Thursday, March 22, 2007

Discussion Creation Among Bloggers - LinkedIn, Blogging and Discussion Groups

I've been participating in a Yahoo Group that are users of LinkedIn and who are Bloggers: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/LinkedinBloggers/

It's an interesting group of folks from diverse backgrounds. It's also been interesting to see the interaction of tools involved - Social Networking, Blogging and a Discussion Group.

It seems that four different models of "discussion creation" have occurred:

  • Organice Discussion - someone posts something interesting, lots of bloggers post on the topic, distributed discussion ensues.
  • Tag Memes - Someone posts a question and "Tags" five people to give their response. See Five Things Meme as an example.
  • Blog Hub - A central blog provides a place where the topic is raised and comments are collected and bloggers post. See Supporting New Managers and What Would You Do to Support New Managers? as an example.
  • Discussion Group Hub - questions/topics are raised via the discussion group and can go out into the blog world to get a more diverse audience - which is now happening with this group.

I'm not sure which of these make sense in what case. Certainly it suggests that there's need for something more than MyBlogLog, Explode, CoComment, etc. to help bloggers and blog readers with comments.

But this still leaves me with lots of questions about the interplay between these tools, so I'd ask people who author a blog, use LinkedIn (or other social networking), and participate in discussion groups, how do you use these tools.

How do you use LinkedIn?

How do you use Discussion Groups?

What's the interaction between them?

I'll be curious to see the response from the group. Actually, what I'd love to see are some responses via blog posts from different folks in the group:

Bill Austin -Famous Quotes 2007 Weblog Awards
Alister Cameron - www.alistercameron.com
Dennis McDonald - www.ddmcd.com
Jason Alba - http://www.JibberJobber.com/blog
Ben Yoskovitz - http://www.instigatorblog.com
Ben - http://blog.targetz.net/

My answers...


Where I use LinkedIn:

* I definitely use LinkedIn for Specific Requests - Ex. Open Source Business Models, speakers for Web 2.0 event I did last fall.

* LinkedIn has been great to keep track of people I know and their current contact information. I regularly do wine tastings here in Los Angeles with some interesting folks I know. LinkedIn has been my primary tool for keeping track of who to invite.

* I definitely check people out using LinkedIn. It's a great way to get a background on folks.

* I've not found that much use for LinkedIn to help my blogging, but I'm starting to think about this. Maybe this meme will help.

Where I use the Discussion Group:

* I've not been very active in the discussion group on particular topics. However, it definitely has served as a hub. This suggests that something more than MyBlogLog is needed to create hubs from groups of bloggers. That's probably the value of this group.

Interaction:

* Not much right now between LinkedIn and my blog. Certainly my LinkedIn profile provides a better public profile for me. Otherwise, I've not seen much.

* I'm constantly frustrated by conversations that take place in discussion groups that can't cross the border into the blog world. And, I don't like to copy and paste.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am in the middle of writing up some of my thoughts on this and will post about it and let you know. There has certainly been a storm of activity over this question.

Bill Austin

Anonymous said...

Here are some thoughts related to this topic, stimulated by an increasing number of requests to join "social networks" of one sort or another:

"Network Unto Others As You Would Have Others Network Unto You" http://www.ddmcd.com/unto.html

Anonymous said...

We have been using LinkedIn for both sourcing recruits and reviewing backgrounds for recruits. It's been great to zero in on very specific skillsets. The level of resumes we get through our LinkedIn networks is top notch.

We've also found that other social networks such as FaceBook and MySpace to have almost no results when it comes to recruitment.

I think the reason that LinkedIn is working is that there are so many other people in our micromarket (or microfield) in our networks that we end up really just being a couple hops away from someone who's perfectly qualified. We've also found that potential clients find us through LinkedIn. I'm very happy with the time I've spent building up my LinkedIn network. I have to say that it has netted far more than I would have thought.

Charles Edge :: Partner, 318
Author :: Mac Tiger Server Little Black Book

Shanx said...

You may want to check out the Q&A ("Answers") section inside LinkedIn. It's more focused and more professional than many discussion forums.