He Types She Talks

She Talks

Rachel Beanland

I’m flying solo on this post tonight because a fascinating e-mail landed in my inbox yesterday.

LinkedIn wrote its group administrators to let them know that they’d be adding some much-requested features to their groups. According to the e-mail, as of this Friday, group administrators will be able to:

•    Host discussion forums
•    View a searchable list of group members
•    Secure a static LinkedIn URL for your group
•    Offer members the opportunity to receive daily or weekly digests of new discussion and activity (members will automatically be opted “in” until they change their settings)

These changes are pretty huge for higher ed communicators who are interested in reaching their alumni where they already live (LinkedIn is quoting 25,000,000+ users as of today). Right now, I’m hosting a Richmond School of Arts & Sciences alumni group that’s only semi-useful. I can approve members, view their LinkedIn page and, thankfully, export their e-mail addresses to Outlook. I’m able to include a link to the School’s Web site, but there’s really no good way to share alumni updates or other information about the School without spamming the group’s members.

Ideally, I’d like every LinkedIn group member to subscribe to our alumni e-newsletter or the School’s RSS feed. To get them to that point, I’ve got to be able to provide more information about what we’re doing, both at the University of Richmond and at the school level, on the LinkedIn group’s homepage.

I’ll be interested to see if real “discussions” happen within the group come Friday. If I can use the forum to post an e-newsletter opt-in, news, updates and links back to our Web site, when relevant, then we’ll have already come a long way. I imagine I won’t have much control over the digests and that they will essentially be a long activity feed of who updated their profile, when. We offer Arts & Sciences alums a number of ways to connect with the School on our Web site, so the URL will make it easy to extend the invitation to join our LinkedIn group.

Who’s to say how this will really play out on Friday? Or in the weeks and months that follow? Right now, our LinkedIn group is small enough that we’ve got a little room to play and figure out what works and what doesn’t. One thing’s for sure: if LinkedIn keeps listening to its group administrators, their groups might get downright functional.