Mimicking Real World Business Collaboration Needs – Linkedin Launches Subgroups
LinkedIn groups have been among the most active online business groups and collaboration platforms with over 30,000 groups created over time. Clearly one of the best features the social networking for business professionals offers, the LinkedIn groups have been a popular place for millions of business professionals to come together, discuss, collaborate and share providing a great resource to its members. It looks like the groups may just get better.
LinkedIn announced the introduction of subgroups which can be created under the thousands of main groups created. This was a response to a popular suggestion from its users who have been suggesting the introduction of subgroups for some time but what is interesting is the real world comparison of this feature. In an email which went out to the members, LinkedIn says:
“We’re happy to announce that later this week we are launching a long-requested feature for group managers: the ability to create subgroups. Subgroups are like a break- out session at a conference. They enable you to create more focused areas than in the main group.”
Also, by creating and inviting members into subgroups, you can now send additional weekly Announcement emails to focused audiences.
It’s good to see some more aspects of real world business collaboration situations being applied to the improvement of digital business collaboration platforms like the online groups. The ability to address a smaller section of an overall group like in the conference situation is something that does happen in many situations and being able to do the same online would perhaps bring online groups a step closer to how people would interact offline. On the flip side, I wonder if this will fragment larger groups and perhaps isolate some of its members as more activity happens within subgroups. We will just have to wait and see how things pan out over time.
For now it’s a welcome change and perhaps the forerunner to other social networking for business software platforms that will also keep a close eye on it and decide to implement this feature into upcoming versions. Anything in the direction of improving software to encourage more collaboration is a step in the right direction.
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