Have you ever wanted to contact someone but could not find an email address? Below are some tips from Rich Sauser, our guest blogger today.

Rich is a networking expert and is often quoted in the media. He is sought after as a presenter and I was glad to have Rich working with me when I started my company. Currently residing in Charlotte, you can contact Rich through many social networking sites. Thanks to Rich for sharing these tips with our readers.

photo credit: Katie@!

Here’s Rich…

Have you ever wanted to connect with someone on LinkedIn, but they were out of your network and there was no easy way to connect? You can still try to get an introduction but it may take a bit creative of work outside of LinkedIn. Recently, someone asked me how to connect with someone in the County of McHenry Department of Health in Illinois. Although I have over 1,200 first degree contacts in LinkedIn, there are not a lot of people on LinkedIn from the McHenry County Health Department.

Listed below is the approach I used to find someone who could potentially introduce me to the person I wanted to contact.

1. Look up the company the person works at on LinkedIn and see if there is anyone else you can connect with or contact. In this case there were a few but not too many:
2. In this case there was nothing really there, but I was able to get the website of the company:
3. What you are now looking for is the format of the email address of people who work there (e.g. FirstName.LastName@CompanyName.com)
4. First thing I do is go to the “Contact Us” page – sometimes when you attempt to contact them it will pull up in your email and you will get the format.
5. By going to Public Health and clicking the “contact us” I get the following address: Health@co.mchenry.il.us – while better than nothing it is still a generic email account.
6. So now having nothing else to go on, you need to do a Google Search to get the name format. In this case I did a search on “@co.mchenry.il.us”. A few hits down, you will see your first listing of a name followed by the “@co.mchenry.il.us“
7. Based on the email addresses shown, I have a couple of options for the email format: first letter of first name and then last name or first letter first name, first letter of middle initial and then last name.
8. So now I can either do a search on Google for the person I am trying to contact with both versions of their email address or I can send an email to both versions and see which one works.