A recent conversation with a client set me thinking.  They wanted accounts set up at various social networking tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc and have everything automated (rss feed from blogs, automatic responses, etc) so that they could literally ‘set and forget’ the tools. This isn’t the first client who has requested this – I’ve had others ask for it too, thinking that engaging a Virtual Assistant to set things up for them and do occasional maintenance was all that is needed.  I don’t agree.

It made me realise that they didn’t understand the reason why these tools exist.  They’re not for automatic promotion of business services and products to generate quick sales, but rather to facilitate networking, relationship building and over time, may generate business. In fact I know they do because I’ve seen it happen for me and know others personally who have had that experience too.

In this day and age of instant gratification and quick responses, people tend to forget that some things need to have a seed planted, nurtured, watered and carefully grown over time.  And networking is one of those things, irrespective of what vehicle or tool is used. What do you think?

I’ve covered setting up a group at Yahoogroups and being a moderator or owner, and being a member of yahoogroups.  So I thought I’d touch on some of the things you should or shouldn’t do when participating in yahoogroups.  Mostly common sense things but it’s amazing how many people do not realise until it’s mentioned.

Don’t use SMS type for messages
You shouldn’t use phonetic spelling or lots of abbreviated words and half sentences, especially if the forum is intended for business.  I know it is common practice on chat programs to shortcut the process, but email is quite different, and generally accepted almost the same as a written letter.  The reason not to type email in the shortcut form is that it can become habit-forming and not something you would want to promote to prospective clients, bosses or other business associates.  It is important to remember that your ‘professionalism’ is on show 24 hours a day via email – a small point, but important.

Mixture of cultures
With the whole world being open to membership for these groups cultural differences need to be considered and it is possible to easily upset a member and suddenly you have a heated argument with many others getting involved and the original meaning and context completely shoved aside! I’ve seen this happen in groups and it’s a shame, as it often just takes a little thought and consideration to realise that perhaps the writer didn’t fully understand the language, or hadn’t actually meant what may have sounded rather rude. There have been times when someone has written something I thought was offensive or wrong and rather than emailing back to the list via the group email address, I have chosen to email the writer direct instead. A much better way to handle a misunderstanding.

Read first before sending
A good rule when handling/writing email for group discussions – read through it first and then check which address it is going to, before clicking ‘Send’.  I’ve known many a member to get embarrassed because they thought they were emailing someone privately only to find they just told the whole group what they were privately thinking.  oops!

Trim Messages
Trim the message before sending it back to the group. What I mean by this is do not leave all of the original discussion and replies at the tail end as this is unnecessary and makes it inconvenient for those who have chosen to receive a daily digest of messages (they keep reading the same things over and over otherwise) and difficult for those who are on limited bandwidth for email. But don’t delete the whole previous message – if you are responding to something, or adding to the discussion. There are often multiple discussions going on and it could prove difficult for the reader to understand what you’re saying, and in what context, if the whole previous message is deleted from your response. I have at times read something posted to a group and thought ‘huh?’ There is a happy medium here.  Leave the subject matter intact.

Topic changes
This applies particularly to discussion groups, but could also take place in normal everyday exchange of emails between two or more people.

It is common that subject matter in emails change quickly – one person might send an email with one topic, another replies and it prompts them to add another topic in that reply and then others start replying to the changed topic – but forget to change the subject heading – which can be very confusing for those later joining in the discussion and difficult to relocate one of the originating messages if filed away electronically – with the unchanged subject heading. This applies to searching through archives online also.

When responding to an email take a moment to think about it – are you changing the topic, should the subject heading be changed and whether the replied message requires any trimming of the original message before hitting the ‘send’ key. This can be particularly important when responding to business leads or enquiries relating to your business. A general rule of thumb for email seems to be to keep the number of topics discussed to a minimum – and start new email messages for new topics.

Backgrounds
There is a great supply of backgrounds available for use in various email programs – which help make your emails look more attractive and less boring. However, some backgrounds would be better used as wallpaper on your computer desktop and make it difficult to read the email message you are sending. If you want to use them, keep them for family and friends, but stick with plain backgrounds for business email.  And if you are replying to an email that uses a background give some consideration as to whether it should continue to be there or whether the background should be removed before sending the email response.

Bad Language
On occasion I’ve noticed some messages with bad language posted to online discussion groups that are usually maintained for business purposes, i.e. those groups that are designed to assist people with their line of business. Whilst I appreciate that we all get annoyed with some things I really do not feel that bad language has a place in a public forum that is used for business. Perhaps this might be an old fashioned value but I doubt that people would write a business letter using bad language so I cannot understand them doing the same when posting a message to a business oriented group. Think carefully when writing your email – is the language you are using something that might offend another person? Could the message get in front of someone you’d like to do business with? Emails are very easily forwarded on to others. How would you like them to think of you? It only takes a moment to think about what you’re written and to read it again before sending it on.  I have changed the setting on my email program to send out emails a few minutes after I’ve pressed send so I have time to change my mind and correct an email by retrieving it from the outbox before it goes.

Signatures
It is good to experiment with your signature style – have a look at what others do so you can decide what you do and don’t like.  You can use colour, different font formats, and even add a graphic.  However, prepare a plain text version too – not all yahoogroups forums are set to html format, some are plain text only (so you can’t forward attachments) and therefore your signature won’t look as intended.  Be aware too that many forums have rules and might only allow you 3 or 4 lines, others have no ruling at all.

I hope by observing these simple courtesies you will be able to enjoy participation in groups at yahoogroups for many years to come.

Further to my recent posts about joining a yahoogroup and being a member, the information would not be complete without something on being a moderator or owner of a group.

Anyone can start up a yahoogroup for any reason.  You just have to do a search to find out that the topics are so varied and memberships range from 1 or 2 people to thousands of people.  And the activity of these groups can range to only a few messages a month to hundreds of messages in one day.  But the good thing is that this doesn’t happen overnight, it takes time to grow your group and for the activity to develop.

I’ll give you examples of groups I’ve set up to give you some ideas for your own group.

I have a family group that is set to private which means it’s only open to those I invite or add to the group – no-one else can apply to join. So my parents, siblings, nephews and nieces can join in the chatter to one another without having to know everyone’s email address. What I haven’t shared in previous posts is that you can literally send one email and it will go out to a group of however many is in the group. So you can hit reply or send to mygroup@yahoogroups.com and all members of that group will receive your email.

Another group I set up was for a group of women who do fundraising and support each in a closed forum – again no-one can join unless invited or added to the group and generally the group isn’t advertised on the yahoogroups directory.

Some groups I’ve joined are announcement only lists – there isn’t any actual discussion that takes place, just information that is disseminated to the members. So you could choose to set up a group for a newsletter for example and many have.

Most groups I belong to are advertised in the yahoogroups directory and open to anyone to join, although membership is generally approved first and often new members might be moderated until they’ve settled into the culture of the group, or proven they aren’t spammers.

Because some groups are very large and lots of messages come through day and night, list owners can elect to have some members set up as co-moderators and when you log into a group where you can see the members, the owners and moderators are identified by a blue or gold crown next to their yahoo ID in the member’s list of any group.

When you go to set up a new group you are encouraged to search through existing categories first to find a home for your new group at http://groups.yahoo.com/start.    Once you’ve found the right category then you click on ‘Place My Group Here’.  Now you need to decide on a name for your group, if you haven’t already and a shortened version for the email address. For example I created the Virtual Assistants International Group and the shortened version is vaig@yahoogroups.com for the address.  I then gave it a description – don’t worry if you don’t have it all correct as you can update the description later.

You will be advised if the name or address you’ve chosen is available and then you can proceed further to select your yahoo profile to link to the group.

Now, you can start exploring all the facilities available for your group.  I’ll share more in a later post.

As a moderator of a few yahoogroup forums I get frequent requests for me to remove members, update their email addresses, change their email notifications and so on.  Realistically I couldn’t do this for everyone – with over 2,000 participants in the forums I moderate (or own) it would become a fulltime job in itself – an unpaid one.  I try to educate them periodically on things they can do to help themselves, but it seems that sometimes it still doesn’t click – especially if they’ve not participated in online forums before.

Below is an email I sent to one of my groups explaining how their membership works and I’ve added it here to assist anyone else trying to learn how it can work for them.

Everyone owns their own account at yahoogroups.com.  If I subscribed you because you belong to the ACS team, you would have received a welcome message via yahoogroups explaining how it works.  Some groups (like mine) might have a series of emails that come through, to explain how the list works and possibly send some files as well.

To login to yahoogroups.com, use the email address you were registered with, or the one you are receiving at and enter your password. If you do not know your password, then you need to click on ‘forgot password’ so yahoogroups can regenerate that for you – your moderator cannot do it.  If that doesn’t work for you they can log in and ask it to regenerate and I have done this on occasions for some and that usually resolves it.  If you don’t receive the information you need then you do need to contact yahoogroups at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/forms_index.html

At the bottom of every email you’ll find links to Visit Your Group, Change Settings via the Web, or Unsubscribe.

Once you have logged in, you’ll see a blue box on the left that says ‘View Groups‘ and to the right of that ‘Edit My Groups’ (see figure below).  Click on Edit My Groups and then change your settings from Individual emails to nomail, daily digest or whatever suits you.  You’ll need to do this for each group you belong to but if the setting is to be the same for all you can do it simply in one hit rather than individually for each group from this screen.  For the moderator to do it they have to login as a moderator and then search through each group to find you and this does take time.  At the centre of the screen you’ll see a link for ‘Go to my Email Preferences’ which is where you can add more email addresses or change them.  You can have several addresses listed to send from but you can only choose one to receive at.  I have about 6 or 7 addresses listed on my yahoogroups account and might have a different address listed for receiving for each forum I belong to.

It really is important for you to become familiar with anything you use on the web.  I belong to 20 groups here at yahoogroups and some are set to nomail and some to individual email.  I wouldn’t expect the moderators of those groups to manage my account for me and it’s important that you don’t either.  So please take the time to explore how yahoogroups works and you’ll find that you can easily make changes and even join more groups if you wish.

Finally, if you are going on leave for a period of time, set your yahoogroups to ‘nomail’ so that your autoresponder does not keep coming back to the moderators. It is really very annoying for every message that is posted to receive an autoresponder advising you’re not available.

I hope this helps everyone to understand a little more about how yahoogroups works.

I belong to many groups at yahoogroups (over 20) but I wonder how many out there really don’t know much about them?  I thought I’d do a series on ‘How To Use Yahoogroups’.

I moderate several groups and own about 4 myself with a total number of well over 2,000 participants.  And another group I belong to has over 8,000 members on its own.

There are tens of thousands of groups there – on almost any topic you can think of.  In the moderator’s group alone there are over 43,000 members and I expect there are a lot of moderators who aren’t members of that group – I only recently joined myself.

Anyone can start up a group but it would be worth your while first to do a search to see if there are already existing groups in the topic of interest.    I’ll give you some tips here to help you find an active group.

1. First, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/ and do a search on your topic of interest.
2. I decided to search on Embroidery and you’ll see there are over 2,000 groups with this word in their description.
3. Next, look at the description. Under the name of the forum it will list the number of members and indicate if membership is required – most groups will need you to join simply because spammers can run rife in publicly open groups. A large membership list though might not indicate a very active group.
4. Click on the link for that group to view their home page. If you look at the Figure 1 below, this shows the number of messages sent each month for a list with over 3,000 members.  I wouldn’t call that very active.  If you look at figure 2 the list has just under 900 members but look at the number of messages per month.  If you’re really looking to connect with others in your topic of interest and learn from them, then an active group is what you’re looking for – not necessarily the largest.
5. Next, read through their home page message – if you can abide by their rules or think they sound like a good group to join, then click on the ‘Join This Group’ link. Some groups will accept you straight away, others will be moderated and you’ll have to wait for your application to be approved.  Make sure you give a description or reason if asked to do so – don’t leave that section blank otherwise your request to join may get ignored as a potential spammer.
6. Once you are accepted as a member, make sure you read any further rules or information sent to you and view the archived messages.  In other words ‘lurk’ for a week or two, just to get a feel for the culture of the group and to make sure you don’t embarrass yourself by breaking any ‘unwritten’ rules.  And only self-promote if encouraged to do so, otherwise, once again, you might get branded a spammer.
7. Finally – participate. Ask questions, answer questions, join in the chatter and let other members get to know you.  If you have good knowledge on the topic at hand it will be noticed and it won’t be long before you’ll be welcomed as someone who really knows what they’re talking about. Have fun!

Figure 1

Figure 2

On my next post I’ll explain about setting up your personal membership of a group or groups and then will follow up with starting up your own group.

yahoogroups, forums, chat groups, membership groups