While I was at the speed networking event I described in an earlier post, one of the discussions had to do with following up with contacts when looking for jobs or projects. One woman said she subscribes to the Wall Street Journal and looks through it every day in the hopes of finding something worthy to send to important contacts.

I suggested something else.

When you search a topic in Google News, Google will ask you if you would like daily alerts on the topic. What I did is search for the topics germane to what I do (e.g. branding, relationship building, market research, public relations measurement, etc.) and told Google to send me alerts. Certainly most days I do not see anything I want to pass along to my colleagues, but some days I do. And they can come from some unexpected sources. One article on branding I sent out to acquaintances came from a South African business publication. I would never have thought to look for an article in this publication, because I did not even know it existed. But Google looked for the topic and found it.

Another idea is to build in your Outlook lists of people interested in the your topics, so when you do see a good article, it is easy to send it to the people you think will care.