This week I have a guest post over at SearchEnginePeople.com on how to figure out what customers like about you, how they naturally talk about you, and how to use that to super-charge your marketing and word-of-mouth. Go read 3 Ways to Get Your Customers Talking About You!
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I just finished reading Are LinkedIn Groups Tuckered Out? and my first thought was, “Have they even gotten started?”
My experience has been similar to the author’s – lots of my Groups have 0 comments, 0 discussions. But I don’t think that’s an unfixable problem or that the door has shut on groups. I do think LinkedIn has to zero in more precisely on the function they want Groups to accomplish.
First of all, there are two types of groups that I’ve identified on LinkedIn:
I’m not sure that the organization-centered groups have a viable life as active, communicating social networks. It’s useful to see job updates (your former co-worker was just promoted to VP as his new job) or to remind you that you do have a contact at Company X that you’re applying to – but for richer interaction there are many alternatives – Yammer for inside the corporate walls, Facebook for coworkers that are more like friends, Twitter for more granular status updates.
Activity-centered groups are where LinkedIn should capitalize. And the first step in doing so, is to humbly realize that LinkedIn is not the destination. People are smart and leave professional “fingerprints” everywhere; LinkedIn needs to be able to find those fingerprints and affix them to their Group discussions, their LinkedIn Answers, and their profile.
This isn’t a new concept – BackType is doing exactly this (you can subscribe to my BackType feed to see my comments all over the web). But LinkedIn has the advantage of location – I don’t expect future hiring managers to look up my BackType, but they will be looking at my LinkedIn profile and the more rich a picture I can paint of how I think and respond to ideas, the better.
Imagine the following: You set up a group on LinkedIn and people start joining. Then, you can configure the Group to automatically pick up the RSS feed for your email discussion list and your Flickr feed. You could allow individual members to upload their BackType feed and their RSS feeds. Now your LinkedIn Group has automatic traffic, relevant traffic, and it becomes part of everyone’s individual professional profiles.
You’d probably have to allow individual granularity (i.e. allow users to exclude certain posts, or opt-out of the automatic reposting), but there would also be the potential for greater sharing (people may want that brilliant mailing list post they read to be available to everyone, not just their Group).
We’re in a new era: never before have participation levels been so high in sharing, commenting, writing, and conversing. But it’s scattered among dozens of sites and services. The time has passed for any one social network to be the “king” who claims all the content (despite what Facebook would have you believe), but there’s still the opportunity for one (or several) services to be the best aggregators. No one is in a better spot than LinkedIn to capture the “professional personal branding” crown.
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Is this a surprise to anyone?
“Not only do blogs rank below newspapers and portals, they rank below wikis, direct mail, company email, and messageboard posts.” (People Don’t Trust Company Blogs)
The Forrester report goes on to encourage ways in which companies can make their blogs more relevant and more genuine, to try and reclaim some of that goodwill.
My thought is: not that many companies are interesting enough to merit a blog.
If you have an eloquent CEO or group product manager or other evangelist in-house, that’s not a problem. But I’m guessing more often blog content is generated in the same way as it was at one of my past companies: “Intern, write a bunch of blog posts and date them every week or so.” This is how company blogs end up with rehashed press releases or a description of the in-house poker tournament last month.
No, I don’t really care who went all-in, unless it was the CEO and that’s your way of telling us you’re going under next week.
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Cindy Alvarez is a product manager who turns understanding the customer into competitive advantage.
She's worked with early-stage startups, medium-sized companies, and Fortune 500 companies to make customer development an ingrained part of company culture and product development process. Read more about Cindy.
