[Updated 24 October 2009: Liz Allen is blogging about "managing communciations, technology, and social media at Adaptivate.]
[Updated 13 July 2009: The "Notes" feature mentioned below on 15 May has been broken for a while. Adding a note to a member's record reproduces that same note for other group members, over-writing your own previous annotation.]
[Updated 15 May 2009: Liz Allen notes that LinkedIn has added a "Notes" feature to the queue for pending group membership approvals, something she proposed to LinkedIn a long time ago. "You can put in a note about an individual pending request," says Liz, "and the other group managers can see it. This will be useful for groups that have more than one person approving group requests, and for managing work flow."]
[Updated 28 April 2009: link to Liz Allen's guest posting on the LinkedIn Blog.]
This post is written by Elizabeth Allen, associate director of alumni relations at the California Institute of Technology. You can follow her on Twitter @lizallen and read her thoughts at Adaptivate.
I have managed the Caltech Alumni Association's LinkedIn Group since its launch in May 2005. Every week we receive from 50 to 100 requests to join. And yes, I check every single request against the names in our alumni database. This is time consuming and not so fun, but I do it 1) to maintain the integrity of the group itself (no recruiters, thank you) and 2) to check alumni email addresses against our records.
LinkedIn's admin tools have remained relatively unchanged for the last four years. Some cosmetic differences, maybe. But recently LinkedIn did make some changes to the group administrative capabilities – some good, some not so good.
The Good:
- Group managers can post RSS feeds to the group. The feeds are in addition to individual articles and news stories posted by members of the group. You can also post more than one feed.
- Via LinkedIn, you can send an email blast to the members of your group, though the formatting leaves something to be desired. From what I can see, the messaging feature essentially automates a process you could have done by hand in the past: instead of downloading a list of group member email addresses and sending the message yourself, LinkedIn will do it for you.
Which leads me to
The Bad:
Group admins still have access to the individual addresses while a member's request is pending. But as admins, we've lost the ability to retrieve a list of all group members' email addresses. Once in the group, members' email addresses are hidden from the admin (unless you happen to be directly connected to the individual group member), and are no longer exportable en masse.
No more email addresses means one more barrier between an organization and data about its group members. Having access to that information – email addresses, as well as other user data that aren't downloadable by admins – would be really helpful. Are most of my group members located in urban areas? Foreign countries? How many are currently looking for work? How many have participated in a group discussion, or posted a job? How about the average number of connections? And the number of connections within the group? Crunching these numbers would help us as group managers determine the real value our alumni get from LinkedIn.
To accomplish this, I'd like access to a Google Analytics/Group Management hybrid: a dashboard where group admins can access data (like the kind I mentioned above) about their group and its members. Andy Shaindlin proposed a Group Manager's dashboard here in 2007.
The updated groups features for LinkedIn admins do add tools that make it easier for individuals to disseminate information. And communication and connectivity among group members are key reasons to have a group in the first place. Tools like this add value to the group member experience, and I have no doubt that our LinkedIn group is a useful resource for alumni. I'd just like something more than anecdotal evidence to prove it.
*
Note: Speaking of LinkedIn Groups, the group Alumni Nets will serve professionals using LinkedIn for alumni groups. If you manage a LinkedIn alumni group, or want to discuss online alumni communities, you can join Alumni Nets.
