Late last week LinkedIn launched Discussions for Groups. Until now Groups performed limited service, allowing members to message each other directly and allowing organizations (like alumni associations) to display a logo in members' profiles and in search results.
The new Discussions feature allows a Group member to post a discussion topic; other members can then comment. LinkedIn's only other attempt at community-building, the LinkedIn Answers function, is a hit-or-miss affair; many of the so-called questions serve solely as vehicles for users' pre-established opinions, while others ask questions that could easily be answered with Google and some common sense.
There should be more on the way for Groups. According to LinkedIn's Ben Guthrie via the company's corporate blog,
This is the first step in a series of upgrades to the Groups functionality that you will be seeing in the months to come. In addition to discussions, given below are three [sic] more new feature enhancements to LinkedIn Groups:
- Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.
- Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members.
- Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
- Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics.
Discussion forums just launched, of course (so it looks like this posting was written a while ago and published without being updated). Also, it's not clear whether the "Group home page" is what currently exists under the Overview tab, or is something yet to come.
Meanwhile there are some bugs to be worked out and some obvious functions missing. Group membership numbers are not displayed accurately, member lists are not sortable (though you can search for name or keyword), and there are discrepancies in the views that Group members at large and group managers can see.
This summer's launch of a searchable directory of Groups on LinkedIn led to an explosion of new (and newly-discovered) Groups, including alumni associations'. But the Discussions functionality needs to advance rapidly to keep up with the expectations and needs of LinkedIn members.
Here are enhancements that I think would be useful (some of these are mentioned in comments on LinkedIn's blog):
- a mouse-over view of the basic profile info for someone requesting to join a group;
- pre-setting a welcome message to send to new Group members;
- simple import for calendar or event information (e.g., professional conferences for industry meetings);
- tagging of Discussion posts, or advanced searchability;
- optional moderation of postings so spam or objectionable content can be intercepted;
- a Discussions widget to embed in other sites (such as blogs or organization homepages), to make content portable.
(They should also fix the system-wide typo in the screen shot shown above.)
So what would you like to see in LinkedIn Discussions for alumni association or campus-wide groups? How are Discussions working for your Groups so far?
