Tag Archives: Open Groups on LinkedIn

###Update 2: as of this morning (December 21) it seems that the process of moving to an Open Group is being made available to the group owner as you will be given the option to change across to an Open Group automatically. There should be a yellow band now with a clickable area and it will explain some of the implications and a bit of housekeeping you should do ahead of it. Also in the “Group settings” area of the “Manage” menu in the group you should find a button at the top which guides you through the process! Decide carefully though – no undoing the process once you’ve elected to make it Open! 🙂 ###

### Quick update: I’ve had a number of people ask how to make their groups open – as of end November 2010, LinkedIn are still testing and rolling out and, if you are interested in enabling this feature for your group, they recommend emailing them at opengroups@linkedin.com or visit an update page at lnkd.in/opengroups. ###

In yet another departure from their current setup, LinkedIn has announced that it is introducing Open Groups onto the site – indeed, this will be the default format of all new LinkedIn Groups going forward, once it is fully rolled out.

So what’s an Open Group? Well, this isn’t, as you might think, one that anyone on LinkedIn can join – those already exist as “open access groups” – but rather one where the content will be visible to everyone on LinkedIn (group member of not) and externally to LinkedIn as well, therefore making it accessible to Google.

Currently, most of the content on LinkedIn, including in this instance that in the Groups, is essentially hidden from Google because they are locked away behind the password and login. The main exceptions to this are (more…)