LinkedIn changes earn wrath of Group managers

It's not just changes to Facebook that have got users up in arms; LinkedIn has been cheesing off its Group managers with updates of its own.

LinkedIn is an odd internet property. The so-called professional networking site is growing at a phenomenal rate at the moment, growth attributed in part to people joining in an attempt to help secure their career prospects while the sword of Damocles hangs above their head in these horribly uncertain times.

(Yes, LinkedIn is more than happy to benefit from potential soon-to-be-job-hunters in spite of commenting in my blog last year that it was unfair of me to call it a "job site".)

And if developing your career is your aim, then having easy access to former work colleagues and the networks of contacts they have is highly beneficial. My issue with LinkedIn, however, has always been that it is just too hard to make valuable new connections on the site, with others in your industry, those you find just "interesting", or those you feel you could buy from/sell to; LinkedIn advises throughout the site that you DON'T connect to people you don't already know and trust and this has not made building valuable new relationships any easier.

In fact, the only real place to do this has been the LinkedIn Groups area, where members can form or join groups based around common interests. Not all LinkedIn users know about Groups, but those that do spent a lot of their time there and many of the Group managers have been highly successful in building large and vibrant communities; a nice result for their considerable efforts.

One of these Group managers contacted me this week. Having built a group of 15,000 members, he feels LinkedIn's recent changes to how Groups work have taken away much of his control and replaced that with ads to earn revenue from the community he has put significant effort into building.

His anger is at the following changes:

1) Group managers can no longer access their Group's e-mail lists, taking away the ability to send regular newsletters and other correspondence to members;

2) Managers can no longer view the full member list, as they are limited to seeing only 500 subscribers. This is obviously annoying those who have put the effort into building much larger groups, of which there are plenty (I was contacted by a manger of 15,000 Group members, 97% of which he can no longer see);

3) Forced advertising onto the Group profile and other pages that the Group managers get no benefit from, as there is no revenue share. The issue for Group managers seems not to be that they themselves are making money from the Group, however, but that LinkedIn has cashed in on their hard work;

4) By removing the e-mail list download, Group managers no longer have any visibility of Group performance, giving no indication of how many new Group members are joining, churn (existing members leaving), etc. LinkedIn itself offers no reporting capabilities on such things.

In short, the little information they did have to measure the reults of their efforts and enable more effective use of the Groups through regular communication have been taken from the Group Managers who have spent nearly a year building them.

For many, the Groups feature is what makes LinkedIn worth visiting after you've found all your former work buddies and it is commonly used as a way of making new connections with a view to doing businesses. But the success of these Groups comes down to the dedication of the managers and their efforts to keep the content fresh, discussions flowing and members engaged.

In the interests of balance, LinkedIn has also added some features to Groups, the most interesting of which is the ability to display an RSS feed from other sources within the News section of the Group. I run a Group myself on LinkedIn and I have added an RSS feed of sales leads from our website to our pages. The problem is that the news items don't appear by default when you click the News tab within a Group -- you only see the manually pasted stuff there and the automated RSS feeds don't show unless you click "News feed" within that page. Not obvious for anyone looking for news updates and several Group Managers I spoke to had no idea how to add a feed, let alone find one once added (so I have written instructions, here: http://wecandobiz.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/add-a-rss-news-feed-to-your-linkedin-group/).

Without the continued support of these guys -- who have to rank as LinkedIn's biggest advocates -- will LinkedIn Groups break out beyond use by only the most dedicated site fans?

I'd love to read your thoughts and comments on how LinkedIn Groups benefit you...

UPDATE: Social Media Portal has let me know that a petition has now been started by Group Managers against the changes LinkedIn has made. You can read more on this at http://tinyurl.com/dbbhsd and sign up to the petition at http://tinyurl.com/cvzcqq.

On a separate note, I read with interest this week that France-based business-focused social network Viadeo -- a site that has always trailed LinkedIn and Xing in terms of popularity in Europe -- has acquired Chinese social network Tianji.com. This comes just a short while after picking up Indian socnet ApnaCircle. Viadeo now boasts over 7 million members.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz