INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
I open it out of habit and accept everyone who adds me because I don''t know why I wouldn''t
There is no clear benefit to the social network
I&ve never met a recruiter on there
The only messages I get are spam from offshore dev teams and crypto announcements
It like Facebook without the benefit of maybe seeing a picture of someone award-winning chili or dog.
I understand that I&m using LinkedIn
I understand I should cultivate a salon-like list of contacts that I can use to source stories and meet interesting people
But I have my own story-sourcing tools and my own contacts
It not even good as a broadcast medium
I have 16,000 connections
As a test I posted a story on LinkedIn and on Medium
It a post about how to write a book
If the spammers on LinkedIn would have loved to learn something from a writer, I suspected that would have been it
Check out these read counts…
This is Medium:
And this is LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a spam garden full of misspelled, grunty requests from
international software houses that are looking, primarily, to sell you services
Because it LinkedIn it super easy to slip past any and all defenses against this spam and so I get messages like these on a daily
basis:
[gallery ids="1708969,1708970,1708971,1708972,1708973"]
I don''t know this for sure but I think that somewhere out there is a
self-help book about networking that tells introverted desk jockeys to fill their conversations with canned junk
Gail, above, seems nice enough and he been doing a really nice job keeping up with all of my anniversaries
But why What did it get him Maybe I&ll meet him at a conference and he&ll be able to use it as a point of connection
That might be cool, but I doubt it will happen.
I know people have used LinkedIn to find jobs
I know people use LinkedIn to sell products
Guys like my buddy Lewis Howes have used it to create mass followings but now Lewis is mostly showing up on Facebook and not LinkedIn
In short, I know people like LinkedIn.
I think it hot vomit in a paper bag.
How would I like LinkedIn to be used Want to see the best pitch
I ever got in that dead drop sewer It right here:
Bang.
That the best exchange I&ve had on LinkedIn in years
It one that I replied to kindly and with interest
Why Because I wasn''t someone cheery spam message
It was a question that I could help with.
That it
It an actual conversation
Someone says &Hey, I need help& and the response is a quick &What up& Someone on Twitter said that this exchange stroked my ego
But it was also the most human interaction I&ve had on LinkedIn in years.
Rather than get into that, however, I&d like to explain how to
pitch someone like me — a busy journalist and entrepreneur who treats LinkedIn like a whack-a-mole weekly chore that has
become more a bad habit than necessity.
As I&ve said before and will say forever: selling and PR and gathering customers is about being a
Want to approach me on Twitter You say &Hey, I have a question,& you ask it when prompted, and you wait for a response
A lot of folks have said they prefer a full chunk of text when the get spammed on services but I disagree
I get enough of that in email
I get enough of that everywhere else online
If you&re going to network with me (or anyone else who is equally cranky) you&re going to have to try something different
You&re going to have to try to be human.
So next time you&re encouraged to Control-V in some copypasta about your business, don''t
Next time you think it might be a good idea to say &Congragulations on fifteen years at Scrablr!& maybe take another tack
It isn''t an alternative to MailChimp
Use it that way.
Fortnite is impressive, but it absolutely dwarfed by the world largest video game, LinkedIn, played exclusively by 40-50
year old white guys who compete by sending random connection requests in a quest to build the furthest-reaching &professional
network.
mdash; Zack Kanter (@zackkanter) September 4, 2018
