LinkedIn? Live and Audio Events

It's complicated!

"Some of my best friends are LinkedIn? trainers," he started nervously. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

Look, I'll level with you, I have a pretty complicated relationship with this platform. It does some really interesting and useful things, but reach seems to be non-existent and getting worse all the time.

As an introvert, I struggle with the "social" part of social media at the best of times.

People on this platform can be really weird. Some accounts aren't even real people but bots. Other people have cultural and social sensibilities that are so removed from my own, we might be as well be from different planets.

I'm not exaggerating when I say I have seen posts that have said things like, "I almost got into a fist fight last night (and here's what it taught me about thought leadership)."

And that's without the features that come and go, often loudly celebrated and discontinued before reaching me.

That's without our expertise being shamelessly plundered for cynical AI purposes.

That's without the cease and desist emails from the trademark lawyers.

I say this all really just to explain that I —while deeply invested in this platform, creating content for it constantly— am extremely tired and a little disillusioned.

That said, I have made a small handful of really great friends here. And that's definitely something.

If you need something to offset the negativity of the above, perhaps you could listen to this episode of the THE LINKEDIN?? BRANDING SHOW PODCAST by #MichelleSquared :

Goodbye LinkedIn? Audio Events

It seems audio events are going away on this platform.

Those of you who will want to continue to do live events on this platform will need to use some third-party tool moving forward.

Unpopular opinion: Audio events weren't always very good

There has been a real outpouring of disappointment over this Audio Event development.

But, to be honest, I found that the lack of entry barriers to Audio events often meant people using them weren't terribly invested in doing them well.

With only a handful of exceptions (notably Lynnaire Johnston whose sessions were wonderful), they were mostly unstructured waffle featuring complete strangers and terrible phone audio.

Even when the host was organised and good at presenting content, throwing open to 'audience participation' often lead to awkward monologues with no point or audience members making unreasonable demands on hosts.

Audio rooms often had a garbled quality to the audio reminiscent of old Skype calls. People were sometimes randomly booted, even the hosts. Sometimes no amount of unmuting actually unmuted participants.

What philosophically is the difference between live audio and video?

I kind of wondered philosophically what the difference between video and audio events actually was.

Video:

• Video and audio;
• Chat;
• Recording: You can watch the video later if you couldn't attend live.
• Audience participation: You will need to send guests / co-hosts to your livestreaming platform guesting features to incorporate them into the discussion. (Again, I'd emphasise only spotlighting people you know you can trust.)

Audio:

• Audio only;
• No chat: Sometimes people would create group chats to incorporate text chat but this was very cumbersome.
• Recording: No recording unless you're doing it outside of the platform. If you weren't in attendance while the event was live, it might as well not have had happened. Annoyingly LinkedIn? had a habit of surfacing associated posts after the event had already ended.
• Audience participation: People could raise their hands and speak. (Again, I would caution most people against from opening this up to just anybody in the audience.)

"But I don't want to be on camera..."

While I have spoken about this objection in the past, most livestreaming software will give you the ability to replace a video camera with a static image if you want to (for either an individual or the stream as a whole).

That said, if you're really deep into social audio, it is still possible to do on Clubhouse and Twitter/X.

While I cannot speak to the success of this approach, it is possible to create online events in LinkedIn? that link out to Clubhouse, Twitter/X or even YouTube if you are so inclined.

LinkedIn? Live: Your only live option on this platform

If you want to go live on this platform you will now need a third party tool.

Simple options:

• Restream Studio
• Streamlabs Talk Studio
• OneStream Live

Advanced options:

• OBS Studio (Free, Windows / Mac / Linux)
• Ecamm Live (Mac only)

General content considerations

I realise no one likes it when someone rearranges things they relied on, and this is kind of the price we pay for playing on the rented land of social media.

If live communication with your audience is important to your goals, you might need to change your approach, and there may be some degree of learning curve when it comes to making this change.

But I am excited by the possibilities.

• Your events will be available as recordings after they end.
• You will be able to stream those events to multiple live destinations.
• You can lean into more perennial topics and hopefully get more mileage out of your content.
• You could record audio and release a podcast. You could record video and publish that. You could take the audio and attach a static image. You can take any of this previously recorded material and work it into a live show. There are all kinds of way of putting this stuff together. Try things out.

Good luck!

Did you do live audio events? How will you pivot moving forward?