Let’s say you’re working on something that would benefit from the perspective of a really knowledgeable person in addition to yourself.  In fact, you probably are.

I think people, especially smart ones focused on particular fields, are the ultimate source of knowledge and insight because they are dynamic.  They just keep going.  Books and articles and such are great – but there’s nothing like finding a really great person for taking your understanding of the work you’re doing to the next level.

I’ve been in the people-finding business for almost a decade now, but today online a friend asked me how to find people who aren’t on social media.

I came up with this list of 5 ways.  What am I missing?

Ask people who are on social media

Social media is the easiest way to discover relevant people, either based on what they’ve published or based on who is connected to them.  The easiest way to find people is on the internet, and one of the best ways to find people who aren’t on the internet is to ask the people you find who are, who else you should talk to.

Search news

It would be great to extract this automatically, but just for a fresh test: I searched for “artificial intelligence” and “social justice” on Google News and the first result that wasn’t a TED Talk was an article about a conference and the first name in it was of an important college professor who has no Twitter account, 9 contacts on LinkedIn, and a blank avatar on Facebook.  He’s got a big CV though.

Search books (try Google Talk to Books)

Google’s new semantic search engine of books, called Talk to Books, is a pretty great way to explore around any topic.

Go to events

You know who the king of going to events and finding incredible people is? Kent Bye, host of Voices of VR and Voices of AI.  Thats where he gets his interviews.  And he has done hundreds, if not thousands, of interviews.

Leade.rs

Loic Le Meur’s new startup Leade.rs is a great looking way to find public speakers on hot topics.  It’s a directory. Is it social media?  Maybe.

Also: From the remarkable new Pew study titled “The Future of Well-Being in a Tech-Saturated World,” based on responses of more than 1,000 experts, some perspective:  Stephen Downes, a senior research officer at the National Research Council Canada, commented, “The internet will help rather than harm people’s well-being because it breaks down barriers and supports them in their ambitions and objectives. We see a lot of disruption today caused by this feature, as individuals and companies act out a number of their less desirable ambitions and objectives. Racism, intolerance, greed and criminality have always lurked beneath the surface, and it is no surprise to see them surface. But the vast majority of human ambitions and objectives are far more noble: people desire to educate themselves, people desire to communicate with others, people desire to share their experiences, people desire to create networks of enterprise, commerce and culture. All these are supported by digital technologies, and while they may not be as visible and disruptive as the less-desirable objectives, they are just as real and far more massive.”