Will LinkedIn Groups be the next Yahoo Groups?

Mar 31, 2013 articles, branding
The Future of LinkedIn Groups?

With the added LinkedIn groups, seems to be more and more shameless business promotions. Will LinkedIn groups eventually turn into Yahoo Groups? Yahoo groups used to be a nice spot to find like minded conversations on topics at hand. Grant it this was way before meetup.com and it had more of a forum style, but it was a GREAT resource at the time, and I am even still part of a few moderated Yahoo groups. But if you look at 90% of the groups it is nothing but spam, mostly because there is no moderation going on.

With so many automated tools out there to post your blog post to the LinkedIn groups, it could easily turn into the spam that Yahoo experienced. Especially if a company owns multiple domains and is posting blogs daily or a few times a week. Then the groups start getting posts from the same person over and over again and doesn’t leave any space for other posts. It’s a thin line between promoting your blog posts that you feel will contribute to the group, and just setting up your automated WordPress plugin to blast all the groups you are a part of with 2 or 3 domains. It will probably take longer for people to realize or even say something since the content is relative to the group. But even though you aren’t posting about viagra doesn’t mean you aren’t spamming the group. Spam consist of automation, and saturation.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it is great there are tools out there that help with task that would normally take up our time for other business related things. But the key is moderation. I mean chocolate cake tastes good, but without moderation, you will more than likely end of with health issues if you eat it for every meal. Branding your company is no different, without moderation, you will more than likely find your business’ health (reputation) at risk.