This post appeared originally on Des Walsh dot Com One reason for sharing here on Thinking Home Business is that it is about a resource that could be particularly helpful for professionals working from home.

What do I mean, the LinkedIn Bloggers group has moved to LinkedIn? With that name, wouldn’t it have been there already?

Short answer: Yes

And No

The story so far

It’s now just over five and a half years ago, in May 2005, since I teamed up with the most prolific creator of online groups I know, Vincent Wright, to help build the LinkedIn Bloggers group he had established on the Yahoo! Groups platform. Several months later we established a group of the same name on what was then known as LinkedIn for Groups and is now just LinkedIn Groups (a literally significant change in nomenclature which is almost certainly of more interest to students of history like me than to most of the millions of LinkedIn members!)

We had some great discussions on the Yahoo group, but things quietened down some time ago and, not to put too fine a point on it, conversation on the group just fizzled out.

So if the conversation has fizzled out, why move to LinkedIn Groups?

Some of us believe there is scope still to have useful discussions around blogging, plus other new/social media, and networking, especially on LinkedIn, and think the new LinkedIn Groups platform (as distinct from the old LinkedIn for Groups directory) seems to provide more scope for re-starting the conversation.

So we have now moved the focus of attention to the LinkedIn group and away from the Yahoo group (effectively mothballing the Yahoo group) .

People and topics

In a post back in 2005, only a few days after I had joined the Yahoo group, I wrote about the people we hoped to attract to LinkedIn Bloggers and how we saw the group operating:

The aim is for LinkedIn Bloggers to attract LinkedIn members who are already experienced and even expert bloggers … and also – and very importantly from my point of view – LinkedIn members who are not yet blogging and want to find out more about it, how they would go about it etc, in a friendly, professional and non-hyped setting.

I think that still lines up pretty much with how we see the group operating on the LinkedIn platform.

OK, I can’t resist sharing a bit of history but I’ll keep it brief

Just harking back for a moment to the “LinkedIn for Groups/LinkedIn Groups” distinction I made above, and promising no extended history lesson, there was no opportunity in 2005 to have a group conversation on LinkedIn. The groups then were, as far as I can recall, mainly alumni groups from colleges and companies and the LinkedIn for Groups directory gave people in those groups better intra-group networking opportunity.

The relatively new look “LinkedIn Groups” is set up for moderated discussions, has real names not the often uncommunicative Yahoo username setup. There are also, helpfully, a Promotions section (so the discussion stream does not have to be muddied) and a Jobs section (ditto re discussion).

But what if we’re giving a party and nobody comes?

That’s possible. On the other hand, we have 127 members in the group on LinkedIn and while many of the members of the Yahoo group may not migrate there are already new members in the group on LinkedIn who were not members of the Yahoo group.

I’m sure there are many LinkedIn members around the world who do not yet even know of the existence of the LinkedIn Bloggers group. Especially given that, as I discovered a day or so ago, we were not listed on the LinkedIn Groups directory. That was probably a hangover from the old days when you had to pay an annual fee to LinkedIn to have your group listed: as we had no actual activity going on there at the time we did not avail ourselves of the privilege. I’ve changed the setting there so I would expect more people will now become aware of the group’s existence and be attracted to join us.

We are definitely open for business

At this stage the group is technically a “closed” group while we arrange the furniture, so to speak. But membership for any LinkedIn member should normally be approved immediately. And one of the great advantages of the LinkedIn Groups setup is that people who apply to join the group will already be LinkedIn members (basic membership is free) which has always been a pre-requisite for membership of the group, but very difficult and sometimes impossible to establish from the Yahoo group membership application process.

We have a group of managers standing ready to serve

I am delighted that Dennis McDonald and Robyn Tippins, who each has great knowledge, experience, wisdom and good old common sense and were both such stalwarts as co-moderators on the Yahoo group, have stepped up to be managers of the LinkedIn group.

We have rules, but not too many

A draft document with rules for the group has been posted on the site. There are at present two rules (with explanations of how each applies):

Rule 1: Respect the discussion space, in terms of topic, content and tone

Rule 2: Respect your colleagues in the group

Acknowledgements

It’s appropriate to acknowledge here the great support for the group over the years from the founder, Vincent Wright, original co-moderator Dave Taylor, Dennis and Robyn as above, and co-moderator on the Yahoo group Sarah Lewis.

We are still using the logo which was donated with typical generosity by Paul Dube and approved by LinkedIn, back in the mists of LinkedIn Bloggers time.

And thanks to all the wonderful people who have contributed through sharing, discussing and debating, to what has been a truly dynamic group and will hopefully continue to provide service and enjoyment in its new place of operation.

I hope if you are not a LinkedIn Bloggers member yet you will come and check us out.

Image credits: Original image Moving House, mikecogh via Flickr, Creative Commons a-sa

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.