How many of you find that positive word of mouth directly results in new members to your group?

Are you doing anything specific to generate that word of mouth beyond running a fabulous group? Are there specific tactics that you use with the intent to get new members to your group?

I had the privilege of attending Gaspedal’s Word of Mouth Crash Course this afternoon and it made me think about how the ideas presented in this course could be applied to Groups. The course was led by Andy Sernovitz, who literally wrote the book on Word of Mouth Marketing and defines Word of Mouth Marketing as “Giving people a reason to talk about your stuff, and making it easier for that conversation to take place.”

I’d like to challenge all of you to share with us what Word of Mouth (WOM) tactics you’ve used to successfully recruit new members to your group. To entice you to share, I have five copies of Andy’s book Word of Mouth Marketing that I will give to 5 randomly selected contributers who share their WOM tactics by commenting below (to be announced next Wednesday).

I look forward to learning hearing your ideas!

Best,
Jami
Groups Community Manager

We are currently experiencing delays in processing email to Yahoo! Groups. We have isolated the issue and are working to repair it, at which point email delivery should catch up.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Best,
Jami
Groups Community Manager

If you haven’t already done so, I highly recommend that you subscribe to the RSS feed for the Groups blog to receive updated headlines when I post new content. You can do this by clicking the + My Yahoo! button or Entries RSS link in the right hand column on the Groups blog homepage.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s a format that web sites and blogs can use to send updated headlines to you via services like My Yahoo!. My Yahoo! gathers the content you select from a variety of sources and displays it for you in one convenient location. Syndication means you don’t have to visit each site individually to see what’s new — you simply scan headlines or brief article summaries and click to read the full text. That’s the “really simple” part. And it’s “really simple” for publishers to make their content accessible this way too.

Click here to learn more about RSS feeds.

Jami
Groups Community Manager

Following my email from Monday, What’s in store for Yahoo! Groups, I thought it’d be a great time to introduce you to the dedicated and hard working team behind the Groups product (at least those we could pull out of meetings).

Over the next few weeks, I’ll spotlight the smaller teams that make up the larger Yahoo! Groups team here on the blog and highlight what each of these teams does (much like I did with the Groups Operations team in the recent Groups podcast).

You’ll have an opportunity to ask the each team questions related to their area of focus within Groups and get a sneak peek at what they’re working on. I look forward to having the opportunity to introduce you to other members of the Groups team, because I am sure you get tired of always hearing from me!

Best,
Jami
Groups Community Manager

Hi everyone; it has been some time since we’ve announced what we have planned for the Yahoo! Groups community, so I thought I’d outline our plans for the coming year.

Over the past few months, the Groups Team has been hard at work strengthening and improving our existing systems, while simultaneously innovating and developing new features and options.

What’s new now…
So far, we have released the following to the site:

An entirely new search and browse system. This new system fixes a number of known issues, makes search updates much faster, and improves the sort order when you browse for groups (many enhancements related to this release were highlighted in the recent post called Yahoo! Groups: How long does it really take ).

• A new “Groups Lab” initiative which consists of a team of folks who work to create features within Groups that can be customized by moderators to fit the specific needs of their group. The People Map is an example of a feature that was developed by this team.
• A new technology platform for the site (not quite fully released). We are changing every page of the site but doing so in a way that won’t disrupt your existing experience. This new platform will allow us to release features and fix bugs much faster than ever before.

What’s to come…
But the exciting news is what is to come in the future. Here is a short list of the features we plan to unveil to you in the coming year:

• New ways for people to share information with each other within your groups: Product Reviews, Services Directory, Wanted Boards, Address Book, Event Planner, and many more.
• Message Boards 2.0: Improving the Message experience within groups in many different ways (e.g. giving members the opportunity to choose which discussions they want to subscribe to, making it easier for moderators to highlight the best content, etc.).
• Ability to charge an optional subscription fee for membership to your groups (we have no plans to get in the middle of the transaction, just make it easy for you to make sure members are paying).
• Photo Album 2.0: An entirely new photo system with massive group storage and stunningly large photos.
• The return of archived attachments: We will process attachments and store them on your group, if you choose this option.
• For our non-English speakers, the ability to select the language you want to view the site in and better handling of all types of character sets.

We’ll also work to address some of the top suggestions from the Groups Suggestion Board , such as allowing members to adopt abandoned groups, increase the number of characters in group descriptions, enabling moderators to send and reject messages from the owner address, and many more. (Look for a blog post in the near future with more details).

The entire team is excited to finally deliver on several of the features we’ve heard many of you ask for. Thanks for being such loyal members of the Yahoo! Groups community!

Best,
Leonard
Director, Yahoo! Groups

Update: 7/18 – This issue has been fully resolved. Please note that photos uploaded before we corrected the issue will not appear as “new photos”, but anything uploaded after we found resolution will. Thank you for your patience.

We are aware that the link that appears on the Groups homepage when new photos are added is not currently appearing in some Groups.

Newly added photos can still be viewed by clicking on the Photos link in the left hand navigation of the group homepage.

We are currently working to correct this and appreciate your patience.

Best,
Jami
Groups Community Manager

While the majority of the Yahoo! Groups team is working on strengthening and improving the core Groups product (more on that to come soon), a small team of folks have been working on a new way to create features within Groups, features that can be customized by moderators to fit the specific needs of their groups.

We’ve been calling the work this team has been doing “Groups Labs”, and we are excited today to announce the first new feature (or “grouplet”) built using the Groups Labs framework: the People Map!

What is People Map?
Have you ever wondered who the members of your group are and where they live? If so, you’ll want to try out the People Map, which offers a simple way to add people to a map.

But the People Map is more than just a way to map member locations. By giving group owners and moderators the ability to customize the questions members are asked, the People Map can also serve as a dynamic group address book or even a group specific profile.

Learn More About People Map
You can learn all about the People Map, including how to link your members to it during this limited Beta period, here: http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/peoplemap/

Please keep in mind that we are in the early stages of a first beta, which means that there are lots of kinks still to work out and improvements to be made (you can click here for a list of known issues with the current release).

People Map Feedback
So if you want to wait for a later release to begin trying it out in your groups, we understand. Nevertheless, we do think the People Map is ready for lots of groups to begin using it, and we look forward to the feedback from those who do. In fact, we’ve created a group specifically to collect this feedback.

We look forward to hearing what you think.

Thanks!
Jami
Groups Community Manager

P.S. You can try out the People Map (from a member perspective) in the Moderator Central group.

Several of you have asked how the order of groups is determined when someone searches (or browses) for a group within the Groups Search Directory, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to explain.

The order is based on a combination of factors that includes the number of members, the frequency of activity, and whether or not the group moderates messages or members. To prevent gaming of the system we can’t divulge the exact algorithm (just as search engines can’t tell you exactly how they rank results), but all of these elements play a role and may explain the fluctuations that some of you have reported.

Our ultimate goal is to serve up the highest quality Groups based on the topic or keyword being searched. If you feel that our algorithm isn’t performing well, we’d love for you to share examples of searches or categories that aren’t providing the best results first, so that we can work to improve the algorithm over time.

Thanks!
Jami
Groups Community Manager

P.S. Just to be clear, we see moderation as a positive not a negative.

P.S.S We don’t rank groups overall, just related to particular searches or categories. To see how your group ranks,  go to http://www.groups.yahoo.com and type a search term related to your group.