REPURPOSED For Your Convenience

Sorry, subscribers and followers, I am a bit under the weather today, so I am going to be keeping my "90 Day Content Challenge" promise of 90 articles in 90 days by taking a few pieces from my company blog. I promise, tomorrow I will post something ten times better.

So, as you can see from my profile...

I am quite active on here.

This website was where I landed my first gig, my first career, and it was where I began my professional career. It was a wonderful platform to play around with. I would network; I would post; I would engage...but something seems to be missing, don't you think?

A Missing Piece

There is an element that is either just my bad luck for not knowing the right people (or not setting my profile up the way it should be, despite having followed ten years of advice plasticized all across the web on LinkedIn optimization), I have found that even with 774 million official users, this platform has become 99.9 percent B2B oriented. Am I being bitter? No, I am not. Networking is loosely defined, after all.

Networking has been redefined

Many see networking as the art of war for finding clients, attracting top talent, and collaborating with others. Then, there are those who feel copy and pasting scripts to absolutely waste my time is the right way to go. Once again, perhaps I just belong to the wrong Groups, or have failed to fully optimize my profile (unlikely), but think about this: have you been seeing more spam on here lately? In the last two years, I have seen a harsh decline on quality networking and more so, people who just want to pitch a service.

Networking is restructured

What defines networking in your eyes? I feel it as less of a way to pitch a service and is more emphasized based around collaboration and education, which may be the piece I am missing in hindsight of writing this post. I am not a "lead," as I am looking for them myself, so I have declined thousands of InMail connections (and have had to unfollow or "un-connect" with over three thousand people) based solely on first impressions.

Tell me, does this sound familiar?

"Hello, I offer web and graphic design services for small companies, and I would love to give you a demo of our new product...please click here and sign up..."

Unless I am doing something wrong, I have found that these represent majority of my time on here. At one point, I actually made the attempt of following the pack, scripting out messages to people. I was met with a barrage of pitchforks and flaming sticks. This is not to say that LinkedIn is vitally dead. However, I am writing this as a proud statement: we can change this together. All we have to do is understand what networking is. It is the art and science of collaborating, finding like-minded individuals, and not offering services, products, or offerings to anyone that solicit otherwise.

Just because there are roughly 774 million users...

…does not mean that they are all active.

A harsh fact comes up from a 2020 post: there are only 310 million active users!

That means that if you are posting on LinkedIn daily, weekly, monthly, or simply are on here because you gave up on TikTok (in my eyes, the end of social media) only one-half of your connections and followers will see it. The rest are not even active.

This can be for a number of reasons.

Maybe I am not the only one who realized that the buyout from Microsoft in 2016 caused a harsh fluctuation in the "LinkedIn algorithm." Perhaps others simply do not care anymore. But I like to consider this website as an opportunity that was missed back in the 2018 boom during its highest growth period.

Globalization and LinkedIn...

We are also seeing the dawn of globalization.

Almost one-fourth of the users here are not based in an individualistic society. Rather, they are collectivist. For those that do not know these two pragmatic terms, an individualistic society (United States, United Kingdom...) focuses on the overall self (essentially, money). Collectivist societies focus on the group or the culture, where it means more to make a living to support the community and the family rather than on one's own freebie ambitions.

This is not a bad thing, but as more collectivistic cultures jump on board and those in the United States jump off when they realize they are being spammed, the platform succumbs to "culture clash," where one society offering less expensive services come on board to spam rather than network. I have had hundreds of experiences where I have been pitched a service to, only to respond back with a kind and simple:

"No thank you, but do you need any help collaborating or talking in business terms, rather than sales talk? I [do this and that] and would love to keep in touch."

I am most often never offered a response.

Again, I am not saying globalization is bad...

But it definitely affects us on here. A collectivist society cannot interact fluently with an individualistic society, not because the two individuals can not get along, but simply because we are all raised based on the morals and ethos of our society. At stated by AFSUsa.com:

"Everyone falls somewhere on the individualist-collectivist spectrum."

Even within a very collectivist culture, you will find people who are more individualist...has shown that people shift along this spectrum, leaning more collectivist or individualist depending on the situation. This adaptability is more common in multicultural communities and contexts. It’s partly why we seek intercultural exchange: to adopt multiple cultural frames and learn to apply them in relevant communities and circumstances."

(AFSUSA.com)

This does not mean we can change things...

…and please do not take this as a cultural discussion.

I am not trying to peeve anybody off, but the reality is we are expanding at far too fast a rate. With 540,000 new small businesses opening their doors, the future of this website is really going to be a 50/50 toss-up in my eyes. Can we survive the culture clash? Can we begin to realize that connecting for less selfish reasons as "joining an event" or "pitching a service" is perhaps more appropriate? Or is it simply the next "way of the world?"

You decide.

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