If your association has a LinkedIn Group, your group members are likely to get a daily email digest of the day’s discussions. Not a bad thing… but what if every one of those emails was promoting a competitor to your online career center? If you have the “Jobs” tab enabled for your Group, that’s exactly what is happening. When you create a Group, it defaults to enabling the “Jobs” tab which is a way to keep job ads from cluttering up the discussion area. However, if the tab is enabled then every digest email your Group members receive includes an ad for LinkedIn’s own job posting service. Click the “Get Started” link at the bottom of that email and this is where it takes your Group members: http://www.linkedin.com/jobs/post.
Chances are, you’re not marketing your own career center via daily email messages, and chances are companies that want to advertise to your audience pay you for that access. You’ve got to hand it to LinkedIn – it’s a very clever way to leverage the activities and value of professional associations that are engaging in social media – at absolutely no cost to LinkedIn. They don’t even have to share any of their job board revenue with anyone. Now, it’s not that people won’t use LinkedIn to post jobs, just like they use other types of job boards along with yours, but giving them free access to your audience to market their competing service simply makes no sense.
So, what to do? First, have your Group administrator disable the “Jobs” tab under the Group settings. What about people who want to post jobs to your Group? There are several options and we’ll be talking about that at the ASAE Annual Meeting in a Learning Lab called, “Make Social Media Work for Your Online Career Center.” It’s a panel discussion on Monday, August 23 at 8:30 am with Dianne Vance, CAE, ASCE; Peter Inchauteguiz, CAE, AAPS, Regina Gibson-Burtnick, ASHA, and Chip Deale, CAE, CFA Institute. If you can’t make it there, follow the session tweets with hashtag #asae10 ls3. We’ll also be posting future blog articles that take a closer look at your options. If you just can’t wait that long, email me at cmcintyre@boxwoodtech.com.
Hope to see you in LA!
