LinkedIn to upgrade groups with discussions

I have received the following mail from LinkedIn being the owner of two groups and manager of one group as follows:

a) Virtually Networked
b) Social Media in India
c) Symbiosis Alumni

Dear Shefali,

First, thank you for managing your group on LinkedIn. We sincerely appreciate the time and effort you devote to your members, and we know they value it. Together you have made Groups one of the top features on LinkedIn.

This Friday, we will be adding several much-requested features to your group:

• Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)
• Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
• Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)
• Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

We're confident that these new features will spur communication, promote collaboration, and make your group more valuable to you and your members. We hope you can come by LinkedIn on Friday morning to check out the new functionality and get a group discussion going by posting a welcome message.

Sincerely,
The LinkedIn Groups Team

This Friday you can expect new discussion capability to be enabled for Group managers and members. This is a very welcome change as until now there were very limited options available with group owners, it was nothing more than a list of people interested in a common subject. If you need to send any message to your group members, you were supposed to export their email addresses and then sending them mail using any Yahoo! Mail / Gmail. Not the best option I would say. Discussing stuff online will save many of us from unnecessary spam.

Moreover they are also planning to release an enhanced capability for searching members in the Group. This is a very logical upgrade after the release of searchable Groups Directory.

Looking forward to that !!

LinkedIn in Plain English

Two of my favorites came together (My favorite networking site Linkedin is being explained by Common Craft - I love their videos) and it was impossible not to blog about it.

Common Craft has a wonderful way of explaining everything in the simplest way and it’s a sheer pleasure to watch their videos.

Linkedin has recently reached the mark of 1 million users in India; still my network has least no. of people from India :(. Check out the Bollywood style party @ Linkedin office to celebrate their achievement.

10 super cool ways to increase your network in Linkedin

1)Get all your contacts in the address-book of your Outlook, Yahoo, Google, Rediff, AOL and MSN email accounts.
Download your address book of any of your email account on your machine and upload it on your Linkedin connections and send an invitation to connect to all these contacts

2)Write a comprehensive profile with proper keywords
Write a brief profile so that people are interested in reading it. Very long descriptions are boring and generally people lose interest in the mid-way. Use the key words appropriately to make your profile more search-friendly.

3)Use your interest sections most intelligently
It’s like a tag cloud of your blog. Use all the key words relevant to your interest / industry to increase the searcheability of your profile and also it makes it easy for others to identify your area of expertise.

4)Make getting connected with you as easy as possible for others
Use Quick links on your other sites, your email address in your Linkedin profile, direct people to your blog / site – do any thing to make it easy for others to connect with you

5)Get connected to the top open networkers
Linkedin best part is your 2nd and 3rd degree connections; get connected to open networker (they usually have huge network of their own) to increase your 2nd and 3rd level of connections.

6)Be an open networker yourself
To be an open networker you need to register your profile at http://www.themetanetwork.com/ and write [LION] in your profile which stands for Linkedin Open Networker

7)Join relevant groups
Join the groups relevant to your interest / industry to get connected with like minded people for many fruitful discussions.

8)Ask relevant questions
Asking relevant questions on Linkedin will not only increase your business acumen and understanding of your industry, it will also help you in increasing your network.

9) Answer questions related to your field
As they rightly say “what goes around comes around” - help people with your expertise and they will help you with increasing your network.

10) Answer to all your connection invitations messages
Last but not the least step is little time consuming but its crucial for maintaining fruitful working relationships on Linkedin.