[Updated 4 December, 2009: 8 Tips for Managing LinkedIn Groups via Mashable.]
[Updated 24 October, 2009: The school mentioned below opened up their alumni Group commenting as planned, and participation is steady.]
This is another of the increasingly common posts around the general theme of "We no longer control the conversation." If you're tired of hearing that, you might want to move on...I found out recently that the alumni staff at a prominent U.S. university had disabled the Discussions tab in their official alumni group on LinkedIn. I exchanged e-mail with one of the school's alumni staff members about a different topic and took the opportunity to ask about this apparent oversight.
"Why did you turn off the alumni discussions?" To me, Discussions are the sole useful feature of most LinkedIn Groups. [Sample view shown above. Click to enlarge.]
She explained that when the service launched, the subject line on the daily digests sent to Group members indicated that the email was "from" the alumni association. The VP was concerned (if I understood her explanation correctly) that alumni might think that comments posted by other alumni had actually come from the school, and that they represented some official institutional position, or that the alumni association endorsed the comments.
This concern is misguided for a few reasons, but here are five that came to mind immediately:
1) It places the Alumni Association's narrow interest above the alumni body's broad interest;
2) It doesn't give the alumni credit for understanding how these forums work, and indicates that the parent organization might not understand how they work;
3) It suggests that we can control conversations online (we can participate in discussions and sometimes even influence them, but we cannot control them);
4) It deprives alumni of one thing associations can uniquely provide via LinkedIn: a structured alumni-only forum for personal and professional interaction around topics of mutual interest – topics that matter to alumni (unlike most of the stuff we send out en masse);
5) The school mentioned above has alumni-created regional Groups on LinkedIn with the Discussion tab active, so the train has, as they say, left the station. Alumni can't tell (and don't care) whether the Group was created by alumni or the alumni office.
There are also active Yahoo! Groups for alumni of the same school, where discussion is the sole purpose and function of the service. Again, these are created and run by alumni, so there's a complete mismatch between the school's traditional, top-down control model and the organic bottom-up inclusive model used by the alumni the school wants to serve.
Bottom line, to me this is a good reminder to keep asking "How can we help alumni solve their problems and how can we serve their needs?"
Does your school have an official LinkedIn Group? Do you have Discussions disabled? If so, why?