Alumni Groups and LinkedIn: 7 Additional Considerations

Last week Kyle James of Wofford College blogged about setting up a LinkedIn Group for alumni. His comments may be instructional to anyone who hasn't yet looked at the Groups function on the LinkedIn site.

Since Kyle mentioned Caltech, I thought I'd comment on our three and a half year experience with LinkedIn Groups at the Caltech Alumni Association. This isn't the "update to the pros and cons of LinkedIn alumni groups" that I mentioned when I commented on his posting, but this may still be of interest.

Growth of Caltech Alumni Group since launch* [click image to view full size]

LinkedIn Groups have been available since 2005, but with limited functionality; see part two of my posting about this from exactly a year ago. The Caltech alumni group launched in May 2005. The chart above shows the growth of our total group membership (in red) over the monthly rate of growth (as measured by new members per month, shown in black). Note that Caltech has about 20,000 contactable alumni.

OK. So what?

1) Verifying alumni status
I think there is more overhead to maintaining a group than Kyle implies in his description. Specifically, you must verify the alumni status of those trying to join your group if you intend the group to be for alumni (and students). If you don't verify alumni or student status, then your group will quickly be overrun with corporate recruiters. At Caltech we allow current and former postdocs to join the Group, as they are also eligible for Alumni Association membership.

2) Working beyond the alumni network
Kyle presents a hypothetical alumnus who uses LinkedIn to "search [for] alumni who either live in Boston or are lawyers and [to] make a connection that is much more likely to contact them back and be helpful..." This makes sense: use the alumni connection to find a contact. But how likely is that contact to be one of the other Wofford alumni?

Not very likely. But that's OK — with only a couple of hundred connections, a Wofford group member can reach millions of potential contacts. With my 290 LinkedIn connections, I have access to more than 3,081,000 individuals within three degrees of me. And just 50 of my 290 direct connections are members of the Caltech Group.

So, there is great potential value in LinkedIn to alumni using the alumni network as the first step to searching an expanded network (that includes many more non-alumni than alumni). You are expanding your resource pool dramatically by searching for connections even 2 degrees away. (Incidentally, as the Caltech group has reached just over 10% of alumni, Kyle's goal of 200 alumni Group members is probably a good initial target for a school of Wofford's size.)

This example shows the strength of weak ties. You may not find a fellow alum who has the experience or knowledge or connections you need, but you will likely find one who knows the person you are seeking.

So the way to get the most out of the LinkedIn network is to work beyond the alumni network. This is one reason why alumni online directories attract such a dismal number of users. The searches suddenly seem depressingly limited — and limiting — in the shadow of massive networking databases like LinkedIn. The number of people who have joined the Caltech group on LinkedIn since 2005 is roughly comparable to the number of alumni who have logged in to the alumni directory on our web site at least one time since 2004.

3) Spreadsheet tracking
Kyle mentioned that "LinkedIn doesn't provide any sort of metrics." I agree there's a lack of reporting from LinkedIn, a black mark against the service. So his idea of tracking via spreadsheet is sensible, and that's how we've kept tabs on the data in the chart above. Groups that have existed for some time can retrieve historical data by exporting the Group membership list as a .csv file and sorting members by date joined.

4) Viral growth...
...nudged along by the web presence Kyle described, plus periodic marketing via publications, Facebook, and e-newsletters, will lead to your Group's steady increase. The spike in our group's membership (May 2006 in the chart) resulted from marketing the alumni Group to people who were already members of LinkedIn but who had not yet joined our official alumni Group. Most people simply weren't aware of it, and our membership doubled almost overnight. Our second year saw the Group grow 55% over year one. The third year saw growth of 34% over year two. In the first quarter of year four we've seen 11% growth.

5) Setting goals
As Kyle says, this can be important. Our stretch goal is simple (and on one level, simplistic): we want LinkedIn to replace our online alumni directory as the tool people use to find the resources they need — inside or outside the alumni network. Having said that, we will probably extend the trend line on this chart and create some marketing ideas and membership targets to increase the slope over the next year or so.

6) Group totals versus LinkedIn totals
Almost 2,300 alumni (more than 10% of all Caltech alumni) are registered in the LinkedIn Caltech Group, and there are dozens of students and postdocs. When Groups launched as a new feature, there were 3 million users on LinkedIn. That number has increased ten times since then, as has our Group membership number. So the rate of our Group's growth since 2005 is in line with the site's overall growth since then. We're keeping up with the public adoption rate for this particular service.

7) Your Group logo and badge
Don't underestimate just how absurdly tiny the Group logo is when it shows up in an alum's LinkedIn profile or a search result. You must make any image, acronym or words as large as you reasonably can in the impossibly tiny 60 x 30 pixel space. Here are three groups' logos side by side. Click the image to see them the actual size they appear on the LinkedIn site:

Can you identify these three alumni groups? Merely resizing an old logo or banner to 60 x 30 pixels will not work. You have to create a legible image designed for this purpose. Too many LinkedIn Groups can't even be identified because of careless planning and design by Group owners.

Enough for now. When the recently added Group Discussions feature has had more time to mature, I'll take a look at its pros and cons right here.

* Chart data is from LinkedIn and Caltech Alumni Association

Comments

[Mason Porter]

Do you have a record of what happened in May 2006? Publicity in Caltech publications? An announcement at Reunion Weekend?

Keeping up with the growth of LinkedIn is the result you'd expect for any group like this just with an initial announcement of the group's existence. (Actually, this is one of the kind of first results one would see with network growth models, though I won't be able to tell you exactly which papers discuss this specifically.) I think a key is to get a couple more isolated spikes and then rely on the usual channels.

[Kyle James]

Andy,
Thanks for this follow-up. You make some really great points. It is true my hypothetical situation is a best case scenario, but I like to think positive.

As far as the monitoring of who is allowed to join we had a detailed discussion with both our Career Services and Alumni departments about should we limit to just alumni or beyond this. It was finally decided that friends of the college would be included in this. What does this mean? Well basically I look at a profile to make sure that they either have Wofford listed in education or they have some sort of local connection that seems to make sense. We are also counting on the network itself to flush out a lot of the trash. Let's be honest here if someone misrepresents them self on LinkedIn then them being in our group is the least of their problems. LinkedIn does have the benefit over a network like Facebook because this is your professional identity and lying and gaining professional connections this way is career suicide. So yes we maybe are being overly optimistic, but until we get burned that is the way we have kind of decided to let it go.

[Andy Shaindlin]

Kyle: This topic is very important, but has many nuances. I don't want to leave a comment here that is longer than my original posting, so I'll limit my commments to this:

1) If the group is open to anyone who wants to join, then "misrepresenting" oneself is not the issue. 2) There are going to be many alumni who don't list Wofford in their profile (for whatever reason). How will you decide whether to let them in the group? You should look them up in your database. 3) Why let any "trash" (as you say) into your group at all, when you have the ability to prevent it in advance? By the time the network flushes it out, the damage is done - recruiter spam will be in your Group Discussions and in your Group members' mailboxes, and the Wofford logo and name will be on their profiles, visible to 25 million LinkedIn users. (And the current Discussion moderation tools are really lacking, so until LinkedIn fixes that, we won't be able to remove messages from public view.)

We devalue the alumni brand by not maintaining exclusivity in group membership. As we seek to break down silos on the one hand, and maintain the value of the alumni network on the other, this kind of balancing act becomes more difficult, and more critical, in my opinion. We will soon have very few tools that 1) allow us to maintain the value of the network (like a LI Group) and also 2) let us connect people with non-alumni who can add value to our alumni relations efforts (like the rest of the LI network can do).

Great discussion - I hope it continues (somewhere).

[Andrew Shaindlin]

Mason: The May '06 spike is due entirely to one effort: a joint message from LI and Caltech to Caltech alumni who were members of LI but were not (yet) members of the Caltech group there. We are planning to repeat this effort soon, but need to work with LI to make it happen. Stay tuned and thanks for the comment!