I recently took on a research question that required me to look for online and first-person information that referred to multiple overseas locations. At first glance, it appeared that the core question and the supporting issues could be answered with a few email exchanges complemented by some online research. As the responses started to roll in, it became clear that my initial assumptions were not entirely accurate.

The information I thought I was going to find in the public domain wasn’t as easy to locate as I had hoped. Instead, I found some of the data was available but gaps still remained. By this stage, I recognized that my working research knowledge might not have identified all of the options available to me. So I turned to the social networks that I am involved with and posed a question. In this case I used LinkedIn and was quite pleasantly surprised with the responses.

Within just a day after I posted the question I began receiving responses that were both informative and free of obvious self-promotion. Also, the replies were entirely on topic and didn’t attempt to redirect the conversation to an unrelated issues or websites. Overall, I can recommend the Q&A services at LinkedIn as a good supplemental resource for more information. In this case I was searching for data that might have been available for purchase from information services such as Hoovers, but I was impressed to see that my contacts in LinkedIn (and people outside of my connections) were able to expand the list of potential information sources, both free and fee-based.

It will be interesting to see how future questions will be answered depending on their complexity and niche. I am sure that I will be spending more time on LinkedIn to try and answer questions posed by other users in light of my positive experience so far.