If you value messages from the Medical Devices Group, you need to join my personal mailing list at https://medgroup.biz/stay. It may be the only way I can communicate with you in the future.

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This article, updated July 17, 2018, was originally named,

What would it really take to beat LinkedIn at its own game?

I know you’ve thought about it. I have.

FIRST MOVER and MONOPOLIST
LinkedIn and my cable company give me horrible service. There’s nothing I can do about it.

I mean, I guess I could survive without cable but my livelihood requires unfettered Internet access, so that’s out.

And I could delete my LinkedIn account, but that would have a material adverse affect on me. You see, I built one of these for myself:

I knew from the start, in 2011, when I literally inherited the Medical Devices Group, I was building a castle out of sand.

This Medical Devices Group I lead now has 350,000+ members and, while LinkedIn shares zero engagement metrics with me (why would they?), I know from personal correspondences and business connections that what I do there matters.

So I keep at it, moderating it, letting people in, blocking spammers, nurturing the group and faithfully writing a group announcement once weekly.

This, knowing LinkedIn could pull the groups plug at any moment, without notice, and it would all be gone. (Rumor says shuttering groups was a real possibility in 2017.)

Indeed, they could kick me off the system if they don’t like this article. Their terms of service make it clear: We’re here at their discretion. It’s their sandbox.

Groups deteriorate. LinkedIn looks away.

There’s a host of reasons why groups are a shadow of their former selves. And while we can’t place all the blame on LinkedIn, they deserve most of it.

For example, LinkedIn steadily stripped vital management tools away from managers. Why?

That’s it.

“Because LinkedIn.” Frustrated LinkedIn users figure I know what’s going on here because I lead this huge group. Surely, I can explain what LinkedIn is doing.

I cannot. Their decisions defy logic. So much so, I stopped trying and simply respond, “Because LinkedIn,” since only “LinkedIn” acts this way.

Can’t live with LinkedIn. Can’t live without it.

There are no viable alternatives to LinkedIn. (I’ve looked.) None seem to have a reasonable chance to the Tipping Point required to overtake them.

LinkedIn isn’t all bad. But my relationship with them? I made a picture to show you.

And while I and every serious group owner would love to migrate our groups to our own websites where we control how things work, it’s just not practical or scalable.

🤔

If there’s a way to migrate a group off LinkedIn, I’ve probably tried it. Now 6½ years into my Medical Devices Group reign of terror, more than 60,000 have logged into my companion site, MedicalDevicesGroup.net, and shared their contact information with me.

That’s one-in-six subscribers, to say nothing of how stale the names get.

So, that leaves us with this question.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t take them on. You probably can’t either.

Despite hemorrhaging money, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. If there were a real competitive threat, I have to think they’d respond.

Despite bloated software, there’s a LOT of code to support present functionality to say nothing of the code we’d write if we created our improved version.

Despite frustrated customers, inviting millions of users to open a profile…? I don’t even know how to finish the sentence. I mean, how most users see their profiles – as a resume repository, only to be visited in times of great distress. Still, they are here, giving LinkedIn all the social proof it needs for the foreseeable future.

The only thing I can think of

The only thing I can think of dawned on me today.

I believe the only way to unseat LinkedIn is for a big player – nay, a HUGE player – to take it on.

I’m talking a Google (despite their Google+ disappointment), a Facebook, a Yuri Milner, Eric Schmidt, Amazon.

Someone that follows through on what they execute. Someone that would make you say, “Oh, SNAP, now it is O N!”

Do we have an alternative?

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ADDENDUM: I was wrong. I can and have taken them on: MedicalDevicesGroup.net.

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About the author: Joe Hage leads the world’s largest Medical Devices Group (350,000+ members), the industry’s only spam-free, curated forum for intelligent conversations with medical device thought leaders. Mr. Hage’s medical device marketing services help companies engage qualified prospects and his family of 10x Medical Device Conferences unites Medical Devices Group members in fun and educational forums each year.

Don Bogutski
President and CEO at Dx+
Adversity creates opportunity. Stop whining and worrying. You didn’t create Linkedin, or guaranty it’s success. You are only responsible for your singular success. Start crafting a way individually, or collectively to a bright future.

Joe Hage
🔥 Find me at MedicalDevicesGroup.net 🔥
Don, what you see as whining and worrying, I see as whining and alerting. Sure, I would have preferred a logical progression with the platform (whining) and I’m using the bullhorn available to alert my subscribers to follow me at https://MedicalDevicesGroup.net where we will continue our journey. Join us there if you like.

Noam “N.G.” Gordon
Influencer on Influencer Marketing, Brand Evangelist, Blogger, Speaker, Creator of @DearMishu. MGS19 Speaker.
This is a turning point, Microsoft has the opportunity to get into social media with making the groups much much ..groups that its members help one another, and not just posts and self-promo and ..yes, hate.

David Rydberg
Emmy Award Winning Comedy Ghost Writer: The Battle for Resident Evil Truth GAME/movie in dev
Dark INTEL groups like Stratfor Global INTEl, (AJ works for them) all over Linkedin messin w our posts everyday, Thats why folks wont use it anymore, including me? (they changed my font to white even!)

Michael Crosson
Entrepreneur | Sales Management Consultant | Publisher | Advertising and Marketing Exec at SocialMediopolis.com
Hey, all – I run the largest group on LinkedIn with almost 2,000,000 members (Social Media Marketing, #66325). At NO point in the past 8-9 years have I been worried as much as I am now that LinkedIn is about to make a huge and potentially fatal misstep with Groups. I don’t believe it has anything to do with Microsoft… LinkedIn itself has been slowly and surely eroding the importance and value of groups for going on five years now, well before their acquisition.
The problem is that top management just simply does not get how much groups contribute to LinkedIn, which otherwise would just be another half-assed job search website. NOBODY but nobody comes here every morning to get their news feed with their morning coffee, or to catch up with friends. They truly risk turning LinkedIn into a milktoast version of Friendster if they “integrate” groups into their main architecture, instead of featuring it as the unique and valuable resource that it always was in the beginning.
But you know the saying, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

Michael Zadrozny, MBA
Plastics and Leadership professional
Well said Joe

John Marrett
Helping mid-sized organizations increase sales and improve customer service since 1993 | #LinkedInLocal
There are days when I think LinkedIn needs Facebook’s reactions. I would use the “Angry” face!

Joe Hage
🔥 Find me at MedicalDevicesGroup.net 🔥

😠 LinkedIn workaround at https://emojipedia.org/angry-face/ 😠

John Marrett
Helping mid-sized organizations increase sales and improve customer service since 1993 | #LinkedInLocal
Joe Hage: thanks for that, I’ll remember it for when I’m using my computer! Just fine on my tablet and phone 😉

Katalin Szilárd
DipTrans/LC – English-Hungarian Translation Expert in * Medical * Medical Device * Pharmaceutical * Law/Business fields
I totally agree, Joe. The love & hate symbol was a hit. Not only groups and group leaders, but individual paying members are not respected either. See my post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6422757944898699264

Franz Paul
Director of Candidate Relations at Scope and Prospect
Not a whole lot- considering how LinkedIn doesn’t really understand what their users want…

Robert Koshinskie
Product, Market & Business Management with Focus in Medical Device
While I don’t hate LI, I do wonder if it serves a real purpose any more. It seems to me that the whole social networking thing has gone stale. If someone could design and build a next generation platform that was clearly differentiated from LI then people may switch. Better ways to keep the focus on business and leave the junk to FB. Perhaps group buying power (e.g. insurance, services, virtual assistant)?

Joe Hage
🔥 Find me at MedicalDevicesGroup.net 🔥
Robert Koshinskie, please elaborate?

Robert Koshinskie
Product, Market & Business Management with Focus in Medical Device
Just thinking off the top of my head as I reflect on topics that seem key to many these days. For those on LinkedIn who are independent, some kind of group medical purchase may be beneficial. Also, using some of the machine learning that is being developed, perhaps LI could help better guide members to cull their networks, removing very distant links that hold little meaning and seeking out potential new connections that are based on your core contacts with whom you regularly communicate.

Joe Hage
🔥 Find me at MedicalDevicesGroup.net 🔥
I enjoy our conversations, John, and you know I value your perspective. At this point, if I were reading our conversation I would think, “Well, maybe that’s okay for you, John Jones! I don’t have the resources to build my own website that’s nearly as robust as LinkedIn’s.”

If you’re comfortable sharing it, how much time and money have you invested in your site so far?

John Jones
CEO of LabLynx, Inc and the Laboratory Informatics Institute
Joe, I am totally ok with sharing those metrics. To develop the first release of the site cost me no cash money and I did not have to do any development. I used WordPress and the Buddypress plugin and about a dozen other plugins. In terms of time to get the first release out. It took me 8 months starting in early 2015 when Linkedin announced the deprecation of a number of group features and the api. Once I saw that I said to myself that this is going in a direction that I am not interested in. So initial release took about 80 hours a month for the first 8 months. Since that time I have spent money on developer services and of course my own time. These on-going costs are incurred not out of necessity but out of my desire to keep building a better and better community. Each group/community owner will have their own economic realities and the marketplace controls what you will be able to do practically.
With respect to LI robustness… I am sorry but that gave me a bit of a chuckle. LI, robust, those 2 words do not go together. The functionality of LI is remedial at best. There are tons of home grown WordPress sites that smoke LI in terms of functionality. I will spot you that it is robust in terms of performance.

John Jones
CEO of LabLynx, Inc and the Laboratory Informatics Institute
Additional… In terms of scale and size…. who cares. Your Medical Device (MD) group has over 300K members. Easily handled by WordPress. Linkedin has a total of 535,643 profiles with Medical Device in it. LI has several hundred million people, how does that help your mission with respect to MD. If you have all of those MD people visiting your WordPress (WP) site, you would be able to easily handle that, give them more functionality and engagement than LI can ever do. How would a replacement for Linkedin from the likes of some other mega company like Amazon or Facebook help you if you already have all the quality MD members and visitors. Since you do not have the 500K of visitors and members, this is why I advise building your own site in WP and then using LI to drive that 500K to your site. Once your MD group is gone from LI, what other venue would MD folks have that even compares to your own site? NONE. This is precisely why I think you can do your own thing and be done with LI. As more community owners do this, LI will find themselves in a continuous war of attrition that they cannot win. Now is the time to stop investing your time in LI and build your own community.

Joe Hage
🔥 Find me at MedicalDevicesGroup.net 🔥
John Jones Ok! Ok! Now all I need is the time and money to do it.

John Jones
CEO of LabLynx, Inc and the Laboratory Informatics Institute
Joe Hage, I get it but this is the crux of the problem for any group owner… alternatives. The economics for each of us is as different as our DNA. What works for me may not work for you and others. There are alternatives to my approach such as https://mobilize.io/. I do not endorse this one, I just provide it as an example. It has more functionality than Linkedin as many community platforms do. The point is, you don’t have to spend a lot to get a lot but you do have to think about what you are doing and work hard at it. Serve your members and they will be your source of growth. Linkedin is by no means got you by the…

John Jones
CEO of LabLynx, Inc and the Laboratory Informatics Institute
Additional… I too run a Linkedin group and absolutely loved it from its inception in 2009 to October 2015. October 2015 was a red letter day for me when it comes to Linkedin groups. They announced their changes and when I saw that, I immediately started developing my own off-site group. In October 2015 my Linkedin group had 74,000 members and in 2009 it had 1 member (me). I grew it until 2015 when Linkedin effectively killed groups. In November 2015, I introduced my external replacement group. It started with 1 member and today it has over 210K members and over 5,000 unique visitors per day. My LI group has 75K. I still have my Linkedin group but it is rather pitiful. The engagement and sharing is practically nil compared to my off-site group.
So much for the idea that you need a big player to make social groups work. Linkedin is just one of many resources I use to build my external group and the group focuses on content and engagement, not on marketing. How many people watch television for the adverts? How many watch tv anymore. The world is changing, open source is changing the industry I am in and it is doing the same to social media as large social media loses user trust and group leaders form small, responsive communities that play to the needs of its tribe.

John Jones
CEO of LabLynx, Inc and the Laboratory Informatics Institute
The way I see it, the social world naturally breaks down into tribes (in modern speak, groups). We are all part of one or more tribes. Tribalism has been made taboo in many corners of society but even those that make it taboo are card carrying, daily practitioners of tribalism. So if we can accept that and move on, we can better analyze this situation with how much LI stinks at the group functionality.
Groups need to evolve naturally and when that happens you find that Linkedin or any other social platform with billions of users has no real advantage over a well run independent social group. The economy of scale just does not apply. It is like saying planet earth has an economy of scale. What difference does that make to the Medical Devices group? Joe has a group with a few hundred thousand members that he does not know. The engagement of those users is literally by a few hundred people. From a marketing perspective, the conventional wisdom is the larger the better. From a user’s perspective it is all about quality of content and engagement. You have to decide the purpose of the group. Is it to market something or is it to share knowledge and collaborate.

Joe Hage
🔥 Find me at MedicalDevicesGroup.net 🔥
John Jones and I talked offline after his comment. I replied, “I didn’t say a big social media player necessarily. I said a credible entity that wins. I should have said Amazon. That would make people sit up and notice.”

When he still disagreed, I replied, “We’ll have to agree to disagree here unless there is a Linux-type or WordPress-type offering where money is made from those who rely on the system in a non-advertising way.

I reminded him of my one-in-six “conversion rate” to my personal https://MedicalDevicesGroup.net site. That’s why I don’t believe we small fries can each build little sites and extract a big enough audience.

Additional comments most welcome. (edited)

Kevin Saitta
…
You have to remember, before Microsoft bought LinkedIn, LinkedIn was on the right path. LinkedIn didn’t fail, Microsoft has (Remember Nokia?). You want to beat LinkedIn, then look at the root cause of the issue. Fix what Microsoft has broken and you will beat them (Microsoft) at their own game.

Gopan Joshi (GJ)
Scaling organizations by building cloud services | Ex Jio Cloud Services, Netmagic SimpliCloud
Can’t agree more. LinkedIn used to be much better before Microsoft acquired them. I’m sure, LinkedIn users will be more than happy to switch to something more credible / old LinkedIn.

John Jones
CEO of LabLynx, Inc and the Laboratory Informatics Institute
Well Joe, I did respond earlier with a comment but for some reason it has been censored out. I will try again. Basically, I agree with your sentiments but I disagree with the solution. The solution is not for a big social media player to take on Linkedin, same goes for facebook. Another big player will just be the same old thing we have now. The problem is fundamental to the business model of these social media platforms.
The answer comes from you and other professional group owners. You have to stop investing your time in Linkedin and invest solely in your own property. Just use Linkedin to drive members to your property. Number of members is not what is important. It is engagement and content. Your group lacks the engagement it once had and LI on the whole has little useful content. Stop looking at the number of members you think you have and focus on driving quality members and engagement at your site and use Linkedin as a way to recruit.
Once you have your own group outside and it thrives, you will never look back.

John English, HCCP
Computer Validation & Data Integrity
You have insights as a large (MEGA?) Group leader that I would not have been aware of, Joe. This piece is worth of some thought – I’ll see if I can suggest anything.

Christine W.
Legal Document Preparation & Writing Services
I don’t think LI is too big to fail OR be replaced. It had to start out on the bottom before it grew into the seemingly gargantuan Philistine that it has become. I just know that there’s a David out there somewhere, slingshot in hand, poised to whip a flaming pile of dog shit at LI’s head.

Joe Hage
🔥 Find me at MedicalDevicesGroup.net 🔥
Know anyone?

Chris Walker
Partner at Refine Labs | B2B Growth Marketing & E-Commerce
Agreee LinkedIn is moving slowly, although I don’t think it’s intentional. Their ad product is 10 years behind, too. in regards to the Microsoft acquisition, sometimes the new organ doesn’t fit the body.