24 March 2009 / LinkedIn 0 ReTweets

LinkedIn Group Managers: How to Contact Your Group Members Now?

If you are on LinkedIn for a specific objective, start a LinkedIn Group. Period. There is no better way to start your own community and add your own brand to the LinkedIn community. I have already posted information on how to promote your LinkedIn Group, and am working on new material as to why you should have a Group and how to best utilize it, but if you have not started your own LinkedIn Group or have not joined and participated in many of the communities that exist, you may be missing out on one of LinkedIn’s greatest features.

It is ironic that although the Group feature provides an excellent avenue for social networking, recent changes enacted by LinkedIn have made it hard for Group Managers to efficiently manage their LinkedIn Groups. If you currently have your own LinkedIn Group or are thinking of creating one, you need to be aware of these issues.

Yesterday, I wrote about the “RSS Spam” potential in LinkedIn Groups because of the new fucntionality added last week. Today I wanted to discuss the issue of communicating with Group members from a Manager’s perspective. Last week LinkedIn prevented Group Managers from exporting member’s email addresses as well as the ability to view their email addresses. While this does add more privacy to members, it means that the only way for the Group Manager to communicate with their members is by either sending out an individual message to one person OR to send out a message to everyone! There is no in-between.

This is very regrettable as sometimes a Group Manager might want to send out a message to a subset of members for whatever purpose. I do this often when managing invites and RSVPs to a group lunch or event that I hold. Now it is not time-effective to do so within the LinkedIn Inbox realm of creating messages for each person or having to wait for the LinkedIn server to respond everytime I want to add another contact. Anyone who has ever tried to create an Inbox message and send it to multiple contacts will appreciate what I have to say.

So what does this mean for the Group Manager? It’s literally send to everyone or send to no one. Or you use another tool (excel spreadsheet?) to register everyone’s email addresses as they join (if you can see it) or ask them for their email address when they join and take note of it separately, afterwards using the email client of your choice (gmail or outlook) to actually send the email.

What does this mean for the community member? You may start to get a lot more general targetted emails from your Group Manager that may be irrelevant to you.

The net-net of this is that 1) LinkedIn is not showing their trust in Group Mangers in the name of “privacy” and 2) it is getting harder for Managers to provide a very customized experience within the LinkedIn framework which are forcing groups to add Ning.com or other networking portals to supplement what they can’t do on LinkedIn (like easily communicate with their members).

I still highly recommend LinkedIn as The Platform and their Groups as great communities, but don’t be hesitant to join these other networking portal sites because they may provide you with a deeper and more communal experience.

Ric Kissler
I agree with your issue about sending messages to more than one, but not all. Perhaps as a work around, they could put a tab next to “Manage” labeled “Notify.” Like Manage, it would show an alphabetical list of group members with a check box so you could select certain members for a message to a subset of the group.
Ric Kissler
I agree with your issue about sending messages to more than one, but not all. Perhaps as a work around, they could put a tab next to “Manage” labeled “Notify.” Like Manage, it would show an alphabetical list of group members with a check box so you could select certain members for a message to a subset of the group.
Neal Schaffer
Bingo! Excellent comment Ric! It is so easy to implement the functionality to make it easier for every Group Manager, but it bothers me that they don’t. I know that the LinkedIn group of employees are intelligent, so I always analyze these situations as being ones where LinkedIn doesn’t want to make it easier for you. Maybe it makes the Inbox stickier, creating more impressions and thus more monetizing opportunities? Your guess is as good as mine!
Neal Schaffer
Bingo! Excellent comment Ric! It is so easy to implement the functionality to make it easier for every Group Manager, but it bothers me that they don’t. I know that the LinkedIn group of employees are intelligent, so I always analyze these situations as being ones where LinkedIn doesn’t want to make it easier for you. Maybe it makes the Inbox stickier, creating more impressions and thus more monetizing opportunities? Your guess is as good as mine!
Simon Hamer
Looks like we will have to mandate that if they want to join the group they have to connect with us first. This is the only way we can do it, more work needlessly. I suppose we could use the announcement feature, occaisionally, but I agree a little backward !
Simon Hamer
Looks like we will have to mandate that if they want to join the group they have to connect with us first. This is the only way we can do it, more work needlessly. I suppose we could use the announcement feature, occaisionally, but I agree a little backward !
Neal Schaffer
Good point Simon. That being said, even if they connect with us first, although we can export the email addresses of our connections, we would have to fish through the list looking just for those group members. Either way you look at it ends up being quite backwards!
Neal Schaffer
Good point Simon. That being said, even if they connect with us first, although we can export the email addresses of our connections, we would have to fish through the list looking just for those group members. Either way you look at it ends up being quite backwards!
http://www.mnheadhunter.com/ MN Headhunter | Paul DeBettign
I manage 3 groups and have always chosen to approve new members even though one of the groups is an open networking group versus for a specific group or cause.
This is time consuming, no doubt.
I have copied each email address into an Excel spreadsheet and sent a group introduction message.
At the moment, this is still possible and hopefully will be going forward.
http://www.mnheadhunter.com MN Headhunter | Paul DeBettignies
I manage 3 groups and have always chosen to approve new members even though one of the groups is an open networking group versus for a specific group or cause.
This is time consuming, no doubt.
I have copied each email address into an Excel spreadsheet and sent a group introduction message.
At the moment, this is still possible and hopefully will be going forward.
Neal Schaffer
Yes, Paul, when someone applies to the Group their email address is still indicated on the screen, so you could copy each address into a file as you do. This is time-consuming but possible. The problem is unless you start doing this to begin with you can only track email addresses for new members ;-( Regardless, something tells me it is just a matter of time until LinkedIn stops displaying the email address here as well as it is in direct violation of what they are trying to achieve!
Neal Schaffer
Yes, Paul, when someone applies to the Group their email address is still indicated on the screen, so you could copy each address into a file as you do. This is time-consuming but possible. The problem is unless you start doing this to begin with you can only track email addresses for new members ;-( Regardless, something tells me it is just a matter of time until LinkedIn stops displaying the email address here as well as it is in direct violation of what they are trying to achieve!
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