All I Need to Know About LinkedIn Groups I Learned in Kindergarten

How to behave in a LinkedIn Group you don’t own

July 28, 2014: LinkedIn wants its Groups to “provide a place for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share content, find answers, post and view jobs, make business contacts, and establish themselves as industry experts.”

What it doesn’t want is for its groups to be overrun with spam, irrelevant comments, and “unprofessional” behavior.  In other words, it doesn’t want people acting like greedy, impulsive “me-centered” 4-year olds whose superegos have yet to fully develop.

Although LinkedIn doesn’t publish any statistics on the amount of childish behavior in its Groups, there’s a lot of it — especially on big groups. Linked is clearly aware of the problem, however, and has taken steps to curb it. In April of 2014, it introduced a tough new approach that’s  been informally called the “SWAM (Site-Wide Automatic Moderation) Program.” In a blog post announcing it, LinkedIn published the following details about SWAM:

While we rely on group management to determine the appropriate level of moderation for discussions in their groups, we also support a moderation feature that helps group members and managers minimize unwanted content such as self-promotion in their own and other groups. By monitoring how people respond to contributions, we can gauge the likelihood of unwanted content being repeated from group to group. Based on the feedback trends, some members may become subject to moderation in all their groups for a period of time.

Think of SWAM as being a giant paddle used to inflict corporal punishment on LinkedIn’s ill-behaving members. The SWAM Program is a big deal because it means that if any member misbehaves in a group and is subject to a disciplinary action taken by the Group moderator or owner, or is assigned a negative score by Group members authorized to flag content as promotional or irrelevant, any content this member posts to any — repeat any — LinkedIn Group will not appear. Instead, it will enter a moderation queue whose content may or may not ever become public.

Unless you enjoy sitting in a corner with a Dunce cap on your head, you want to avoid SWAM. So when you post to any LinkedIn group, please, children, remember the following six rules:

Rule 1: You’re in somebody else’s space. Posting content to a LinkedIn Group that you don’t own isn’t like posting content to your Profile page. Tune any content you post to what you believe is going to be relevant and valuable to the Group.

Rule 2: Wade — don’t dive — into conversations. Don’t rush in and start conversations until you’ve got a good idea about what the Group expects from you. Start with “liking” posts that you agree with, and then move on to commenting on them. When you do comment, avoid the temptation to simply say “great post,” “love it,” or “right on.” Take the time to add a little bit of value to your comment by explaining why you like something or take issue with it.

Rule 3: Use “snark” and sarcasm with discretion. Sadly, a fair number of people on LinkedIn can’t write, or write ridiculous things when they do attempt to write. Avoid the temptation to call out these people and shame them for their poor use of language, even if you believe they deserve it. Instead, send them a private message if you feel strongly enough about a linguistic gaffe.

Rule 4: Humble and helpful works, brash and boastful doesn’t. Everybody’s got an ego but LinkedIn groups aren’t the best places to express your own magnificence. A spirit of empathy (“we’re all bozos on this bus”) goes a lot further than “I’m the greatest”–style braggadocio.

Rule 5: Avoid ad hominem attacks. Regard LinkedIn as a public conference room, not a locker room or after-hours sports bar. If somebody is taking an absurd position on an issue, let them take it. Don’t put yourself in the role of enforcing the Reality Principle — that’s the moderator’s job. Ad hominem attacks (and responses to such attacks) are very dangerous because all it takes is one or two aggrieved people to make you subject to the dreaded SWAM.

Rule 6: Share something useful. While it’s true that emotional, controversial postings generally perform very well on social media, LinkedIn is a much more buttoned-down network than either Facebook or Twitter.Share content that can save people time or contribute to solving a business problem. Avoid the temptation to just share your own helpful content; if a competitor’s posted something helpful, there’s no reason not to share it. Sharing content from 3rd-party sources you personally curate is a good way to underscore the fact that, like every professional, you’re naturally biased toward the success of your own enterprise, but your mind is open to many points of view and you’re not afraid of highlighting good content regardless of who authored it.

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