Grifter: “A person who engages in petty or small-scale swindling.”
Normally, I would start with a clever analogy here, or as I would refer to it (if you know me), as perfect synchronicity. Maybe the proper terminology is “union synchronicity,” but I’m too exhausted to come up with one. Perfect, or in this case, union synchronicity, is when you take two unrelated topics that have no business being in the same room together and somehow use them together to tell a very compelling story.
All I got is this: If my relationship with LinkedIn had a status, it would read, “complicated,” because that’s exactly what it is, complicated.
Ironically enough, Malcolm Gladwell, someone whom I would revere as the Godfather of using union synchronicity in writing (also one of my favorite authors of all time) wrote a book called “The Tipping Point,” which, is self explanatory, and for me a perfect segue into “why” I want to share my thoughts on LinkedIn, because well, I’ve reached the so-called ‘tipping point’ with the platform and this time, there’s no one on the other end of the tetertotter to bring me back up.
And I’m stubborn, so of course it’s going to sound dramatic, but aside from my stubbornness, it's how defiant I am, so when I say the tipping is “done tipped,” keep those two things in mind, but before you do that, hear me out.
It was over a year ago that I got mixed up in this world of watching my organic reach on LinkedIn disappear. I think most of us experienced that, at least those of us who showed up here on the regular. It was odd, and of course, I was pissed off, but it didn’t really bother me because the stories I was writing about were never intended to draw attention to myself. The part I was most disappointed in is that the people my content was reaching, who were either sending me dm’s or at the very least being exposed to their content was gone, and that’s about the time I started paying attention to the people who didn’t appear to be impacted by the death of organic reach.
The content that “as they would refer to it as, doing well” as they measured (and shared) their impressions was content that all had a similar tone, a similar format, and worst of all, a similar topic. These people, as I will later refer to as ‘grifters’, were all talking about “how to be successful” on LinkedIn, but it was odd. None of them actually worked for LinkedIn. Out of the ashes of LinkedIn burning down, the social media Grifter was born.
Keep in mind this is all speculation at best, so if you’re not open to what I’ll call an “Op-ed,” then let me remind you that you’re the one who decided to read on this (and there, “ain’t no damn hook” reeling you in here).
It was as if, overnight, LinkedIn had become a wasteland of people doing well, according to impressions and social proof, and all they were doing was creating content about how to create content, eventually turning this idea into a business, duping other people into believing that this “social media” engagement was going to convert to dollars. The only problem was, for those of us, like me, who refused to lick the boots of a platform (yeah, I said that), continued to tell stories the same way we used to, we had already realized that the conversion rate of an impression on LinkedIn is trading at the same ratio as Schrutebucks are to the Dollar (there’s your pop culture analogy).
I was fine with all of this, I didn’t really care, in fact I started to take pride in not having the social proof on LinkedIn the same way those others were, because in the end I feel as if “having social proof” in today’s LinkedIn landscape can only be attributed to the leader of some fancy cohort, or worse, putting your content into a Pod for fake engagement. I even wrote about it over a year ago. Something changed, though, and although I can’t put an exact finger on one thing, as it was multiple things, there are a few specific examples that stood out to me:
Watching a podcast of a LinkedIn influencer explain to the viewers that having 300,000 LinkedIn followers is the equivalent of having 3,000,000 on Instagram (there's that fancy Grifter logic at work) or watching another LinkedIn influencer discuss why there’s a rise in cringe content, not having the awareness to realize that just talking about LinkedIn engagement is cringe, but then came the last influencer, who does nothing but talk about “How to create linkedIn engagement” pawning it off as a social selling cohort. This was the moment the tipping point dropped off the map for me as I read through the comments of unsuspecting people buying into what was being fed to them, so I took my tinfoil hat off, shrugged my shoulders, and haven’t posted since.
The desire to share wasn’t gone. It was dead.
It’s this repeatable and predictable play that to me shouts, “run away as fast as I can.” It’s this: join my cohort so I can teach you to social sell with LinkedIn school, which leads people to believe that social proof and impressions are indicators of actual revenue, whose people or members buy into, failing to realize that all the new people they are now engaging with just so happen to be other members of the same cohort. So, while the numbers look good, the only person actually making money off the process is the guy standing there with a jar of snake oil in his hands, watching this gigantic (forgive me for saying this) LinkedIn Circle Jerk as he or she counts all the cash.
LinkedIn lately feels like that to me, and I know I’m not alone, because if I were alone, I wouldn’t feel compelled to share how I feel. I may be one of the first, though, and if I'm wrong, good, I can go back to loving the very platform that I’ve always thought to be the best, but unfortunately, for now, at the very least, it feels like a foreign country to me.
To me, there will always be a definitive line between people who use platforms to tell true stories, build real relationships, and do real work, and people who use platforms to extract attention, sell the idea of attention, and profit from the illusion of success.
Unfortunately for them, that illusion isn’t fooling everyone.
Derek
This is "Lying to Me."
