By James Snider

Have you ever tried to contact someone but were not sure if you had the email address right?  You guessed “First Name dot  Last Name at Company Name dot com”.  You sent the email…it did not bounce back but you got no response.  There are ways to find email addresses sometimes but other times, you just have to guess.  At Texas Instruments, the norm is “First Initial Last Name at TI dot com”.  At Sabre it is “First Name dot Last Name at Sabre dot com”.  But that is only correct most of the time…not 100%.

LinkedIn can help you out.

Try this.

1. If the person is on LinkedIn, go to the “add connections” option on your LinkedIn account. LinkedIn will give you an option to “See who  you already know on LinkedIn” and will have your email address entered in an “Email” field.

2. You need to enter the password for your email account in the “Password” field and let LinkedIn search through your email account for everyone you have sent an email to.

3.If the email address you used for the person you are trying to reach is the same email address as LinkedIn has for that person, he or she will show up in the results returned from LinkedIn.

You have just verified that you have the same email address for that person as LinkedIn does.  LinkedIn will not normally give you this information unless you are already connected to the person, but you can get it by going through this backdoor to LinkedIn.

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James Snider is a specialist in global marketing and social media marketing. He writes a blog on Using Social Media in the Job Search.

Reprinted with permission.

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Friday, January 29th, 2010, 7:37 am   |   LinkedIn  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback