The idea of using a centralized group to communicate with many people is definitely not new, but these days you have several more options compared to years ago.

Why use a group?

A group is useful for a centralized means of communication in a way that can have threaded conversations, and has the bonus of not being mistakenly flagged as spam.

With email, any mail received that was sent to over 25 recipients is usually flagged as spam on a mail server level. This can prove to be quite annoying when you have an email to send to over 25 people, because you’ll have to send the message twice (once to the first 25, second to the next 25, etc.) The advantage of the group is that it can act as a free newsletter. You can have hundreds or thousands of members in the group, and any communication sent through it will always get to all recipients.

Using groups the old-school way

The oldie-but-goodie way of starting a group is to use a popular web service for the task, with the three biggies being Yahoo! Groups, Live Groups and Google Groups. You will most likely pick the one per your current email provider. All three essentially work the same way but it’s the feature set that truly separates one from the other.

Yahoo! Groups

With Y! Groups you can integrate things like Yahoo! Answers (a very popular question/answer site) as well as many other group apps which Y! called “grouplets”. These are accessible via Add/Remove Applications on the left sidebar once logged into your Y! Group.

Live Groups

Arguably the best feature in Live Groups is the ability to create, edit and share documents via Office Live. For many this is an absolute godsend because anyone that is in the group will always be able to view any document you post exactly as created originally. This also counts for spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. In addition, with SkyDrive, adding files into the group is stupidly easy and unbelievably convenient given the fact you have 25GB of storage in the group. All of this is very convenient.

Google Groups

The strength of Google Groups is in its ability to track conversations. It is by design very Gmail-like, and that’s not a bad thing. You also have more customization when using Google Groups. You can change the theme, colors and even the fonts the group uses. You can also change the core navigation (i.e. which links show up first in the sidebar). Another good feature in Google Groups is “Pages”. If you want a “flat” page outside of the normal threads but still within the group (such as a how-to doc), Pages is a nice feature to have.

Using groups the new-school way

The new way of using collaborative group features is to simply use social media.

Facebook calls a group a “fan page”, but in reality it’s a group with a more fun(?) title. In addition, Facebook does have a Groups app, although I don’t think anybody uses that when you can just use fan pages instead.

MySpace has no fancy title for groups and simply calls it MySpace Groups.

The drawbacks of using groups

No matter which group service you choose, it’s always the case that you own absolutely none of the content posted to any of those systems, so if the goal is to create a community with the intent of making money from it later, using a free group is not a wise move. What will happen is that after you build your community, you’ll have to shift everybody over to a new system where you do own the content. The transition will be frustrating at best and you’ll lose a good chunk of your community members in the process.

If future cash fueled by community involvement is the goal, you’re better off using a self-hosted forum on your own web site such as vBulletin (what PCMech uses) or phpBB. It does require a good deal of technical know-how to pull that off, but you do own your own content and have 100% control over the entire system.

On the other hand, if the goal is simply to have a place where everyone can join in where mass-emails can be sent out without fear of being spam-flagged by mistake, the group is the best solution.

Groups are the unsung hero for small business

One of the absolute best uses of a group is for small business. As a collaborative solution, you truly can’t do much better especially considering it’s free.

Let’s say you wanted an in-house  collaborative solution that has a full-enabled calendar with to-do/task management, threaded discussions, “levels” of members (administrators, moderators, etc.) and so on – and you want the entire thing set up in less than 30 minutes.

Groups is it. Not only can it be set up in record time, but is also accessible anywhere – office or home. It’s also mobile-enabled as well (for old-school providers anyway).

For large-scale enterprise collaborative solutions, I’ll concede groups would not work that well. For small biz however it’s a darn good choice. You can even brand it to your company name (as in a domain) through Yahoo! Small Business, Windows Live Domains or Google Apps Standard Edition. This makes all accounts end in @your_site.com. It’s all free and all ready-to-use.

What do you think of groups? Boom or bust?

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