Personal Reflections of a LinkedIn Group Owner and Manager

Personal Reflections of a LinkedIn Group Owner and Manager

I am the President of Executive Oasis International, a Toronto team building and management consulting firm that was established in 1996. It's been over 12 years since I joined LinkedIn and just over 8 years since I started managing groups on LinkedIn. At the time of writing, I own:

• Team Building Network for Executives - for executive peer to peer interaction and discussions about team building, corporate culture, and leadership (I have just launched an Executive Team Buiding Network hive)
• B2B Bloggers Network - where bloggers can share their content and discover and share great content from other bloggers
• An alumni group for a company where I once worked

• Event Planners Network Canada - Réseau des planificateurs d'événements au Canada (2,465 members)
• Caribbean Event Planners Network (940 members)
• Networking & Professional Development for Event Planners (749 Members)

A Roller Coaster for Group Leaders

It's been a roller coaster. We've gone from the days when there were few group manager tools to a full suite of tools to manage groups. At first spam was a huge problem and spam gangs flooded groups with their content. Controlling spam has become a lot easier but, despite the fact that members have the tools to flag spam, few members bother.

Once the full suite of group management tools was in place, managing groups was a breeze. It didn't take a lot of time and it was fun.

After a while, some tools, like Block and Delete, stopped working and LinkedIn never bothered to fix them. One by one, the excellent tools for group management and communication with group members have been removed. In fact, on LinkedIn, you can't even send private messages to multiple recipients without all names being visible.

Functionality, layout, and navigation have changed so often that there has always been confusion about how groups work. 

Despite numerous reminders in announcements, members never really did understand subgroups and they were finally scrapped without notice. Instead of changing the functionality, the focus should have been on making sure everything works.

Beginning in October 2015, notifications from groups were gradually removed, until now, the only time that group members receive notifications is if someone tags them.  Announcements work in some groups but not others. Try communicating with a leadership team when the only way to grab their attention is to tag each and every one of them manually. You can't do that with a large group.

The result has been that many groups have become ghost towns. When members stopped receiving notifications of new discussions or comments in discussions in which they have participated, they didn't have a clue what was going on. Communication is the heartbeat of any community and, when it is absent, it kills engagement.

The removal of notifications from groups is not good news for bloggers. Even posting in LinkedIn Pulse has become a pointless exercise as content is no longer distributed to everyone in your network or all of your followers. Even if you share the posts in groups, no one will know they are there unless they visit the groups and manually scan through the discussions as notifications have been removed. Scrolling only goes so far so good luck on gaining visibility if there are a lot of "Conversations" posted in the group.

If a tree falls in the forest, and there's nobody around to hear, does it make a sound?
Source Unknown

• Executive Team Building Network
• B2B Bloggers Network