Disappearing User Groups
I had a call the other day from a corporation in the Great Lakes area who had a good series of job openings for computer savvy users. He asked if I could give him some references... What happened next should not have happened...
HOW DO YOU FIND A USER GROUP?
The caller had a hunch that if he could contact computer user groups in the region, he would find a ready-made market of expert job candidates. He had the right idea contacting the User Group Network. Our UG Locater has been online longer than just about any others -- aside from AOL's which was taken down years ago -- and is usually quite easy to use. His hunch was right -- but the results weren't:
All groups we identified for him (except two) had a dead link to their web site.
Groups had neglected to update their listing when they changed web sites -- or they had gone out of existence anyway. We did supply two good Windows user groups for him to contact, but three Mac groups could not be found.
I jumped over to Apple's user group locator, and they weren't even listed there at all, much less with broken links.
Thank goodness he called, rather than relying on a web page -- and thank goodness, I was able to give him the phone numbers for contact people in the missing groups. Our ongoing database of nearly 3,000 user group listings has phone and contact addresses. Whew! At least I had that much.
What's the moral of this story?
Update your group's listing. There's always someone out there looking for the group, and sometimes it's important that they find you.
* http://www.user-groups.net/registration/index.html
It takes just a few minutes -- particularly if you have your information ready to copy and paste -- and an updated listing could bring you lots of new stuff.
Thanks for reading...
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