What a milestone! Our very own ISO 9001 group over at LinkedIn has now exceeded 200,000 registered users, and shows no sign of stopping.
Keep in mind, too, that every request to join is manually approved, so we’re doing a pretty good job at filtering fake accounts and bots. It’s not perfect, and for sure there are some bots in the mix, but the number is likely statistical noise.
To put it in perspective, that’s somewhere around three times the members of ASQ and CQI… combined.
Much thanks to fellow Group managers Al Smith (retired quality expert dude) and Michael Mills, of Pragmatic Quality Blog (always worth reading and subscribing to.) To eliminate spam, we have all posts set to manual approval, so it takes a little work to keep this thing going.
LinkedIn doesn’t give us any tools to really crunch numbers on members, alas, but a cursory analysis of the daily requests to join seems to point to massive uptake from South Asia and the Middle East, where people are absolutely hungry for information on ISO 9001. We pick on those regions a lot for their proliferation of fake certificates and certificate mills, but the end-users are really interested in doing things right, and getting good information.
I also noticed a lot of requests from students wanting to learn about quality management and ISO 9001 in general.
Keep in mind that certain countries are blocked from LinkedIn (like Russia), and LinkedIn shut off services in China (more of a cost-cutting thing than a political statement.) Many other non-English speaking countries don’t engage much, so we might not see participation from them. I do see a lot of activity coming from South America, though, and Spanish language participation is high. (The group doesn’t limit posts to English-only.)
LinkedIn did a lot of damage with its “New Groups” rollout, and the feature has never really recovered, unfortunately. By trying to ape Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn leaned into the “Feed” feature, forcing users to see a daily scroll of algorithm-served content from contacts and advertisers. Worse, LinkedIn then tried to unify the Groups feature into the Feed code, instead of keeping it a separate feature with its own code. That meant the crippling of anti-spam features, and nowhere near the moderation tools of Facebook’s groups.
But where Facebook groups are nearly entirely spam from India now, at least LinkedIn groups are still used for real communication. It takes a lot more work to approve members and moderate spam, but it’s manageable.
(If you’re reading, LinkedIn, it’s long past the time to split Groups into its own feature, and break it away from the Feed.)
If you’re interested in joining, keep in mind some basic rules:
- No spam. If your first post is promotional, you get banned outright, no questions asked.
- Only post content related to ISO 9001. No general quality management, Six Sigma, Lean, or other generic QA / TQM concepts. There are other LI groups for those.
- Only personal user accounts. No company accounts (since they always spam).
If you want to become part of the massive, global Oxebridge family, join the LinkedIn group here.
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 30 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
