In just over a year, our
Search Engine Land
group on LinkedIn has grown to nearly 3,600 members. Despite new features
being added for group management, I still feel like I’m banging my head against
the wall in hoping the groups become more usable. So, a short wish list
including the ability to message members directly rather than exporting email
addresses and block competitive ads:
- Allow For Moderated Discussions: We recently switched on
discussions, and it’s pretty amazing how the community within our group is
already interacting. But I’m still wary of someone starting a "discussion"
only to use it for self-promotional purposes. Let the group owner see proposed
discussions and allow them to go public if they meet with the owner’s
approval.
- Allow For Block & Kill On Discussions: It’s nice that if someone
submits an inappropriate news story, I can kill the story and block the user.
Let me do the same for discussions.
- Email Or Feed Of Discussion Activity: Sure, I can see a digest of
what discussions have been started in the group. However, unless I’ve missed
it, there’s no way to see the actual comments (and there are plenty of them)
in the discussion without going to the site. That would be nice.
- Customized Group Home Page: I don’t want discussion to be the top
item on the page. I want news to be there. But I can’t alter this. Nor can I
put up a welcoming message or any type of reminder that discussions and news
articles shouldn’t be self-promotional. Give me some options here.
- Featured Discussion: No problem here! I just love that you have
this feature allowing me to put a discussion at the top of the discussion
list, if I so choose. Thanks!
- Auto-Submit News: Our group is tied to our news web site, so I’d
like to auto-submit our news items. No can do, as best I can tell. Let me
submit a feed or feed as the list owner of items I think the entire group
should see.
- Allow For Moderated News Submission: As with discussions, as the
list owner, I’d like to see and approve news items that are submitted, to make
sure they’re not self-promotional.
- Message All Members/Members Newsletter: This is crazy. If I want to
message everyone in my group, my only option is to start a discussion or
export their names for use with a mailing list program. I don’t want to export
names. We run double opt-in for our mailing list software. When I export from
LinkedIn to contact members, I have to explain that we’ve taken there names
from the LinkedIn list and that if they don’t want future mailings, they need
to unsubscribe from the group. And whenever we do a new mailing (which is
pretty rare, maybe three or four times per year), we have to pull a fresh list
of members. This should all run from within LinkedIn, so that members can
directly control their communication preferences.
- Block Competitive Ads: Seriously, my chief competitor gets to run
ads for their conference targeting my group? Yeah, I’m not happy about that.
Yeah, I know you need to make money. Still, let me block those ads — you can
get ads from other people. Think I’m just whining? Go ask Google about
backlash when anti-Proposition 8 web sites found that pro-Proposition 8 groups
were running ads on their site. I should be able to block. And if I can’t
block, then I might have to take my thriving community away from LinkedIn.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Danny – This is very informative. Thank you. It shares much of what it takes to manage a group, and makes me think twice about creating one!
Danny,
I am in linkedin and do use to post articles.
From your standpoint, where those articles should go? Discussion? News?