MMLGF 9: Linkedin Groups Privacy and Visibility

In this long series of post about Linkedin Groups I’ve been writing in the last two or three months I talked about some interesting things like new features linkedin groups should add, exporting information, accessing linkedin groups from your home page and more and more… Although I talked too much, I haven’t said a word about Linkedin groups visibility and privacy.

 

Linkedin groups are on these days semi-public. why? Because you have to invited or ask for being added to any group if you want to be part of it. Maybe you find a group by word of mouth, by doing a search or by any way you want but…

 

… But what if we don’t want to own a semi-public group? What if we want or need some group to be really open or really private so nobody see it?

 

I thought three different kind of groups’ privacy will be just perfect for users.

• Public Groups: There are some groups just open to anyone, without the need to register. It looks like current Linkedin Answers where everybody can ask and answer.
• Semi public Groups: These groups will only let members participate in the groups where non-members must ask for subscription. This is the way Linkedin groups are being created these days that let users create groups for specific regions or businesses.
• Private Groups: That kind of group let companies and people start their own groups without appearing in any Linkedin groups’ directory. That option would let businessmen do/prepare and invite people to meetings online as well as be informed from many different sources or communicate with partners or clients in a silent way.

 

As Private groups are not listed and you just can be member of by invitation , maybe this kind of groups should not be free but let Linkedin or any business social network implementing this decide…

 

This is post #9 of the (M)aking the (M)ost of (L)inkedIn (G)roups (F)unctionality (MMLGF) Series. Ideas for free

Linkedin Groups upgraded?

I started today reading a post about new features at Linkedin groups on the Vincent Wright’s great blog “Linkedin Business Discussion Index”.

 

Some hours later, I saw that the official Linkedin Blog also wrote something about Linkedin Groups new features: “What’s new in LinkedIn Groups? Learn more”.

 

So, when I had time, I enter into Linkedin.com and look at the new features on Linkedin Groups…

 

I hate to say but I’m a little dissapointed about all new features… I mean, sometime ago I wrote a post about a new Linkedin Groups version and I was expecting a really new and quite evolved new version of Linkedin Groups but to be a really bad man (maybe reallistic) what I see is just:

• a new form to add dinamically new groups.
• a “See all my groups” link on the lower, right side of your home page.
• a better group management interface.

 

I mean, this is not bad at all, because always (and twice always) new features are welcome, but … this is the new version I mentioned sometime ago? or this is just an upgrade before a big launch of a new Linkedin Groups version?

MMLGF 8: Exporting your LinkedIn groups activity (Blogging?)

Everybody knows that LinkedIn provide us with some tools and also with a website where we can do direct marketing about ourselves and our needs, and also find people (doing marketing about themselves) that can be future clients, partners or providers.

 

In previous posts on this long series, I’d been writing ideas like:

• Benefits on showing your activity on your public profile
• Advantages of using small boxes with each group’s information on our LinkedIn home
• Benefits on including LinkedIn Groups’ activity on LinkedIn Search

Implementation of those ideas would add great value and would let you do direct marketing easily. But, what other thing would add more value to you and your direct marketing task? The answer is exporting as RSS Feed, Web Services, etc all your LinkedIn (groups) activity.

 

Exporting your LinkedIn groups’ activity (for example your questions, your answers, some specific search or just whatever you can imagine) would be definitely great.

 

Why this is great? Because you will have the chance to show what you do, what you think, what you are looking at, what you are looking for and what you ……. (Complete with the verb you want).

So what? You would use all that staff not only inside LinkedIn but also outside of it.

What are the benefits for users?

• If you export what you ask, then you can put those questions anywhere and, first, bring traffic and readers to LinkedIn. Second, promote your question anywhere probably getting more answers and, third, be aware of how important your questions are, how much readers your questions have by using some RSS Feed tools like feedburner.com.
• If you export your answers then in some way these spread answers you do can be taken as a group and share all together like if you were writing a blog. So, your answers are your blog…
• If you export some specific search, then you are building a feed with some kind of “what I’m reading”.
• If you export what you ……. (Completed before with the verb you wanted) then you can do what you want (do business, implement your website with “best answers”, etc.)

 

This is post #8 of the (M)aking the (M)ost of (L)inkedIn (G)roups (F)unctionality (MMLGF) Series.

MMLGF 7: LinkedIn Groups activity included on Linkedin Search

In previous posts on this MMLGF Series I talked about using the information you and your LinkedIn groups produce by adding it to your public profile. That way you can do marketing about yourself (or maybe about your company services as well, or even your objectives whatever those would be) even better than now.

 

This issue is very important because you can show yourself better and actively but I guess there is somewhere your LinkedIn groups’ activity should be included: LinkedIn Search.

 

How your LinkedIn groups’ activity can be used in Search? I imagine lot of ways but I guess there are some places where/when that feature should be included:

• You answer a question and your answer was classified as a good one, then some related words (maybe using some keywords included in the question) can be added to your keywords so you can be found when someone looks for that precise keyword.
• Like LinkedIn Recommendations we can think about having some “expertise” from your activity / number of answers / questions so you can make a gift to someone that you know or consider he/she has great expertise. It’s like a recommendation that impact directly into your chance to be found when someone makes a search.

 

For sure those ideas would bring more participation and traffic to LinkedIn because what you do is used by LinkedIn for you directly and indirectly. With directly, I mean what you do will let you do direct marketing about your needs and I consider indirect usage when LinkedIn takes some keywords on your good answers on a topic at a LinkedIn Group and add these as a way to find you.

 

This is post #7 of the (M)aking the (M)ost of (L)inkedIn (G)roups (F)unctionality (MMLGF) Series.

MMLGF 6: Making Connections with LinkedIn Groups members

One of the most important features at LinkedIn is to establish direct connections with other people that let you:

• Do business with them
• Consume/provide services from/to them
• Grow your network for future business
• Grow your network so your chance to be found and find the right people grows too.

 

With LinkedIn groups your chance to find someone you want to connect with grows drastically. At LinkedIn Groups you are making direct contact with lot of people you’d like to meet like ones that:

• Offers some services you also offer
• Consume some services you offer
• A possible client
• A possible partner
• Entrepreneur in your industry
• Innovators in your industry

 

In the process of writing this series of posts, LinkedIn added a feature that is perfect for this topic… When you add someone to your network at LinkedIn, you always must say how you meet the guy you are inviting (Colleague at work, university), friend, family and a new one: LinkedIn groups.

 

These new choice let you add a user to your network without knowing user’s email address by just saying you want to add a user because you have met him/her at a LinkedIn Groups. This way, you can make direct contact with some business related people that you meet in a group quite more easily than before.

 

This is post #6 of the (M)aking the (M)ost of (L)inkedIn (G)roups (F)unctionality (MMLGF) Series.

MMLGF 5: Your LinkedIn Groups at your LinkedIn home page

Showing LinkedIn Groups’ activity into your public profile is with no doubts something really useful as a way of marketing yourself. But doing marketing of yourself must be followed by some tool that let you manage, work and monitor the stuff you are trying to promote.

Accessing LinkedIn Groups you are member of into your home page (not your public profile) would make your home quite more useful and dynamic than now. For example, we can think about adding it:

· Specific group’s information, like details, questions, member list, etc. for each group

• · Last questions asked in each or all groups.
• · Links to questions you asked or answered to get direct access to them.
• · List of group members who are more involved with it.

Accessing your LinkedIn groups from your LinkedIn home, getting some information about them and sharing some of your LinkedIn groups’ activity at your public profile should add great value not only to you but also to LinkedIn. You are adding value because you are promoting yourself better, and also having direct access to what you are interested about. LinkedIn is also adding value because offering a better access to your groups let you interact, participate and promote yourself better, and that cause more traffic, more information and more value to LinkedIn website.

 

This is post #5 of the (M)aking the (M)ost of (L)inkedIn (G)roups (F)unctionality (MMLGF) Series.

MMLGF 4: Showing your LinkedIn Groups activity at your public profile

LinkedIn public profile let users to show who they are, what they do and what are their interests and history. LinkedIn Groups are groups to collect and contact people with similar interests. So, if LinkedIn groups new version coming up in late September or my idea of LinkedIn groups I’m posting on this MMLGF series include some functionality like a Question and Answer section, why not to include each user activity into their public profile?

 

That way asking and answering into LinkedIn groups will not only help you and others in specifics topics you are talking about but also will let you promote the activity you have on each and every LinkedIn groups you are subscribed to. So, what are the benefits? Well, I think if you choose to publish that information into your public profile is because you have something positive about you and what you are doing to show there so anyone looking for you can see it.

 

I mean, the current version of LinkedIn groups just let you put you have some interests on something, but if you do something interesting into those LinkedIn groups you are subscribed to, why not to show you are doing something there? I guess doing that (including LinkedIn groups’ activity) will let you show more information about what LinkedIn public profile is about: show who you are, what are your interests and most important: what do you do.

 

I don’t know if this idea is good but with this, LinkedIn groups’ participation will help everyone into promote their own activity and, consequently, add quite more value to your LinkedIn public profile.

This is post #4 of the (M)aking the (M)ost of (L)inkedIn (G)roups (F)unctionality (MMLGF) Series.

MMLGF 3: Exporting information and generating alerts from LinkedIn Groups

Making websites with APIs and Feeds has its sense. When providing an API anyone could build great services over the website existing platform achieving benefits for themselves (offering new services for users on the existing website) and the existing website (promoting it). By providing Feeds, not only website’s information and data could be exported automatically by software components but also, and more important, could be read and used offline or at least, being disconnected from the source website.

Feeds give websites the chance to export information and consume external services automatically. Feeds consumers (web applications like netvibes.com or popurl.com and especially Feed Readers like Google Reader, bloglines.com or desktop feed readers like BlogBridge) let users a way to consume different website and applications information without going into websites but also, in some cases, exporting the information to see what they want or need.

As I mentioned in a previous post applied to LinkedIn.com Question and Answer section, filtering and combination of feeds is also very useful when thinking about LinkedIn Groups (or this “LinkedIn Groups” idea I have in my mind). But, wouldn’t be better for users to have Feed Exportation of specific user’s queries they need or want inside Linkedin, instead of going offsite with feeds URL and make that “filter and combine” onto other website?

Using Feeds from users’ queries and adding advanced search functionality to LinkedIn Groups would let find and export information like:

• Questions from a whole Group
• A particular thread (A Question and its answers)
• A Threads list where some users had asked or answer (yourself, one of your connections or someone you just want to know what he is talking about).
• Queries results I talked about on MMLGF #2 to get questions or threads:
  • Matching specific keyword search.
  • Asked/answered by your connections.
  • Popular threads.
  • Asked/answered today.
  • Asked/answered by some people you are interested in.
  • Tagged by you before.

But, feeds are not everything… we can think about receiving alerts into email inbox, LinkedIn inbox or even directly to our mobile phone. That way, we can be offline but completely online all the time reading feeds into our feed readers from specific queries we want and receiving some alerts into many different ways…

Definitely, with all this, LinkedIn Groups will be great!!!

This is post #3 of the (M)aking the (M)ost of (L)inkedIn (G)roups (F)unctionality (MMLGF) Series.

Linkedin Groups will have soon a new version!!!

while I was reading Linkedin Q&A section just some minutes ago, I found something interesting to say about Linkedin Groups …

I found on this question “What’s the prognosis for LinkedIn for Groups?” an answer from the Corporate Development Manager at LinkedIn, Steven Stegman, saying :

“It’s coming back in September–the new version should be pretty cool. “

So… maybe all my posts seris about Linkedin groups are completely useless  :D  Anyway, I guess it will be useful, maybe not for this version of linkedin groups but for the next one, or for another business social network

We don’t know any features yet, but I hope to hear some news soon.

MMLGF 2: What we need to get and find on LinkedIn Groups

After the first post about features that LinkedIn or any other business social network group implementation should have, I will talk about how users use those groups what they need to find and get from there.

As you know, nowadays there are lot of applications (web apps and desktop apps) built based on great ideas, with fantastic features. But as you also know sometimes those great ideas are not well developed and users get some features they will never use and they don’t get some features they really need. I mean applications are built based on ideas without thinking about how will users need this idea to be built.

In my career I’ve seen quite a lot of groups’ websites and I think all of them have some important defects. Some of them don’t let users make a search, others don’t let look for members, some others don’t have the chance to export things from inside the group, others just don’t focus the navigation correctly and others just don’t let users search in other way than keyword search.

I think users using a group website not only need to have features I mentioned on the MMLFG #1 but also have some chances to get or find specific staff on the forum. Focusing especially on business social networks groups like LinkedIn groups I think users will need good ways to find topics (questions and/or answers) that:

• match specific keyword search.
• asked/answered by your connections.
• with more than certain number of answers (popular topics?).
• asked/answered today.
• asked/answered by some people you are interested in.
• tagged by you before.

As a conclusion, with advanced search possibilities like the ones I mentioned above and some others someone will need, I think users will for sure use those groups not only because they are interested in the topics groups cover but also because they can find and get what they really need. Advanced Search let users don’t waste time and look just for the information they want.

As a final word, if we make a last little effort then it would be great if we can save those advanced search we usually do for later use, and then just execute them.

On the next MMLGF post I will talk about “Exporting information and generating alerts from LinkedIn Groups”. Hope you go on reading me and please just leave any comment you want so I know what you are expecting from this MMLGF series.

 

This is post #2 of the (M)aking the (M)ost of (L)inkedIn (G)roups (F)unctionality (MMLGF) Series.