I Always Google Too Late
October 2nd, 2006 Sean Murphy
Triggered by “Google Me This, Batman” I will try and make some different points. I don’t know how many times I have come back from an meeting (or event or trade show) with business cards or notes on my 3×5 cards and run the people and company names through Google to discover things that would have helped me if I had known them a few hours earlier.Â
It’s not that hard to use Google, I probably spend an hour or two a day following links from searches I have run. But I tend to start from other on-line articles I am reading and not research in anticipation of who I will be meeting. LinkedIn is probably the second most useful search tool if you are trying to get a context on someone.
Two hours a day in Google? That’s a bet you could have won from me ten years ago. Our TV picture tube died about a month ago and I find I have about ten to fifteen hours a week of extra time (funny how much time is taken up by only watching “a little” TV). I think the big win has been missing commercials. But my DSL went out and I had phantom limb pain for my missing Internet connection the next day, I didn’t realize how much I had come to rely on it.
Anyway, I now try to
- spend at least five minutes reviewing the Google results (for web and groups) of people or companies I anticipate encountering.
- if it’s a company, notice what ads come up as well
- if the company has a website see what publications they list as covering them and search the archives for other articles.
- check who else is linked to their site using the Google link: command (or use Advanced Search, pages that link to this page)
- check and see if the person has a LinkedIn profile.
- Read the last half dozen entries (at least) of their blog, if they have one.
- Depending upon the industry it may also be worth a few minutes searching some trade publication archives that may not be deeply indexed by Google (e.g. EE Times for semiconductor and EDA firms/players).
I would welcome any comments or suggestions on what you do to prepare for potential or likely conversations.
Entry Filed under: Rules of Thumb
3 Comments Add your own
1. SKMurphy » Nusym De&hellip | October 21st, 2006 at 12:44 am
[…] The company has attracted funding Remembering to Google, I learned that the Woodside fund (OK they don’t list it directly, but they point to this Aug/2005 Economic Times article and Ashish Gupta’s bio does), Draper Richards, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson (again not in their portfolio list but found in their 20 Year Anniversary Book) all had invested. Also some of the Silicom Ventures folks. […]
2. SKMurphy » Beyond Google:&hellip | January 25th, 2007 at 12:33 am
[…] I had lamented that I always Google too late, but lately I’ve been getting better. Here are some tools to use beyond Google and LinkedIn for searching for different kinds of specialized information. […]
3. SKMurphy » Strategy&hellip | April 26th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
[…] I caught this tweet on the VentureHacks Twitter feed but in checking with Mr. Google I discovered it was part of the Balanced Scorecard methodology. An excerpt from Dr. David Norton’s “Measuring Value Creation with the Balanced Scorecard” a summary is available here. “Strategy is a hypothesis. Strategy implies the movement of an organization from it’s present position to a desirable but uncertain future position. Since the organization has never been to this future position, the pathway of how it intends to get there involves a series of linked hypotheses.” […]
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