Open Letter to LinkedIn on Improving LinkedIn Groups

(Note, we have been asked to keep open the Thioughtexchange process. You can add your own ideas, star those of others, and see what is bubbling to the top. https://my.thoughtexchange.com/#528116952/hub )

Conversations are important to me. They are one of the main ways I learn and are a big part of how I try to pay it forward.

Once upon a time, LinkedIn Groups was a great place to have conversations. I was able to meet real experts and get their insights on themes that mattered to me. Several groups have been important to my own career, including the Professional Pricing Society and the Design Thinking group. I am sure that many people have their own favourite groups, places where they go to share ideas, meet people and develop their networks.

Over the past few years, LinkedIn has consistently degraded group functionality. The most recent 'improvements' have, in the experience of the people I work with most closely, crippled the functionality of Groups and compromise its long-term viability. I hope we can convince LinkedIn to change course. LinkedIn Groups still has the potential to be a huge asset to many professional communities.

At the same time, the number of members in groups continues to expand. SocialMediopolis.com has almost 1.9 million members. It almost as big as the city I live in (Vancouver, BC). Human Resources and Talent Management Executive has about 465,000 members. Even the Design Thinking Group that I manage has more than 118,000 members. Not the size is the most important thing. Smaller groups, like Scenario Planning and Future Strategy (about 8,500 members) have at times been the site of passionate and important conversations.

It would be a shame to lose the value that has been built up in these groups over the years, and the even greater potential value that they have for the future. But that is a real risk. My subjective (and emotional) feeling is that 2019 could be the year we abandon LinkedIn Groups. I hope that does not happen.

First, a bit about me. I am a social learner, one of the ways I learn is through groups (my wife teases me that when I want to learn something I start some sort of organization or organize a conference). LinedIn groups have played an important role in my learning about themes as varied as pricing, revenue management, scenario planning, systems thinking, service design and of course design thinking. You can get a feel for my skills and passions from my TeamFit skill profile.

I think of social media as a gift economy, where one of the main gifts one can give is attention. I try to be generous with my attention, and to show this by reading links and commenting on what I read. Before I start a new discussion I go in and read the past 15-20 discussions in a group and make comments where I have something to say. One needs to give gifts before one expects to get them.

I make my living in three ways. I am co-founder at the skill management platform Teamfit.co, I am a partner at the pricing, innovation and eLearning company Ibbaka, and I do angel investing (going forward I plan to focus on antimicrobial resistance, but that is another story).

The insights on how to improve (save even) LinkedIn groups come from a variety of sources: conversations, an ongoing survey of people in design thinking and a process conducted with the help of Thoughtexchange (more on that below).

The conversations were the most important part of this. Some of them took place on the LinkedIn Design Thinking group itself (here is one example). More were by e-mail or in person over the past six months. As a reasonably visible group manager, I also get a lot of inbound messages on LinkedIn holding me to account for the growing amount of link spam and self promotion on the Design Thinking group. I spend time every day deleting discussions and increasingly blocking users.

The survey used to go out to each new member joining the Design Thinking group, until LinkedIn turned off this functionality as part of an 'upgrade' to groups. We have collected about 1,000 responses. Most of the questions concern design thinking, what it is, how it is changing, how it is being applied, but there are insights that can be applied to LinkedIn Groups. Updating an analysis of this survey is in my work plan for this month.

From the survey, the key value that people are looking for from the Design Thinking group is community. People are looking to belong to a group of people who are passionate about applying design thinking to real world problems. They want to have conversations about this. Using the group to stay up to date with current trends is far less important to most members than is contributing to a community.

The Thoughtexchange process was very interesting. As of writing (Monday January 7, 2019), twenty-five people had participated in the process, generating thirty-seven thoughts and more than two hundred ratings. The top suggestions are captured below as screen grabs from Thoughtexchange.

Pulling together these three sources of insight, I organized suggestions under three key themes: Support Conversations, Make Connections, Knowledge Curation. A fourth theme is Group Insights. Group managers have their own set of concerns that are not fully addressed here.

Support Conversations

Let's face it, most LinkedIn Groups are long scrolls through link spam with people (often paid social media marketers) generating discussion across multiple groups that they have no intention of following. This is killing groups. Comments have been depreciated so that you have to look carefully at each discussion to see if there are any comments and then open these up. When you do so, the most recent comment comes first, making it extra work to follow the flow of what has been said.

It would be a great help to have (i) the most current and (ii) the most active discussions come at the head of the feed (I want to be able to switch back and forth between these views, by 'most current' people mean the discussion that has the most recent comment, and NOT the most recently added discussion). Within a discussion, comments should be offered in chronological order, and not reverse chronological order. This helps people follow the development of a conversation and not just jump in with their own opinion. Group managers should be able to pin to the top the discussions they most want to encourage. Users should be recognized for participating in conversations (LinkedIn Groups did this well many years ago).

These simple changes would go a long way toward rescuing LinkedIn groups.

The idea captured above from Thoughtexchange, around having members suggest a theme for the week, would also help to drive engagement and keep the managers aligned with the rest of the group.

An edge idea, would be to require a member to interact with another discussion before allowing them to start a new discussion. I am not at all sure this would work, but LinkedIn has a large enough user base to support some experimentation.

Make Connections

This is LinkedIn's strength. I personally find it works well for this, and that groups rides on this core capability. In fact, it is one of the main reasons that many group managers stay on LinkedIn rather than moving to one of the alternatives.

Knowledge Curation

I am frequently asked if LinkedIn Groups is a good platform for a Community of Practice. We basically think of the Design Thinking group as a loose and amorphous community of practice so this seems like a good question. LinkedIn is not a good platform for this. It could be though, what is missing is better search, some form of emergent content organization and a content repository. LinkedIn has a pretty good understanding of search, they just need to support a version that makes it easy and obvious to search within the group. It should be pretty easy to add a simple content repository using one of Microsoft's existing solutions. Tagging is where the big opportunity lies.

Does anyone else remember how fun it was to use the early version of del.icio.us and the kinds of communities and connections that emerged from this? Using a folksonomy is powerful way for users to work together to organize content. I was quite surprised that tagging comments and tagging discussion both made it into the top nine of the Thoughtexchange process. It would be great to see LinkedIn try this. They already have some of the machinery in place for other parts of the platform. I can already apply hashtags and use them to signal interests (here is a link to the hashtag #designthinking). The requirement is to provide better ways to organize discussions, comments (and one hope documents) using the hashtags inside a group. If this takes off, some form of hashtag management will also be needed. These are all problems that have been solved elsewhere.

Group Insights

In the past, LinkedIn provided a lot more insight into the makeup of groups: who the people are, what industries and geographies they come from, even indications of people's interests and basic demographics. It would be great to have the past functionality restored. There are many places this could go. Remember how, once upon a time, LinkedIn let you generate a visual graph of your connections? One can still get a flavour of this from Socilab. The creator Craig Tutterow is now at LinkedIn so dare I be hopeful this could come back? It would be great if this happened, and would help with making connections. Being able to see the social networks have within groups would clarify their dynamics and help make them more effective.

I was surprised that Open APIs snuck in to the top nine on the Thoughtexchange process. LinkedIn cannot do everything, and moving away from its current closed garden approach would open the door to a lot of innovation, creating value for everyone in using or managing groups (or on LinkedIn more generally). I suspect that this will happen eventually, now that LinkedIn is part of Microsoft. Imagine if LinkedIn took leadership on this, and opened its ecology to outside innovation. Historically Microsoft has been good at this, so there is perhaps hope.

Managing Groups

Tools for managing groups have been greatly depreciated over the past few years. This has greatly aggravated other group managers that I speak with. I believe the basic issues of better conversations and knowledge curation are far more important than manager tools. If the quality of conversations is not addressed groups will become irrelevant and it won't matter that we do not have good tools to manage them. Yes, better group management tools are needed, especially for large groups. I have not really explored this, but here are three things that are often mentioned by others:

• Ways to automate common actions like accepting people into the group
• Better ways to message and communicate with group members
• Ways to segment a group and focus communications or analysis at specific subgroups

Personally, I would also like to see sub groups come back. Once you have groups the size of cities they need to have neighbourhoods. With this, one would also like to be able to combine discussions that are happening on two different sub groups so that people from different sub groups could cross pollinate. It would be fun (but politically difficult I expect) to do this across groups and not just sub groups.

Final Thoughts

LinkedIn Groups have huge potential. That potnetial is being frittered away by poor design decisions. If there is a vision behind this, it is not clear to me, and I have attended events hosted by LinkedIn on the future of groups. I hope this can change in 2019. Not all at once. Helping groups return to being a venue for conversations rather than a place for link spam would be a big start and does not seem all that hard (things always look easier from the outside). Opening up Groups for innovation would be transformative, and send a powerful signal to the rest of the industry. Sharing ideas and making ideas real is what excites me about LinkedIn, the Internet, my own companies TeamFit and Ibbaka, and investment. Can we link in and help to make this happen?