Did LinkedIn just botch their AI experiment with Influencers?

This is the first article I've written on LinkedIn for a while. I wanted to directly address a number of growing pains I'm seeing the platform go through as they build out the content ecosystem for Experts and Influencers.

If you wish to receive my weekly insights like this article, opt into my email at www.careerclimb.co. Until LinkedIn figures out a better distribution outside of my immediate network, that's the channel I'm using to serve my growing audience.

---

Last Friday, I sent you an email about something that I thought was going to change the game of how we as professionals get visibility on LinkedIn.?

I was wrong.

Let me explain.

I was excited about the fact that LinkedIn was rolling out a new version of Influencers.

Influencers 1.0.

If you've been around the platform for a while, you may remember that Influencers was LinkedIn's original way of creating content.?

It was a tricky transition for what at the time was a resume directory to jumpstart a content stream. And to keep the content quality high and in line with LinkedIn's professional brand.

So they hand-picked a bunch of people and told them they had a platform to speak on the LinkedIn stage via their Influencer pages.?

Up until last week, that was a very exclusive walled garden within LinkedIn.

Influencers started with 150 people in 2012 and then expanded to 500 people by 2015, according to ChatGPT. It included names like Barak Obama, Richard Branson and Arianna Huffington. It was a Who's Who.

Influencers 2.0.

In recent years, LinkedIn expanded its publishing platform to all members who could now publish articles and even create their own newsletters. All you had to do was flip a "creator" switch on your profile.?

I started my own LinkedIn newsletter last year and coached dozens of clients to start theirs.?

There were some significant growing pains, including:

• The?inability to prevent LinkedIn from automatically inviting your entire network?to follow your newsletter. Even though it may not be a fit for them. For example, most of my network is male and my newsletter was targeted to women in tech. Oh well.?
• The?limitation of one newsletter per profile, which restricts the range of topics you can target. Unless you want a super general newsletter that nobody except your friends and family will follow, this means you have to pick a niche. And that's scary for most people.?
• However, the biggest pain was?the lack of discoverability of your newsletter to people outside of your network. Especially if you don't have 100K+ followers.?

The last point is the reason why I stopped writing my newsletter on LinkedIn. You're reading my newsletter now, in your email inbox, which is my preferred channel.?

Cracking the code on Influencers 2.0.

I tried to crack the code on getting my newsletter listed in the LinkedIn editorials.?

I messaged Shyvee Shi asking her what the trick was to getting my newsletter articles noticed and highlighted by the editorial staff in LinkedIn's "newsletters to follow".?

She pointed me to some info pages that mentioned things like hash-tagging keywords and writing on timely topics. All while patiently waiting to be discovered.?

I noticed that the profiled newsletters were all from professional authors in my network, like Nir Eyal . Or established entrepreneurs with large followings, like Charlene Li . Both have over 250K followers on LinkedIn.?

I found myself again bumping nose first into LinkedIn's exclusive walled garden of Influencers.?

Urgh...

Enter Influencers 3.0.?

Last Friday, LinkedIn made its next attempt at developing a wider content creator ecosystem. It did it as part of revamp of Influencers.

Here's what my "early access invite to LinkedIn collaborative articles" email said:

"We’re inviting a select group of experts, like yourself, to be the first to share knowledge in an all-new way – as a valuable member, we're granting you early access to contribute to our new collaborative articles...

Earn the new Community Top Voices badge when you become one of the most insightful contributors for a particular skill."

There are three important pieces here:

1. Skills Pages?- Each LinkedIn skill now has its own "Skills Page". I'm not sure if they are new, but this is the first time I've really noticed them.

In my email, I was invited to collaborate to skills that I have been endorsed for on LinkedIn. Like Product Management, ML, Leadership, Presentations, etc.?

2. Collaborative Articles?- these are AI-generated. Invited contributors are able to add to the article in chunks of up to 750 characters.?

3. A new version of Influencers (3.0?).??The "Community Top Voices" badge seems to be a brand new spin-off from the Influencer Program, which LinkedIn has renamed as "Top Voices".?

A way into the walled garden?

They further explained that "Community Top Voices" badge is earned by having your contributions upvoted by readers of the "collaborative article".?

And then they hint that any LinkedIn member could get "noticed" and invited to become a collaborator by engaging with the articles and collaborations.

This opportunity to get more of my community invited as collaborators got me super excited, and I wanted to share the news with you.?I'm all for taking advantage of any early mover benefit, which happens anytime a big platform like LinkedIn introduces something new.?

That's why I encouraged you to engage with those articles and upvote contributions that you liked.?Of course, I also hoped that you would upvote my contributions, which would help me test the value of and ease of getting the new badge.?

Either way, I was excited at this new experiment and wanted you to also be part of it.

It's a ??

Four days in, I have to say I'm disappointed. Whoever is product managing the Skills Pages at LinkedIn is not adjusting fast enough.

The whole experiment looks headed in the wrong direction.?And at this point,?I'm recommending that you stay away from wasting your time with Skills Pages until the dust settles.?

Here's what's happening and?my recommendation to the LinkedIn product management team?if they should read this:

Stop generating random AI-written articles at such a relentless pace.?

Human contributors can't keep up and there's no incentive to keep up if the majority of the articles have no views or engagement.

On the?Product Management Skills Page, which has 53.3K followers, as of 11:20 am PST on Monday, March 6th, there were 50 AI-generated articles - all them created in the previous 3 days.?20 of those were generated on Monday morning, at the rate of about 3 per hour!

NONE had any contributions, comments or likes.?

Compare that to the 13 articles on the same Skills Page produced in a month three months ago. Most had a good number of engagements and reposts.

That's a rate of 1 article per 2.3 days.?The pace has increased by more than 50x!??And humans can't keep up.?

When the AI-gen articles first came out on Friday, I spent half of the day contributing. And I could only manage 9 article contributions.

I was done. I wanted to see how my contributions would be received and if the articles would gain distribution and visibility.

No such luck.

Three days later, all our thoughtful contributions are buried deep under a sea of new AI-generated content that looks and sounds like endless clones of the same thing.?You touch one and 3 more spring up.???

Do any of the Product Mangers actually check on what's going on and how the Skills Pages are getting spammed?

Provide a discovery mechanism?for the articles that generate contributions and engagement.

If you want people to take precious time to contribute, give their contributions visibility and preferred distribution.?I haven't seen any recommended articles in my feed for Skills Page articles.

You've got to surface those in the feed! Skills Pages are on the periphery where nobody really goes.

Even better - use the same mechanism you employ for distributing newsletters - email.?

I'd love to see you email people who follow Skills Pages with the top article of the week for each Skills Page. Highlight the top contributors in it and invite people to engage.?You can even do a digest of top community-contributed content that may be relevant for each reader.?

Double down on articles generating engagement and contributions.?

Someone, please pull the plug on the AI monster that's spitting out a new article every 15 minutes!?

Instead, have your PMs go into the contributions and spin off each article segment and its human contribution into a new AI thread. Have AI build on it and throw it back to the humans.?

Multiple back-and-forth loops would be much more educational and entertaining than the current one-way AI monologue.?

Let's see what the product teams at LinkedIn do.?It will be interesting to see if LinkedIn is really interested in figuring out a broad content platform with intelligent discovery of new voices.?

Or if it's just checking the box on integrating the latest mothership purchase - Open.ai - whether it fits or not.?