Connecting on LinkedIn – Don’t be a Cancer Cell

Are you being seen as a Cancer Cell when you’re connecting on LinkedIn? Yes. That is a real thing. I’ll get to that in a moment.

But first – a question.

Why do you really use LinkedIn? I mean, really, why are you here?

I may be old school but I do remember a time when we all truly connected.

Picked up the phone and chatted. Caught up on what was happening with each other. Had coffee, lunch and dinner dates. Spent quality time together – to laugh, to talk, to truly connect.

But now, what do we do?

Well for most of us, it’s simply a numbers game, isn’t it? How many followers we can get, how many fans, how many connections? All without really connecting….

Social Media Marketing is Now A Numbers Game

A shame really. I think that by catering to the numbers game we are missing out on what could essentially be a huge opportunity. As someone once said to me “the only organism that grows for the purpose of growth is a cancer cell, ultimately leading to destruction.” Hmmm. Don’t think I want to be the cancer cell in social media.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for growth. Growth in Human Potential, Growth in Business. Growth and the Passion for Growth is what drives society forward. What helps us excel. What keeps us being creative and innovative. So Growth in the right context is definitely good.

But we’re talking about social media here. And what I have observed is that focusing on growth on these platforms has tended to make many people shallow, inauthentic and in many case, quite piranha-like. All of which are not very desirable qualities.

What An Opportunity!

I believe that all social platforms, including LinkedIn, provide us with the opportunity to connect with many more people than we ever could before. And by connect, I truly mean connect -as we did before..

• We can find individuals who share similar interests and have the opportunity to make 10 times new friends than we ever had the opportunity to do before. As a child, I only met new people at school or by becoming “pen-pals” (remember that term?). Now I have the opportunity to connect with so many more people and truly share my stories, my passions, my adventures…
• We can find thousands… No, MILLIONS of people who have complementary backgrounds that we can collaborate with, build new businesses with, generate new ideas with….
• We can showcase our skills and passions to companies that need us and we have the ability to work remotely with businesses we could only have dreamed of working with before…

And all of this is available – with the simple click of a button.

How amazing is that?

True Connection

Because it is so easy, we forget about why this was all created in the first place. We fall prisoner to the idea that growth is all that we are looking for and we forget that each of the people that we are fortunate to connect with is a real person, with wants, desires, fears, aspirations, frustrations. A person, just like you, just like me.

So where am I going with this? It’s just a reminder – for me, for you.

I remember the first time I was introduced to LinkedIn. I had finished a weeklong training session at a technology company in Guelph in 2005 and was getting ready for the long drive back to Toronto, when one of the attendees came up to me and said “Are you on LinkedIn?”

“What’s that?”, I asked

“It’s a networking site for professionals. You can only get on by being invited. I’ll send you an invite”.

There you go. Connection, leveraging technology, but primarily for the purpose of connecting. Staying in touch…Celebrating each other’s wins, Collaborating, Building further connections with individuals in each other’s networks. Growing – but not just for growth’s sake.

Technology provides us with a massive opportunity to expand and grow our networks in a very short period of time. But how many of us truly network? Or have we got caught up in the numbers game?

Are we essentially the social media cancer cells, pursuing growth just for growth's sake? Are we slowly becoming that what we hate and despise – inauthentic, shallow, self-focused individuals?

I sincerely hope not.

Let’s Re-Connect

I would love for you to truly re-connect. I believe it is so very important. It will do your soul good.

Take a second and really look at those that you are connected to. When was the last time you reached out personally to say hello. To reconnect? To truly understand the person that you are connected to?

Now that 2021’s almost upon us, I am putting out a call to action. A challenge of sorts.

Let’s bring back the ways of old, where we could not hide behind avatars and false names. I want to see you, to know you, to connect with you.

Let’s reconnect on a human basis.

Free for coffee next week?