Mid-Atlantic Consultants Network

submitted by: Ed Callahan, Coherent Sales Consulting

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In addition to the new website we learned about at our meeting in September, there is a new way to communicate with other members of the Mid-Atlantic Consultants Network (MACN). If you are a member of our LinkedIn Group, you have access to some interesting new communication capabilities, such as:

• Discussion forms: Simple discussion spaces for all members.
• Enhance roster: Searchable list of group members
• Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive.
• Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

To access this functionality in LinkedIn, go to your home page in LinkedIn and click on Groups in the personal navigation panel on the left side of your screen.

You will be redirected to a page that looks like this:

This is my page and yours will reflect at least one group – MACN’s – assuming you have joined it. I have underlined the four settings you will see (the “manage” setting is for administrators of each group only).

If you click on “Discussions” you can start a discussion or participate in existing discussions.

If you click on members, you can see a list of all the MACN members in LinkedIn who have signed up for the MACN LinkedIn group, starting with yourself and sorted by degrees away from you. You can also easily search for specific members of the group by keyword.

If you haven’t already joined the MACN LinkedIn group, you can do so by clicking this link, MACN LinkedIn Group, or on the profile of anyone who is in the group already (use me for example) and then click on the MACN logo displayed in my profile (scroll to find it). If you don’t see the MACN logo, click on “display more” and you will.

You can also discover other groups within LinkedIn you may wish to join by searching for them via the quick search capability at the top right of any LinkedIn page (see the graphic below), by changing the search target to “Groups” and entering keywords, like the College or University you atttended, any Company you worked for, and any interest or expertise area you may have, like “Wireless” or “Six Sigma”. The primary benefit of joining groups is the fact that all members of groups you belong to are included in the search domain for you, in addition to the people who are 1st, 2nd, or 3rd degree members of your network. You may invite them to connect with you because you belong to the same group. You don’t need an introduction.