Tag Archives: LinkedIn

Social Media

8 Tips to Successfully Manage a LinkedIn Group

I recently took over managing a group on LinkedIn. What is a group? It’s a bunch of people who have specific, definable interests around which they can coalesce and interact. Any LI member can create a group and anyone can join groups that interest them. Some are open and some require an application to join to be approved. These tips are about the latter. Here are 8 tips to successfully manage a group, ensuring it’s well-functioning for everyone’s benefit:

  1. Encourage useful discussions and topics, beginning with examples of your own. Look at the most popular discussions and rotate them through the Manager’s Choice carousel.
  2. Initiate good discussions, comment meaningfully on other’s discussions and strive to be a top contributor without abusing your manager position.
  3. Make sensible rules and communicate them–what is open for discussion and what is a promotion; don’t let spam annoy the group members.
  4. Don’t tolerate way off topic discussions or comments–delete them. Put repeat offenders in the moderation queue–meaning nothing they post goes up in the group without your or another manager/moderator’s approval.
  5. Don’t tolerate abusive, profane or threatening comments. Put offenders in moderation or if especially egregious, block and delete them from the group.
  6. Don’t use auto-join; review requests to join if yours is not an open group. Do use auto-send welcome messages that include specifics about the group, as well as do’s and don’ts. Do use auto-send messages for those member requests you decline.
  7. Stay active; visit the group every day, even if only for a short time, so that items in moderation don’t stay there too long or requests to join languish either.
  8. If the group is too big to handle on your own, recruit some moderator’s or another manager from among the most active members.
Writing

Five Essential Story Ingredients

Updated 2018, with the cover image and link to the 10th Anniversary Edition of Waiting for Westmoreland

Thanks, Richard Brownell for posting this on LinkedIn to remind us of some essential story ingredients needed for successful writing. The tips are contained in an article on Writer’s Digest, by Steven James. James begins his piece by asking  is the following a story:

Imagine that I’m telling you about my day and I say, “I woke up. I ate breakfast. I left for work.”

Of course it isn’t. From my own writing courses from a bygone time, I recall that a story needs exposition of a character who experiences a conflict. The crisis the character meets may be exacerbated by a weakness or a character flaw. The story arc proceeds through the protagonist discovering more about him or herself and finding the change required to resolve the difficulty. Rather than my explaining all that here, take a look at the item on Writer’s Digest at the link in the first paragraph. Of course, you can also see a real life example looking at my own memoir. Waiting for Westmoreland.

The cover of the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Waiting for Westmoreland