Gloerich on New Media and Community Management

One of the trickiest parts of setting up a LinkedIn-group is getting enough traction within a group. Too bad you can’t force members to be active… but you can be active yourself. Creating one discussion after another is not the way to go though, it’s doing the opposite of what you think it does: it depletes the group of spontaneity. After someone is starting subject after subject, who dares standing up and initiating something as well?

But if you can’t force other people and you can’t start discussions yourself, what other options are left?

News items

They don’t have as big a footprint as discussions do and that’s exactly what you want. The barrier to post a news-item is really low, literally just copy/paste. People can adjust some fields, but that isn’t even necessary.  There’s no need to follow a news-item or responding to comments. They can, but they don’t have to. But the best part is that even if you post several news-items a day, it doesn’t feel like interrupting to someone when they post something as well. So you can go right ahead and start posting interesting articles. At least something is happening and there’s value being created in this group. Also important to know

But there’s more – RSS

Posting news-items is a feature that is greatly undervalued. Why? Because you don’t need to be logged in to LinkedIn to share news-items.

As a group manager you can access a special tab in your group called ‘Manage’. One of the options that shows up in that tab is ‘selecting news-feeds’. If you want to automatically post items that you or other people write on a (group-)weblog enter the RSS-feed of that weblog inhere. When a blogpost is posted a an hour ago or so it shows up at ‘news’ in your LinkedIn-group. Especially with the new look of Linkedin with Discussions and News mixed in with eachother is really valuable.

Still a little bit more – Shared items

If you read your daily news mainly via Google Reader, and I suggest you do, you can share interesting articles by just clicking ‘share’ when you read it. The webpage where these items are posted to are something along the lines of www.google.com/reader/user/name . Check your sharing settings to be sure of that page. That page has an RSS-feed. And you know what to do with RSS feeds and LinkedIn by now. So even when you are checking Google Reader on your mobile while waiting for the menu in a restaurant it is really easy to share items which get syndicated to LinkedIn.

Social Media is all about engaging with your (potential) crowd, I’m going to show one very good way to engage with people who join your LinkedIn-group.

On your website you create useful content and whenever somebody finishes consuming it, you want to be as helpful as you can be to get him/her to read more of your content. Actually, when somebody clicks to the next article or to any other feature on your site, you want to whisper in his ear: “Yes, very good choice. Keep going”. Of course this might annoying every mouse-click but is essentially what you’re doing with good (interaction) design. Every time the user clicks he gets either satisfied, surprised or disappointed.

The moment you’ve been waiting for

I’m working a lot with LinkedIn lately and I even after a few weeks of heavy usage I still find out ways to really take LinkedIn to the next level. One of the most striking examples are automatic responses to activity in a group you are manager of. This is exactly the “Yes, very good choice. Keep going”-moment you’ve been waiting for. The person who joins actually expects a response and you can easily satisfy him by the default “Congratulations! You have been approved to join the group xxxx” or you can write something yourself. Something way better. Something that might trigger a newborn member to participate.

How do you do this?

You need to go to the group you are manager of and select the Manage-tab

After clicking on that tab you see a menu on the right-hand side, click on ‘Manage Templates’.

There are 4 templates, from which the ‘Welcome Message’ is the most important by far.

Click on and get creative with the message you want you newly joined group-member to read.

Now what?

You can figure out the message I created by becoming member of the ‘NGN’ group on LinkedIn.

What hidden features have you found on LinkedIn?