Discussion to my post whether to have an open or closed group

Back in November, the comment about open linkedin groups was surfaced regarding job opportunities.

Last night, Linkedin announced that they are rolling out “open” Linkedin groups. Open groups mean that the content of those groups will be available to the wild west that is the Internet. This means that search engines like Google and Bing will pick up discussions from Linkedin groups and that users will be able to share Linkedin Group discussions on Twitter, Facebook, and other sharing services.
Ian McCarthy, LinkedIn employee responded to my question of open vs. closed groups:

@neldon - the short answer re open v. members-only is that owners typically know within a few seconds whether being a walled-garden of content is beneficial or harmful to the conversation within the group. open is a better option for most groups, which do not need privacy, but there *are* groups for whom the members-only quality of the conversation is absolutely essential.

re larger groups losing touch is that it all depends: on the deftness of the group's management and the shared context of the members

as for the "icebreaker" threads that get so much popularity - these are immensely useful to the n00bs and the more reticent members of the group but often just as annoying to the regulars (who usually look past that onramping to threads they care more about)

there is typically an "open mic" issue with professionals in groups - "how will this reflect on my brand?" "how will this reflect on my company?" etc.

those simpler threads are popular and active precisely because they get so many users into the conversation - they act as an onramp


Another comment by Pat:

I have a group, Career talk International. I changed it to an open group and thought it might go to the wayside, but after a couple of dull weeks the discussions have peeked and the group has grown from 340 to the 370's without invitations. Also the discussions and very good ones.

Response by Ian:  @pat - glad to hear it and thanks for the great story. sounds like the group has some real wind in its sails!

as the group grows, find those regular contributors whom you might want to make content moderators in case the volume of contributions starts becoming a bit much for just you

i'd also encourage your users to consider tweeting out and sharing on facebook discussions they find interesting to further the cycle of discovery and participation - sometimes that nudge from the manager is all they need. 

Another commentor concerning the monitoring of spam says:

Pamela, I find the moderation settings so useful for the spam you describe.

Those moderation tools mean that an attentive Group Manager can control an 'open' group just as effectively as a 'closed' one.

On my group the members default setting is: Free to post comments, yes - Free to post discussions, no. On my 'open' group, non-members can only submit comments via moderation.

If a spam discussion is posted, I see it in moderation, can delete, or move to promotions. My normal action then is to update the poster's permissions to 'full moderation' so they don't make a move without me seeing it. They quickly get bored (or get blocked).

If a great discussion or comment is made that has gone to moderation, I'll do the opposite and set permission on that user to 'free access', which frees them to further interact.

This approach works great. My group is full of active discussion content, with promotions and career discussions all in the right place. More importantly, because that's the way the group looks, few spammers (except new ones) now try it on, so moderation effort is low.
Posted by Ad van der Rest

If my Salt Lake Metro Transitioning Professional group members wish to comment, they can either add a comment to this post or to my comment on the message board.

Linkedin Groups have become wildly popular since their introduction. As of this writing, a total of 761,170 groups have been created. There are groups for every profession, industry, location, and interest imaginable. Linkedin groups are also a great way to find jobs, and recruiters can post jobs for free to a very targeted group. The introduction of open Linkedin groups should create further traction and bring in a very broad audience to the service.

Open or public Linkedin groups create a very interesting new service for both recruiters and job-seekers. Jobs posted in open Linkedin groups will most likely also be indexed by search engines and picked up on the general open Internet. This should create a free service that, if properly administrated by the group owner, would offer a highly relevant job posting service to a targeted group, but also carry broad open distribution on the web. A number of questions come to mind from the introduction of open Linkedin groups:

• Will job postings be open to the web like the regular group discussions?
• Will Linkedin group job posts be picked up by Indeed and SimplyHired?
• Will job-seekers be able to subscribe to group posts by RSS or other means?
• Will Linkedin introduce better job search capabilities?
• Can free job posts ever work? Will it lead to spam and irrelevant job posts?

The introduction of open Linkedin groups is an important new chapter in the development of the social web. With increased collaboration with Twitter, Linkedin is also getting into the real-time search game as well. It’s a very exciting time for social technology – but we have to only hope that the job search process is getting easier and not more difficult for both job-seekers and recruiters.