translate should be clear enough to get you the name of a person mentioned on the site and some understanding as to whether that person qualifies for your study.
