LinkedIn vs private discussion boards

Lately I've been working with many vendors (dozens if not hundreds) across various industries from HR to Finance, DAM to scanners, aquarium supplies to exercise equipment, SaaS to hosting.  As a potential customer, a key differentiator between companies is the clarity of their message.  The vendors that have stood out for me answer the basic questions that I have in a clear, easy to find way on their websites.

• What do you offer?
• What does it do?
• How does it do it?
• How much does it cost?

Vendors should take the time to put themselves in the shoes of their target customers and ask those questions and see how far they get on their own websites.

A second step in evaluating some vendors is looking at their social marketing efforts.  Do they use Twitter, Facebook, Quora, LinkedIn, what is their Klout and Peer Index score like, etc.  This can be very telling, as larger vendors can have multiple accounts on each of these platforms (with little rhyme or reason) and smaller vendors sometimes skip one or more of these areas.

At a certain point more information is required than can be learned from social media and websites and potential customers will need to work with sales and support staff to answer more detailed questions.  An alternative to what can be tedious/drawn out email and phone communication is using LinkedIn groups.  Away from the vendor marketing net, potential customers can ask more pointed questions and access less biased information from other customers, implementers, integrators and other knowledgeable people.   While groups exist for almost any topic you can imagine, it is product specific groups that really help to hone in on specific experts.  Unfortunately this is an area that not all vendors have embraced as some don't see the value and others prefer to private customer areas.  From the vendor perspective I get wanting that control and centralized communication.  Heck even within our internal employee discussion boards there is a lot of discomfort over the idea that a less than perfect response would be posted.  But it is 2012, social is in, centralized communication is out.

When it comes to customer discussion areas there are a few advantages to using LinkedIn vs. a private area:

• Access
• LinkedIn groups can be set to open access or have an approval process
• This beats waiting for a customer account to be created for a private area
• Familiarity and convenience
• Most folks doing research into technical vendors are probably already familiar with LinkedIn 
• They probably doesn’t want to go to a dozen websites to check questions on each vendor
• Notification
• Subscription at the group, thread and post level is ideal so you don't need to return to the site to stay abreast of posts.
• Lack of responses can be disheartening so the more that know about posts and can potentially respond, the better.
• Ease of use
• LinkedIn has an app that makes it simple to contribute to discussion boards.
• People change jobs but tend to stay in the same professions.  Having a private account tied to a work email breaks the relationship when a person changes jobs.  I would assume most LinkedIn accounts are tied to personal email accounts which change less frequently.
• Indexed
• LinkedIn discussions are indexed for search engines. 
• For technical folks that just want to search for this is easier than having to login to a non-indexed site.
• Marketing
• Public presence is worth its weight in gold.
• Announcements, promotions, Job postings
• With a captive audience tied to the group it is another channel to promote and announce information.