So how did my LinkedIn search go for groups of home based professionals?

This is a follow-on from my post yesterday, on looking for relevant online conversations, starting with the professional-focused networking site LinkedIn.

On my first attempt to find groups via (as I recall) the search term “home based professionals” the result was some fifty pages of groups. With ten a page, that made around 500 groups.

The listings included:

The first of these was of general interest, but I wasn’t sure that at this point I wanted to get into discussions about starting a home based business.

The second – Consultants Network – looked interesting, especially as it had a big membership at 118,911, and what looked like a busy discussion space, with 85 discussions listed, far more than I had seen for other groups.

The Consultants Network group describes itself as:

A group that unites all strategy, marketing, finance, business, IT consultants & freelancers. With over 100,000+ global members the largest consultancy community on LinkedIn. (consulting, management, business, interim, freelance, advisory, consultant, recruitment, network, professionals)

I had to submit a request to join. That did not bother me, because I like the idea that there is some process of vetting going on. Although I’m wondering what’s happening. It’s about three days since I submitted that request and I’ve since sent a follow-up. No reply of any kind yet. (Update: three weeks on – April 6 – there is still no response – I have also sent messages, via LinkedIn connections, to the nominated owner and nominated manager of the group, neither of whom has replied.)

By way of a footnote to this post, as I started writing I thought, why just LinkedIn? Why not Yahoo!? Why not other networks and forums?

Why not, indeed! Especially as, at this writing, this area of professionals working from home is not looking a likely area for discussion on LinkedIn.

So I’ve decided to do a series on various social networking platforms, under the general heading of Looking for Conversations. Next I might have a look at Yahoo! Groups.

In the meantime, have you had any interesting, useful or curious experiences with LinkedIn Groups and if so would you like to share them? I hope you will leave a comment.

Story of Searching LinkedIn Groups for Interesting Conversations

I don’t know whether it started, almost eleven years ago, with The Cluetrain Manifesto statement that “markets are conversations”, but the concept of listening to and then “participating in the conversation” has become part of standard advice to business owners and others wanting to get serious about using social media and wanting to attract people to their web sites.

The corollary advice is often, in colloquial terms, to find where the people you want to listen to and connect with “hang out” online, then hang out there too.

I’ve certainly given that advice more than once.

So how well have I been doing in terms of walking my talk?

Pretty well, I believe, in terms of my professional interest in social media and the services I offer there.

But not so well in terms of the focus of this blog, on professionals working from home. So I thought it was time I took my own advice and looked for “where the people hang out” – the people in question being, as I say, professionals working from home.

I started with the “LinkedIn Groups” on professional networking platform LinkedIn, which I know reasonably well, having co-moderated a LinkedIn group for several years and co-authored a book on LinkedIn for recruiters.

LinkedIn Groups – then and now

The decision to check out LinkedIn Groups was not intuitive.

There was a time, not so long ago, when there was no conversation on LinkedIn Groups. No forum, no discussion thread option. And the whole business of setting up a LinkedIn Group was not simple.

As the screenshot above shows, just three years ago, in 2007, to have a group on LinkedIn, you had to send a request to LinkedIn management and there was no guarantee your request would be approved.

And a year later it was not an easy matter to find groups to which you might like to belong.

The whole setup was called, in those days “LinkedIn for Groups”. At the time I found that an odd title, but with hindsight it seems to me that it was quite well chosen for the time, given that the idea was that LinkedIn might agree to establish a Group on its site if there was already a “group” existing externally, such as an alumni group, or a corporation group. So it was LinkedIn for(mainly or exclusively, already existing) Groups.

That has all changed and we now have “LinkedIn Groups”, with no intermediate preposition and a more open policy on setting up a group.

Easy to set up a LinkedIn Group now

When you go to the LinkedIn site now, you can set up a group just by clicking on a link, filling out and submitting an online form and not needing to submit a proposal to LinkedIn management.

One effect of that is a plethora of groups, some with with many members, some with very few, even down to some with only one member, namely the person who set up the group, who presumably sent out invitations to various connections to join and is still waiting for someone to accept.

But I was not looking just for a large group as such. I was looking for some sign that conversations were happening.

As I searched, I was somewhat surprised to find that many groups had no discussion going on and some had only a few discussion topics. Perhaps it’s a hangover from the old setup of LinkedIn for Groups, where there was no forum structure or other way of holding discussions with other members of a group.

The new setup for LinkedIn Groups has a setup for threaded discussions and some of the groups to which I belong have quite extended and informative discussions.

In the next post in this series of Looking for Conversations I will share the results of my search on LinkedIn Groups.

In the meantime, I hope you will share any suggestions about where to find good online conversations among business professionals working from home.