Groupsite offers several ways to search for groups of interest

In the first of these two posts on looking for market conversations on the Groupsite platform I mentioned that I had not discovered “just the group” for my purposes, much less several such groups.

That said, I believe anyone looking for groups where they feel there is some shared interest could well find such groups on Groupsite. They are by no means all business oriented groups, although many are.

As an aside, I should mention that some time ago I happily recommended Groupsite as the preferred platform for a not-for-profit organization where I was at the time a member of the Board. We set up a closed group for the Board members and staff and another, more open group for the volunteers. This has worked very well, as far as I could see. If you have some responsibility for a community group or company, especially at a Board or executive level, I am sure you will find Groupsite very congenial, not just for discussion threads, but for filing, notices of meetings, minutes storing and so on. It’s worth noting in that regard that the paid subscription versions, starting at a very modest $29 a month, all offer enhanced security.

Back to finding conversations on Groupsite.

One of the many things I like about Groupsite is the display of information about individual groups. With any group you can see at a glance the group’s focus, the number of members, whether anyone can join or it is by invitation or request.

You can also learn something about where members live. Judging by the groups I looked at, this information is only partially helpful, as the output presumably depends on the extent to which members have provided the basic data. For example, the information for the group in the screenshot above accounts for only 22% of the group’s membership: New York, NY USA (11%), Reno, NV USA (6%), New Haven, CT USA (5%).

Several search options

As well as the general keyword search, you can search on categories, with eighteen category listings, from Business/Finance to Other. Don’t neglect “Other”: there were 2,262 groups under “Other” when I looked today.

You can also search on Most Members, Most Active, Most Recent and Alphabetical.

Results from “Most Active” should be scrutinized.

One group, of which I was already a member, looked very interesting to me and I dived in, contributing to conversations, leaving endorsements for other members…Then today I found that all of the recent activity on the group was by – me. I then looked more closely and realized that the group, with 2,854 members, was not what I would call active in any realistic sense of the word.

You can filter search results by Keyword, Country, State and City.

Roll your own

Although the primary purpose of this exercise is to look at possibilities for finding groups where you can become part of the conversation and, at an appropriate time and in a way appropriate to the group, introduce members to your product or service, another approach is to set up your own group.

Establishing your own group on Groupsite is as easy as falling off the proverbial log. Provided you are logged in (membership is free), you can just click on the link “Create a Group” in the top left corner of your screen, fill in the required details and you’re off to the races. And entice or persuade some of your friends or colleagues to join – you don’t want to have one of those groups with only one member, however much you like your own company.

I’m thinking now that a post or two on setting up your own group could be helpful – in due course.

Do please share any thoughts on Groupsite or on the “looking for conversations” topic in general.

This post about Groupsite.com continues the series on finding valuable online conversations

Following on from my recent posts about looking for conversations, starting with LinkedIn Groups (here and here), I’ve spent some time today on the Groupsite.com platform, searching for groups of possible interest to me and catching up with some of the groups I belong to on that site.

The exercise has reminded me of the fact that, typically, when I mention Groupsite (formerly CollectiveX) to people, it’s new information for them. At which point I always become an evangelist for the platform: it’s that good.

Incidentally, until I started writing this post I had not realized that my evangelism was helping fulfil one of Groupsite’s explicit guiding principles:

Engaged users are our sales force. Through every touchpoint, we inspire users to become Groupsite creators, champions and evangelists.

I had the good fortune to become aware of Groupsite quite a while ago, through Shaun Callahan, who has the excellent title on the Groupsite management team of Chief Involvement Officer. As Shaun’s bio there states, enthusiastically and in my observation accurately, “Shaun is focused on helping customers achieve a stronger return on involvement”.

The Company Overview states that “Groupsites are a powerful social collaboration tool for ordinary people in everyday groups”.

Search

Before looking more closely at groups to which I already belong, I spent some time in search mode, having first clicked the (not very obvious) “Find a Group” link at the top left corner of the site. I used both the keyword-based search and the category search and found the category search more interesting. With the keyword search, I repeated my endeavour with LinkedIn, aimed at finding groups of professionals working from home.

Using the keyword phrase “home based” I found a handful of groups, the most populated with only 98 members and only eight in double figures.

Then I tried “work at home” (which the system read as “work home”): there was, not unexpectedly, a goodly number of MLM groups: there were also groups which were professional and specialized, e.g. homeland security specialists, and local, e.g. Tampa Bay. There were nine pages of groups showing up for that keyword, but membership of groups was down to 2 and 1 before I was half way through.

I then switched to using the Categories and focused on Business/Finance and Computers/Internet. I had a quick look at Family/Home but did not stay long there because the groups were, not unsurprisingly, about families and home – not, as far as I could ascertain in my scan, about professionals working from home.

For Business/Finance there were hundreds of pages. In both that category and in Computers/Internet, quite a few groups were local and/or specialized, such as the Chesapeake Sustainable Business Network or the SAP Elite group. There were a couple I found had catchy names, such as Paddytech, for IT professionals who work or have worked in Ireland, and “Vegemite in the Old Town Square – For Kiwis and Aussies living or working in Poland”.

One of the largest groups in the Business/Finance category was the LinkedIn Forum with 2,854 members, including me.

Cost

The basic service is free, with the service including all standard features, unlimited users, 250 MB storage and up to five subgroups. Then there are various add-on premium services, for branding, enhanced security etc, at $9 a month each and then packages of services in various configurations – details here.

Summing up

In terms of finding groups where professionals working from home hang out, this was not a hugely productive exercise. Not just because I could not find clusters of professionals clearly working from home, but also because I realized that some groups have only one or two members.

On the other hand, spending some time scanning through the lists showed me that Groupsite is evidently attractive to many groups, internationally and across a wide range of professional and personal interests.

So one way of finding interesting conversations as part of connecting with the market could be to scan through the listings of groups and find ones where you have some shared interest, whether in terms of the group’s professional or hobby interest or local/regional membership, or both: then join and participate (for some groups you have to apply or be invited).

For example, I found a group with a Web focus and with members from my locality and am considering joining that.

The question arises as to how much conversation is actually going on in the various groups. As we saw with LinkedIn, the fact that a group is set up and perhaps has substantial numbers does not necessarily mean there is a conversation happening.

Coming up

In the next post in this series I will share some more about Groupsite, specifically about some of the features and how we can use them to help us in our networking.

Then I plan to tackle Yahoo! Groups, which I expect to be a bit more unwieldy than Groupsite or even LinkedIn, but an interesting and potentially productive platform once you get the hang of how it works.

After that I will look at Ning.

If you have experience with or observations to make about Groupsite, or indeed any of these platforms, I trust you will share with us via the comments.