Influencer Influenza

A recent LinkedIn post by a celebrated social media influencer reads - verbatim - "Effective communication begins with listening." This nugget got 14,618 "likes", 580 comments and 1,900 reposts. I thought about if for a few minutes and then posted my equally insightful retort: "Effective listening begins with hearing the other person's words." Here are the results of my post. Apparently, I am not nearly as influential as I thought I was.

Seriously, though, why do people take the time out of their busy day to comment on and repost this stuff? I learned all about the communication feedback loop way back in my freshman year of college, and I'm sure you did, too. So why did 16,000 people take time out of their busy day to acknowledge, comment on, and share something that they already know? That, my loyal subscribers, was not a rhetorical question. I really want to know what makes plain old common knowledge worthy of people's attention.

My response to this question would be a combination of FOMO and a remote work version of celebrity worship syndrome (a real thing). First, the FOMO part. Have you ever worked with someone who just can't help but comment on other people's comments or edit a document if asked to review it, regardless of how insignificant their changes are? Gotta be thousands of those people on LinkedIn, right? I can just imagine someone like that getting a LinkedIn notification on their phone while in line to board a plane and struggling to repost it to their 25 followers while they schlep their carry on to their seat. They can't help themselves. FOMO!

The celebrity syndrome thing is almost too easy. People think that if you repost something - anything - from an influencer you are somehow thought of in a similar way to the influencer. How else can you explain 16,000 people responding to "communication begins with listening"? I suppose "water is wet" would have had so many reposts it would have overloaded the LinkedIn servers and shut down the entire internet.

The people who have influenced me the most in my life are coaches I played for and military officers I served with. Subtract the profanity from their exhortations and they provided many words to live by. They knew how to communicate, and listening was hardly their first priority. Directly and succinctly sending the message made an indelible impression on the listener. I'll bet that if you think about it, most of your influences came from similar sources in your youth, not from people who restate the obvious and sell it as newly discovered wisdom. A year from now, how many of you will remember the "influential" LinkedIn post you commented on or reposted? But I bet that for the rest of your life you'll remember that coach telling you to "keep your eye on the ball" when you were seven years old. That's real influence.

#thatisall