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There’s a catchphrase on “The West Wing” television show that captures our experience building a community on LinkedIn. “I serve at the pleasure of the President.” In a similar fashion I, Joe Hage, serve at the pleasure of LinkedIn. If I play in their sandbox, I abide by LinkedIn’s ever-changing rules, even when the rules hurt the community we’ve built. Tomorrow LinkedIn is rolling out some very bad ideas that will hurt groups like ours. We’ve invested too much as a community to do nothing. See http://medgroup.biz/protect-our-group THREE MAIN PROBLEMS ONE: LinkedIn now publishes all discussions as submitted, without my approval. In other words: Workaround 1: I will leave the comment “Approved by Joe Hage” on each discussion that deserves your time. If you don’t see “Approved,” I haven’t reviewed it yet. You can scroll down until you see my seal of approval. If your discussion is deleted, I’ll first leave you the comment: “Discussion deleted. See http://medgroup.biz/deleted to learn why.” I’ll also need to hastily kick repeat offenders out of the group. TWO: I can’t write you privately anymore. I used to send individual notes of encouragement to members in transition, and would answer common questions that didn’t merit public discussion. Workaround 2: You can InMail me on LinkedIn for free. And you can always reach me at JHage@MedicalDevicesGroup.net. THREE: LinkedIn will remove the Promotions tab. Not everything belongs on the Discussion page, but that doesn’t mean everything else is garbage and the contributor, a spammer. Workaround 3: We can rely more on the http://MedicalDevicesGroup.net companion site as a means to communicate. If you never joined it, please go to http://medgroup.biz/join to ensure we can talk no matter what LinkedIn ruins next. Use our Events tab to list events. CAN WE CHANGE LINKEDIN’S MIND? So let’s add our voices to their research with a flood of negative feedback. Here’s how. Visit http://medgroup.biz/LI-feedback and click Contact LinkedIn Customer Support. With the subject line “Unhappy with new LinkedIn Group Settings,” send this: Please add this comment to the negative feedback you receive about group settings. Groups are less useful to me now and I will spend less time on site until the following steps are taken – ESPECIALLY STEP ONE. 1. Let my group manager decide what gets posted to the Conversation board. Before the October 14 changes, our manager carefully selected discussions for the group. Scrolling to find a relevant topic wastes my time. It’s easier just to not visit. 2. Bring the Promotions or similar tab back. Not everything belongs on the Conversation page, but that doesn’t mean everything else is garbage and the contributor, a spammer. 3. Let my group manager email me beyond the 15 message limitation. He used to interact with members in a personal and helpful way. Now this is impossible. +++ For all eight issues, visit http://medgroup.biz/protect-our-group ++++++++ WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT? We’ll discuss the changes and the group. You can just listen, share your webcam, or chat notes in the margin. ++++++++ Thank you for making this community something worth protecting. Joe Hage Mike Murphy Philippe Joly Chris Meadows Debra Little Joe Hage Julie Omohundro Chris Phillips Ayfer Bektas As for pre-approving discussions — I guess it depends on the size of the group. I am at around 3200 members, and all discussions are pre-approved. I delete spam. And sometimes this is being taken care of by LinkedIn when people cross-post. I move topics that are about the industry I am in, but are not tied to the group to the Promotions tab. Those will get deleted now. 🙂 But I understand that a group with close to 300k members needs some other type of management. What would be an improvement would be if we could do some knowledge management and reorg of the topics similar to a mail inbox. Right now, we have the Discussions tab with all the discussions. If there were a way to create folders so that discussions could be categorized, e.g., “FDA regulation,” “News in Med Device,” “Big Data,” “Social Media in Med Device,” “Testing,” — just some examples. The discussions can still be seen the way they are now, but one could add tags. And on the left side, there would be the corresponding folders. So, when someone is interested in a special area, he/she can open the corresponding folder and see all the discussions related to that topic. I know medicaldevicesgroup.net has additional LinkedIn groups for sub-categories. But I am not speaking for this group only, in general about LinkedIn groups. Some groups don’t require so many “subgroups.” But I digress… I have put a request with LinkedIn, but I guess I am the only one. 🙂 Thank you for managing this group. Paul Hickman Adi Avidar Joe Hage Anne Baker Paula Norbom Joe Hage My style may not work for everyone. That’s okay. It’s not possible to accommodate 300,000 user preferences. Ginger Cantor Joe Hage Filtering is a distinguishing factor for this group. Hundreds of groups publish everything. That’s not my brand, not my value proposition, and not how I will treat my family here. Karen Boyd Ginger Cantor Marked as spam
 Posted by Asked on October 13, 2015 1:43 am
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