Why Don’t I Like Linked In?

“It’s the place where marketing managers and life coaches go to hide when they’ve got nothing better to do”.

I’m sure you know the feeling, when something just doesn’t feel right but you can’t put your finger on exactly why. That’s the way I’ve felt about Linked In, ever since I signed up.

In contrast I knew from the very first minute why I didn’t like all those Ning sites. The whole thing just stank of exploitation, and of course what happened was every “Billy No Mates” started friending me, then sending me invitations to join their new “community”.

Somehow these people all got conned into one of these MLM scams and were using the free software to spread their poison. Most of them leaving their crappy baubles on my profile.

Facebook has always been uncomfortable for me, not because of scammers, but because I’m not comfortable reading about the sexual exploits of friends of my daughter.

In some ways I’m an old fart, and proud to be

But Linked In was never that clear to me.

With about 150 connections, most people I’ve worked with in the past, I should feel more at home. But the truth is I’m not much interested in keeping up with them on Linked In and I guess they feel the same about me. The connections don’t do anything for me.

We were told to spend time joining groups and contribute to conversations, and answer lots of questions. Both of these we’ve tried, but didn’t build many relationships and didn’t get any backlinks for our marketing site.

There was nothing specific to dislike. It just didn’t feel right. And we finally figured out why.

Check out the Questions and Answers. You’ll find the majority of people asking are trying to pitch without appearing to be selling, and the majority of people answering are doing the same. In itself that doesn’t explain either. A bit of subliminal selling never hurt anybody.

But look a little further and you’ll notice some questions get enormous numbers of answers and others virtually none.

Sensible, intelligent questions get virtually no response and stupid inane questions get flooded.

One question about how business owners saw their business in terms of process from first call to cash received five answers in a week (it was my question).

Another question on which type of Internet business would be most likely to succeed received 150 responses within a couple of hours.

Today I’ve checked the Answers section to find two pages of questions only one of which had any responses. The question was “are you using Twitter” and 65 people had responded – in six minutes.

There’s obviously something strange going on here!

This morning it struck me. These people are at work, hiding the fact that they’ve nothing to do.

They’re pretending to be adding value, to their bosses, themselves and even the poor saps who are supposed to read their irrelevant, postering, meaningless crap.

Linked In is a place where marketing managers and life coaches go to hide when they’ve got nothing better to do.

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Tagged as: Facebook, Free, Ning, On the Web, Online Communities, Questions and Answers, Social network, Twitter