A hot debate has unfolded in LinkedIN about the option for group leaders to access the email addresses of the members of their groups. LinkedIN pulled the plug on this option this week due to 'some' group leaders abusing this privilidge and sending innapropiate messages to the members of their groups. Obviously the level of complaints from group members reached a tipping point which had LinkedIN disable this feature.
In 90% of community platforms such as XING, Facebook, Ning and others, the group leader does not have access to the entire list of contact details for their members including email addresses. You could say that the members belong to the community platform and as a group leader you're 'leasing' a space where you can faciliate discussions amongst like minded people who are passionate or interested in a topic. The upside is that you instantly attract highly targeted members into your group at a much quicker pace than building your own community or group using an open source or white label technology. The downside is that it's not so easy to access the contact details of your members.
Michael Crosson who leads the 15,500 member+ The Social Media Marketing group on LinkedIN slammed LinkedIN for their latest decision to disable this feature and wrote the following:
LinkedIn pulls the rug out from group owners - eliminating the ability to download the email list from the group
If you run a group on LinkedIn, you should know that they changed their policy today and have completely eliminated the group managers ability to download their own group's email list.
In the case of Social Media Marketing, that means a number of critical and detrimental changes, including:
- I can no longer respond to and welcome individuals joining
- I can't send you periodic email newsletters as I have in the past
- I have no reporting or feedback mechanism other than trying to cull through the thousands of postings & responses to see what is working or not in the group
Especially in a group like Social Media Marketing, this completely de-personalizes the whole community experience... exactly what we are here to learn and share! If we can't do this on LinkedIn, itself a social community site (theoretically) then what is the purpose here?
They have done this in response to disreputable managers in other groups 'harvesting' emails. This is like cutting down the forest because a few squirrels are stealing the nuts. The correct response would have been to trap the offending squirrels, but nnnnooooooo, LinkedIn takes the worst possible tactic.
If you are a group owner, check out Super Groups or any other LinkedIn Group Managers group and see the overwhelmingly NEGATIVE response from other managers. It is important that we get them to reconsider their perjorative and unjustified policy change.
Thanks for standing up for group managers' rights!
Mike Crosson
Moderator
Whilst LinkedIN has disabled this feature, there are other features available to communicate with all members including the 'Send an Announcement' tool.
My stance - it should be up to the members to choose whether they want the group leader to have access to their email or not. Turning the feature off entirely irritates the people you don't want to irritate who are highly influential and valuable to the overall community platform.
