membership

Beating the Drum for LinkedIn Bloggers

December 15, 2008 By Des Walsh

Life moves so fast in the online, social media world that three and a half years, which is how long the LinkedIn Bloggers group has been going, seems a very long time indeed. To put that in perspective and according to the fascinating social media timeline produced by Danah M. Boyd and Nicole Ellison, it’s about contemporaneous with YouTube, about one and a half years longer than the time since Twitter started and about the same length of time since Facebook became available to all. (HT Tran Tuan Tài for link to Boyd & Ellison social media timeline.)

Given the millions of people on LinkedIn (factoid: at the third level of my LinkedIn connections I am currently connected to 8,774,400 other members and I am by no means a mega-connector) and the untold thousands (hundreds of thousands? millions?) of them who are bloggers, the growth of our group to 896 over those three and a half years of dramatic development and change in the social media/social networking sphere is modest indeed.

Not that growth for its own sake has been a priority or is likely at any stage to be a priority.

But we have decided to give the bus a nudge along on the road to sharing what we have with more people who are interested in the kind of conversations we have, broadly about the intersection of social media, especially but not exclusively blogging, with social networking and specifically with the LinkedIn platform.

In other words, we are working on a strategy for the group to become better known and to continue to grow. We haver been rather quiet, having our chats. We’ll still be having our chats but we are also beating the drum to let the world – especially via the search engines – know we are here.

Right now, if you Google LinkedIn Bloggers you will get at best a mixed and tangential message about the group – at best. That is about to change. With the strategies we are working on, it will soon be much easier for people wanting the sort of group we have, the sort of conversations we have, to find us.

I’ve posted about this, with more background on LinkedIn Bloggers, at my Thinking Home Business blog.

Thing is, if you are already in LinkedIn Bloggers, I hope you will like the idea of augmenting this little bit of drum-beating with some word of mouth/word of blog of your own.

And if you are one of those who has yet to discover the joys of being a member of LinkedIn Bloggers, please come and check us out. It’s a .net url. http://www.linkedinbloggers.net If you would like to join, please read the instructions carefully, especially about providing your LinkedIn profile link (it’s explained there).

Picture of drummer boy by notfilc, via flickr: Creative Commons

Filed Under: Blogging, Resources, Social Media, Social networking Tagged With: Blogging, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Bloggers, membership, Podcasting, Social networking, social networks

Can a Social Media Club Have Virtual Members?

September 10, 2008 By Des Walsh

In line with the responsibilities I took on when, early in July, I accepted an invitation to join the interim advisory group for Social Media Club, I put my hand up to join Michael Brito and Aaron Strout as a group to look at membership issues – defined at the time as membership roles and responsibilities.

Which is the background to Michael’s post, How Des, Michael and Aaron Spent Labor Day Weekend: Brainstorming SMC Membership.

The three areas we identified to look at in this process were:

How do we increase new membership of Social Media Club?
How do we increase engagement and generate excitement for existing members?
How do we localize SMC chapters on areas with few members and a lot of miles in between?

Item 3 was the one I wanted to work on. Let’s face it, as someone who lives, relative to most Social Media Club members, in a far off land, so far in fact that other folks on this planet refer to it as “down under”, it was no doubt fairly predictable that I would want to have something to say about international membership.

World Map with South “up over”: Author CaseyPenk, Vardion, via Wikimedia Commons

And even for many people in a country fairly brimming with Social Media Clubs, i.e. the USA, but not living in or near Austin, Texas, or New York New York, or other cities boasting a Social Media Club, I felt I had a perspective to offer, given that for me the closest Social Media Club, in the city of Brisbane (and so far the only one in this part of the world), is one and a half hours drive from where I live.

As you’ll be able to infer from our report as blogged by Michael, I believe that before we can provide pratical answers to the third question above, we need to resolve a more fundamental question. That question is: just what do we mean by membership of Social Media Club?

And as with the map above, If we change our perspective, we might see new opportunities.

Is Social Media Club membership to be structured so as to only make sense for those people who live near a center which has a SMC (or the potential, in practice, to establish one) which meets on a regular basis in a physical space? And even if that concept allows for people who are only able to participate from time to time, say by virtue of travel to such centers, is there, practically speaking, scope for someone in more outlying areas and who may not travel to such centers, to be a bona fide, participating, contributing member of the Social Media Club network?

In other words, virtual members.

Or should the current – as I see it – fundamentally analog construction of Social Media Club membership be the only (practical) option. That would seem, on the face of it, counter-intuitive for a bunch of people who in many other areas of their business and social lives seem ok – even passionate – about being part of communities which are, for all practical purposes, virtual.

Or am I missing something really obvious?

If you have ideas or questions about this topic, please leave a comment on Michael’s post, or here. All suggestions welcome.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Aaron Strout, down under, international, membership, Michael Brito, Social Media Club

Is LinkedIn Too Busy with Big Deals to Respond to Members?

September 5, 2008 By Des Walsh

I can remember a time not so long ago when LinkedIn executives and staff were really good about responding to questions and even criticism. Co-founder and sometime VP at LinkedIn Konstantin Guericke used to put an enormous effort into communicating with members on LinkedIn-related groups of which I’ve been a member, including the one of which I’m a moderator, LinkedIn Bloggers. Mario Sundar, whose current title at LinkedIn is Community Evangelist, was another who would respond quickly and thoughtfully.

Seems like those days are gone. At least if my experience and that of a couple of my colleagues is anything to go by.

What prompted these reflections and this post was a message yesterday on Twitter (a “tweet”) by @jowyang, a.k.a. Senior Analyst, Social Computing at Forrester Research, Jeremiah Owyang, drawing attention to LinkedIn’s latest coup in hooking up with CNBC, “enabling users to share and discuss news with their professional networks”.

I commented with my own tweet: great to see LinkedIn making high level deals – pity their staff don’t feel any need to respond to emails any more.

I hadn’t intended to start a discussion. Just venting, sounding off, as I had recently had a personal experience of what others had told me about not getting responses to communications with LinkedIn.

But Jeremiah replied to my tweet with another of his, as follows: my friend @mariosundar is the Community Manager at LinkedIn, have you talked to him.

That’s when it got tricky.

Because the direct answer would have been, Erm, no, I haven’t talked to Mario, Jeremiah, but interesting that you should mention him because he’s one of the people who hasn’t replied to emails.

Now I do recognize that emails can go astray.

But I had emailed Mario because I had not had a reply from Kay Luo, Senior Director of Corporate Communications and Buzz Marketing at LinkedIn, whom I had emailed at the suggestion of my colleague Bill Vick, about an issue which he and I thought would have been of interest to LinkedIn.

So I’m talking about two emails, one to Kay Luo and one to Mario Sundar.

This was a month ago. No response, not even a form acknowledgement, from either.

A couple of people have encouraged me to blog about the situation. I was reluctant at first, but on reflection I decided maybe by airing the problem there was a chance, slim perhaps but nevertheless a chance, that LinkedIn could lift its game in the member relations department.

Bear in mind I had not emailed LinkedIn as a newbie member asking some question that could have been resolved by checking out the LinkedIn web site. Although I believe that there should be a system in place for even the newest newbie to get some form of response, even an automatically generated one.

No, what I was writing about was to get official clarification about the different kinds of membership LinkedIn offers, so that the update of the book LinkedIn for Recruiting, of which I am co-author with Bill Vick, could be as accurate as possible.

Why did I need clarification? Because the LinkedIn web site is simply confusing on the subject of types of membership.

In the original, current edition of LinkedIn for Recruiting, which was exhaustively vetted (more than once) by LinkedIn, we listed four types of membership:

Personal (free)
Business
Business Plus and
Business Pro.

Working on the update, I found on the LinkedIn site a chart for comparing account types, which compares Business, Business Plus and Corporate Services (the last-mentioned did not exist at the time the book was published originally :

So what had happened to the Pro account type?

Well, evidently it had not gone away, because under “Account & Settings” on my Linkedin home page I was able to pull up another chart with membership types, still showing a Pro account as an option.

Note also that neither of those tables lists Personal Plus ($60 a year) which I have.

So was this something you think I might have expected at least something along the lines of “thanks for bringing that to our attention, we’ll get back to you soon”? In fact, wasn’t this something that someone would feel concerned enough about to investigate and take some action so as to clear up the apparent anomaly?

You would have thought, wouldn’t you?

Maybe they’ve done something. But they haven’t told me. Haven’t, as I say, even acknowledged that I wrote.

Not a dicky bird, not a peep.

So is it LinkedIn policy not to reply to emails? Is it that people are just too busy with new mega-deals? Is there something wrong with their email system?

Anyone?

Filed Under: Social networking Tagged With: Jeremiah Owyang, LinkedIn, LinkedIn for Recruiting, membership, not answering email, responsiveness