News flash – LinkedIn has proactively updated one of my group email settings, and I think they did it properly!-)
This change is unusual, and is probably more beneficial than not, so let’s have a look.
Group Digest
LinkedIn has always allowed users to determine how often they receive updates from groups. Currently you can get a digest of every change from one day, or receive a digest format once a week. I first wrote about changing your group notification settings in 2008.
Daily vs Weekly
And so for one group, I had the system set to give me a daily digest.
I wasn’t so concerned about the messages, but it was relatively inactive, and I didn’t want to wait up to a week to see things.
LinkedIn’s email
So I received an email with this text:
Seeing a lot of daily digests piling up?
Steve, we noticed you haven’t visited ACME Trainers lately. To help keep your email tidy, we’ve switched you from daily emails to weekly digests from this group – we hope this suits you better!
And included in the email was a link to visit the group and another to change my settings
Easy to alter
The good part – they noticed my behavior and tried to make things better for me.
And – if I didn’t like the change, I had a relatively easy path to change things. If I hit the “change settings” button, I went right to the group settings screen and could reselect the daily digest. Like this:
Looks easy enough, right?
We’re watching out for you
I guess I’m relatively pleased – if you can make things better with a simple change, I’m happy to have you try. If you attempt to do this often and fail however, I’ll start getting vocal about it;-) Round one to LinkedIn.
To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock
Steve,
I am glad that this unsolicited change works for you. In my case it is exactly opposite from what I want. The “daily digest” option was chosen with intent (as I do comb through digest messages from LinkedIn on [almost] daily basis).
Even if the change would be for better of specific individual user, this automatic change that was not asked for smacks as an action of beneficial ruler (or a parent) who knows better that the puny child who needs to be governed.
Having large number of groups that I follow means that I have to log to LinkedIn and roll back their change for couple a groups a day. Is this a some new marketing trick to increase the return visits to the site (as sometimes one stays there longer that just for originally intended action)?
Thanks.
Jeff,
Thanks for the note.
I absolutely see your point. Hopefully LinkedIn makes this change (at most) once in a group setting. It would be even more infuriating if you continually had to set back the setting for the same group…
One aspect that might make this change more beneficial for the average user is that the daily option was the default. (It’s been a while, but that’s what I recall) And so for millions of users that never set anything, they’re getting less email (that they possibly label as junk).
It would be nice, but I doubt LinkedIn has a bit for it – that if you set the value, this new system leaves it alone. (Having that information would have required them to think of this use for it when they put that change in place a couple years ago…)
As a beneficial superior – I see a bit of that (and I allude to it in my article). We’ll be ok as long as they get more right than wrong.
Marketing – I think not.
My feeling is that they receive thousands of emails each day that complain about all these “daily emails” about activity in groups.
We’ll see how it goes.
steve