alumni futures

LinkedIn for Groups: Who Benefits?

[Updated Oct. 2 to reflect restoration of the Current Member Count for Group Admins]

[Updated Sept. 27 to reflect addition of profile links as described in bulleted suggestions, below]:

This posting is in two parts:

1. announced upgrades to LinkedIn's Group service, and
2. whether the Groups function really holds value for sponsoring organizations.

If you're only interested in the second topic, skip to the last section.

1. LinkedIn for Groups - Upgraded?
A LinkedIn corporate blog posting on September 21 announced that the Groups function on LinkedIn had been "upgraded." Among new features, it said, is a form for creating a group, and the promise to process the form in 1-2 business days. This is welcome news for sure, as the turnaround time for creating groups had become weeks instead of days, and as of this past week the service had been "closed," with a promise to re-open in late September. And so it has.

So where are the new Group management features? The blog posting said, in part:

We have made several enhancements to the group management interface. All of the links are clearly listed in the box on the left side of the page. Some of the functions you can do as a manager are (i) view the group members, (ii) invite and accept new members, and (iii) edit the group info.

Only item (iii) is actually new - and even then, the feature isn't new, just the direct access for group admins. Group managers could always view membership, and process memberships on the site. The "edit group info" feature is fine, but should have been implemented a long time ago - it allows you to add a sentence about your group, and a link to your home page. This is rudimentary and has no functional impact on group management (although it's nice to have direct control over the URL and description of my own group).

In one way, the "upgrade" is actually a step backward because LinkedIn has removed the only metric for group managers that it ever provided on the site: the number of members in your group. This used to appear clearly at the top of the page where current members were listed; now it's gone. To find out how many are in your group, you need to export the list of members to your computer, then launch Excel and view the list as a spreadsheet, and scroll to the bottom to see how many lines are in the spreadsheet. LinkedIn refers to this as "an easy way" to see the number of members, but it's not. This appears to be sheer laziness on the part of LinkedIn.

A customer service rep from LinkedIn did send a couple of courteous and responsive emails when I asked about this. She said "through the redesign of the site the option of a total number was lost." But we already knew this. In a follow-up email, she said it's "a good possibility" that the number of members function will be added back in when the next re-design occurs. That's good, but it still falls short of a reasonable standard of utility for the site.

[NOTE: As of October 2, the Current Member Count has been added back to the Admin view. Thank you LinkedIn.]

Here are my suggestions for the kinds of reports that would make LinkedIn Groups useful, and that could be provided via a simple dashboard for group admins:

• the number of members in your group;
• the number of connections per group member;
• the percentage of connections that are wholly within the group; and
• traffic statistics for group members (such as number and frequency of logins, site stickiness, number of profile updates, number of searches per user, and success rate for connection requests).
• In addition, Caltech's Liz Allen suggested to LinkedIn several months ago that pending Group membership requests include a link to the requester's profile - providing a quick way to recognize the many recruiters and random "open networkers" who are joining every group in sight (but who are not eligible to join closed groups like alumni associations).

[Update: As of Sept. 27 this last feature is now implemented! A valuable improvement.]

Do you think I have missed the newness of "upgraded" items on the site? If so, tell us your point of view by leaving a comment, or send me an e-mail - I will update this posting with corrected info from LinkedIn, or from other users.

2. LinkedIn Groups: Who Benefits?
LinkedIn Groups do one thing above all: they drive new membership for LinkedIn. How? By using pre-existing group affinities to encourage copycat behavior on the site. "You joined the alumni group on LinkedIn? I'm an alumnus too, so I better join the group as well."

Alumni associations benefit by giving alumni in their closed network a way to connect fellow alumni with a larger, open network - in this case, all the non-alumni they are connected to via LinkedIn. They also have their logo and name displayed, albeit on a tiny scale and in marginalized locations on the site.

Alumni benefit by displaying their academic pedigree for personal promotion and for networking.

So how much value can your alumni association derive from this? That calculation is yours to make - and hard to compute in the absence of quantitative information about your LinkedIn Group's membership and your group members' behavior. LinkedIn could help itself and the organizations (like mine) that it proudly displays on its Groups home page by giving us tools and data that will let us measure our success and theirs.

Software Vendors: IAC merging with iModules

Mike McCamon of iModules emailed a press release over today, announcing the merger of online community software vendor IAC with iModules. I think that means the acquisition of IAC by iModules, but Mike (or Don Philabaum of IAC) can clarify that for us, if they're allowed to discuss the terms.

In his note, Mike says

What's interesting to me is this is yet another acquisition/financing event in our market with previous news of [the] Blackbaud/eTapestry merger in addition to Convio and Kintera's funding efforts.

The online community software space remains very cost-competitive for vendors, and this trend will continue (some would say "until Google owns them all" but let's not get carried away). Meanwhile, the iModules press release was of the ordinary type, revealing each party's pleasure with the deal and mentioning that iModules now has "nearly 600 clients and over 12 million constituents."

Additional resources:

iModules' web site   

IAC's web site

Full text of press release at iModules' site

 

Recap: European Association for International Education

As mentioned, I recently spoke at the annual meeting of the European Association for International Education (EAIE). 2,600 international student exchange professionals from 75 countries gathered to compare notes and discuss trends and best practices. Since international students generally become international alumni, there is a small but motivated group within EAIE that considers the implications of this.

I'm still processing a lot of what I saw and heard, which ranged from assessing international rankings of universities to discussing the "student as customer."

The general attitude toward alumni relations (and by extension, fundraising) was that "North America is so far ahead" of the rest of world in this area. To me that is just another way of saying that "North American schools have a lot of baggage that they can't unload." This is exemplified by the comments I quoted here many weeks ago about volunteer management. Many well-established programs are saddled with structures, processes and events that we cannot, politically, afford to do away with. And yet, as times change we are expected to take advantage of each new opportunity that comes along.

Listening to EAIE attendees talk about the lack of alumni relations, career services or fundraising functions in their institutions, I felt a twinge of jealousy. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence: these developing programs look to North America for mature examples that they can learn from (and sometimes copy directly), while we look at their blank slates and think, "If only I had the opportunity to build a program from the ground up, I could be so much more effective."

Our programs all sit somewhere on the continuum between having every possible alumni service and having no alumni program at all. In the immediate future those of us in North America will meet many nascent programs part way, and perhaps be asked to help them build additional pieces based on our own experience. But I would encourage this group of new international professionals, struggling to create a culture of alumni relations, to invent its own programs that alumni will find relevant.

As this happens, those of us who are supposedly experts will learn a thing or two as well. Then we'll just need to summon up the courage to cross off our own lists one or two things that we frankly do not need any more, and replace them with something we can proudly label: "Not invented here."

My Five Favorite Google Searches

One of the interesting tools available to bloggers is a report each day on where visitors to your blog come from. I can find out, for example, what fraction came directly (e.g., by clicking a link in an RSS feed or email, or by having bookmarked my site). I can learn how many were referred by sites that link to Alumni Futures. And I can find out how many clicked through on a search result, from Google, for example.

The last one is interesting because I can also see what the searcher typed into the search engine. This tells me not only what kind of information people are looking for when it comes to alumni relations, but the degree to which Alumni Futures meets their needs. (Don't worry - I cannot see who did the searching!)

I've kept a reference list of search terms' popularity as a general guideline for future postings. But I also have a second list, search terms that made me laugh or shake my head when I saw them.

Here are my five favorites from the past several months. These are verbatim from real online searches:

• "ohio state alumni angry football tickets"
• "low and tight across your lap"
• "how to sue [blank] university and who to serve"
• "alumni associations more than asking for money"
• "alumni office stop asking for money"

Do you think the last two sort of cancel each other out?

Alumni Futures on College Web Editor Blog

Over at College Web Editor, Karine Joly has been kind enough to let me sound off about blogging and higher ed a little bit. She asked for my answers to her Three Questions to a Higher Ed Blogger, and I obliged. Topics also include social networking sites, since she asked for a basic comparison between LinkedIn and Facebook.

Check it out if you have a chance, and while you're there, subscribe to Karine's RSS feed so you can keep up to date with her site. (Not sure what RSS is? I discussed it in brief a few months ago. Click here to read that posting.)

European Association for International Education: Conference

This week I am traveling to the annual meeting of the European Association for International Education (EAIE). This is a large gathering of institutions interested both in sending students across borders for college and university experiences, and bringing students (including Americans) to their own campuses.

So what's the alumni angle? It's tangential. I've been asked to discuss my institution's experience with the LinkedIn business networking site, and to speculate on its pros and cons for student and alumni relations.* As I've discussed, we created an official Caltech alumni group on LinkedIn and encourage students, postdocs and alumni to use the system to find one another. And as I mentioned in a recent Alumni Futures posting about "the strength of weak ties," a sound long term strategy is to bridge the closed alumni network and other large, open networks to which our alumni belong, while educating networkers about the value of indirect connections.

I hope to bring back useful observations and ideas from my experience with EAIE. As someone not directly involved in the primary business of the 2,500 people attending (international student recruitment) my perspective is sure to be skewed, but sometimes that's what it takes to generate an insight or a new view of an old problem.

* My co-presenters are Dan Guhr of Illuminate Consulting Group and Greg Parkinson of the University of Tasmania.

Ohio U. Alumni Not Entitled to Claims Over Data Security

The many "alumni data breach" stories range from laptops left on airplanes to Social Security numbers posted inadvertently on public web pages to hackers breaking into databases. A series of this last type of incident occurred at Ohio University in 2006. Now, according to the Chronicle,

Ohio University may be turning the page on a string of high-profile hacking incidents that stung the institution last year. The university is already working its way through a thorough revamp of its beleaguered IT office, and now it appears to have dodged a lawsuit filed by two disgruntled alumni.

In the class action suit, alumni asked Ohio U. to cover the costs of credit-monitoring for those whose personal info was exposed when the school failed to secure its network. But the judge ruled that since "the alumni hadn't proved that they suffered any real damages" as a result of the slip up, they are not entitled to protection in the form of credit checks paid for by the school.

Campus officials' defense is technically correct: "There's no evidence that anyone whose personal data were exposed has been the victim of fraud or identity theft." In other words, "Wait until you're sick to go for a check-up." It would be nice if the school helped its alumni to practice preventative medicine, instead of waiting to see if any actual damage was done. But the legal system discourages this approach, and the University is hedging its bets, hoping it can get away without spending any further money on legal remedies.

The plaintiffs were saying that the university should not only improve defective security after the fact, but show that it cares about what happens to alumni. Those of us who work on college campuses know that to alumni, the school seems monolithic, but in reality there's no such thing as "the university." There are many moving parts in that machine. The Alumni Association certainly cares about alumni and their relationship with OU. On the other hand, campus attorneys and PR staff are dutifully protecting the school's reputation. This is their job; but the data security problems were very real.

Meanwhile, as a related aside,the Chronicle's July headline took an uncharacteristic cheap shot at the OU alumni who filed the lawsuit:

"They're Probably Canceling Their Donations Too"

Who benefits from that kind of sarcasm? No one.