The Ugly Reality of LinkedIn Groups and what you can do about it.

CrossConnects for Telecom Professionals: The Ugly Reality of LinkedIn Groups and what you can do about it.

I honestly do not get the LinkedIn business model. They make it very hard to develop, grow and manage groups (however well-meaning and useful) They only allow you to invite people to join who you are already connected with but then they penalize, or at least frown upon, trying to connect with people you don’t know from the business world already. Huh?

Look! The name of the game in Social Media is revenue from ad clicks. That means you want to keep people on the site as much as possible and that means healthy thriving groups where people want to come for great content and peer to peer connecting. But from a purely functional standpoint, LinkedIn's group platform offers scant networking or content value to its members because of the stunningly poor tools it provides to Group owners like me.

• Group Managers should have the means to recruit to the group without begging for connections od spamming other groups hoping to get noticed.
• The Group discussion page needs a way to stream a news feed not SPAM! so that people have a reason to come to the group on a regular basis and join discussions.
• The job discussion page needs to be searchable and a way to post résumés discreetly.
• There need to be a way to self-identify as someone looking for connections within a group and people should not be penalized for trying to connect with fellow group members.
• Invitation to join a group out to be on par with an invitation to connect rather than being relegated to an email which is far more likely to be ignored as SPAM.

Group Managers are solely responsible for building communities of share interest, and are therefore strategically important for LinkedIn continues success. You would think after ten years or so in business that some high muckety-muck would have figured that groups create captive audiences and thus the best opportunity to provide micro-targeting to advertisers, I am happy to share my page with your advertisers LinkedIn, but I want a functional robust group platform in return,

None of this simple functionality exists and so people rarely check out groups after they join.

I can’t fix the problem with crappy content, but if you want to connect with fellow group members, here are a few tips.

? Use LinkedIn’s advanced people search function to identify people in this group.
? Be strategic!
? Connect with CrossConnects members who have over 500 connections. I now have over 8 Million 2nd level contacts because by 1st levels average about 550 connections each.
? Connect with those who share 15 or more connections with you already. Lots of Shared Connections means they are more open to connecting than those with only one or zero people in common.

Finally, add a comment to this thread saying that you want to grow your network by connecting with others in this group or share it with other groups you are in. Comments welcome.