The Inimitable Tiff

A few months back, LinkedIn debuted a groups feature. A groups feature carries a lot of promise—in-group networking, message boards, sub-groups, mentorship opportunities, career advice, etc. And if such group-wide features launch (fairly likely), the advantages of network membership could be really powerful. For example, think of the networking possibilities for a fairly socioeconomically advantaged women’s school and its amazingly diverse, hard-working alumnae. Or perhaps an online professional magazine written for and by the best (and brightest upcoming) web talent around the world. (Yes, I mean my alma mater Wellesley and my geek role as Prod. Mgr of Digital Web Magazine, of course. Substitute in any strong school or professional association of your choice. Or even your LOLcat fetish—I’m not the judging type.)

Issues ensure
Call me paranoid, but the day groups launched I set up my two de facto network groups to make sure they were at least in somewhat-loyal hands (aka, mine). Security was a major concern. Despite groups being opt-in, there’s very little encouraging people to verify the good intentions of the group admin as a trustworthy source. Prospective members hand over their networking power and personal e-mail to anyone who set up a group.

My second concern after security was redundancy. Initially LinkedIn offered no ability to search for preexisting groups, so I set up my own. But a few weeks ago they finally opened up group searching. I found *five* Wellesley groups on record! Five! Well, at least myself and fellow alums had things covered. Digital Web on the other hand had just my group. Early presence FTW. (That’s ‘for the win’, for non-geeks. Apologies)

Consolidation
Five groups is a bit too much for such a small school. I contacted the admins and proposed merging our groups into one “official” group. While mine had around 100 members and the rest less than 30, I proposed we merge around the alumna-association-driven group. We agreed that would be best by way of visibility and sanctioning, so we set about merging groups…where upon we hit the next set of roadblocks.

LinkedIn set themselves up for lots of headache, in my opinion. Not only was group-creation blind without search, afterwards they offered no guidelines for duplicates, admin-maliciousness, merging, contacting members, etc. With some work, I notified my members they should move to the “official” group. My fellow admins went to delete their smaller groups, but ran into permission problems. I asked my members to withdraw, of which only a few have succeeded in finding the functionality. Quite a few e-mail me for help.

Next?
I wonder how many people are working through the same issues now. I hope LinkedIn isn’t burnt by the issues underlying my concerns, but I don’t see much communication about the role Groups is meant to play, or what vision LinkedIn has for it. With a early $1 billion evaluation in their last round of funding, I’d like to think they take these conceptual issues to heart. If not, at least I’m a conscientious admin willing to tell the 600+ members of my various groups the truth about my intentions, my concerns and that they can contact LinkedIn if they are equally alarmed.