Are LinkedIn Groups Working For You?

I joined LinkedIn about 12 years ago in 2005 which was, believe it or not, only 2 years after LinkedIn was officially launched (May 2003)! One of the first things I did after joining the Roads & Transport Authority (RTA) on the Dubai Metro project in 2006, was to start a LinkedIn group called Metro and Rail Projects to learn, share knowledge and build my network in the rail industry.

As time went on, I started receiving more and more joining requests especially as the group members started interacting and sharing relevant information and news. Today I am pleased to say Metro and Rail Projects is the largest rail group on Linkedin with approx 90,000 members worldwide, all thanks to my amazing group members!

When the group membership was relatively small I was able to interact on a personal level and understand the group's needs and gaps better. It was the group members that actually inspired me to create RailTalent.com, a free rail job board for the members and a LinkedIn sub-group called Rail Jobs Worldwide which has about 20,000 members. 

Now, with the current magnitude, I feel the original intentions of networking, making friends, growing the business and knowledge sharing have somewhat got dissolved. Many members are actively posting rail news and articles but are not really 'interacting' with other members - which is of course due to no fault of their own! LinkedIn themselves created the 'groups' platform with very little rules and over time only improved some functionalities to reduce job spamming etc..

Since it is in my nature to try to find a solution to every problem, I recently started a new initiative called Rail-Connections. The intention is to bridge the communication gap between the thousands of members so they can truly interact, make friends, intimately share knowledge & issues, reach out for help, and even initiate business opportunities amongst themselves.

The first step in this exciting journey is for me to understand and properly 'connect' with all the group members and discover who is a consultant, contractor, client, etc. and who has a problem or project which needs help and who can provide a service or solutions to the rail industry, etc.. For this mammoth task I have deployed a survey to collect and analyse data.

If you are in the rail industry or even if you are not, I would love to hear your views on my one-page survey which you can find at www.rail-connections.com.

Most of the questions are quite generic and can apply to any group on LinkedIn, so therefore your completed survey will be highly beneficial to everyone. Also, I would be very grateful if you can share this survey link (www.rail-connections.com) with your network and other groups. Without your help, this initiative will be an impossible task!

Finally, I would love to hear if your LinkedIn groups (where you are either an owner or member), are working for you? Also, how do you think LinkedIn group owners and members, as well as LinkedIn themselves, can make the groups more fun, informative, interactive and beneficial to all?

Thank you for being a part of this exciting journey...

Imran Qurashi