Should the dead, dying and ill be on LinkedIn?
Chris J Reed
The Only CEO with a Mohawk @ Black Marketing, the World No.1 LinkedIn Marketing & Personal Branding Firm with 2,200 LinkedIn Recommendations. Enhancing Your Personal Brand to Make You a Thought Leader & Win New Clients.
Warning: this post may offend you. I apologise but I don't feel that LinkedIn is the correct platform for this.
I love LinkedIn. I have built a global marketing consultancy based around LinkedIn. However I have a problem with dead, dying and ill people appearing on my feed with no business context at all. More to the point I have begun to be sceptical about whether some of these are genuine. I would like your view but it's my instinct. Why do I feel this way? Is this real?
I have been seeing more of these kind of posts in my feed and disregarded them I wondered why people would post about people who had died or gone to hospital or had cancer/illness on LinkedIn, a business platform. Why not on facebook where their friends and family would care instead of a business platform where they are unknown on that level by most people.
I then noticed that they were appearing more and more. Then the other day I saw these three all in a row within minutes of each other:
What strikes me as odd is that the format appears to be the same. Apologetic words designed to pull at your heart strings (apologies again if I am being cynical) and then a very large photo of the everyday people affected who could be you. But three in a row? On the same day? Am I being overly cynical and sceptical?
I have checked out all the above profiles. Apart from John Bronson all the rest have commented, liked, reposted the above posts dozens of times. Why would you do that? If you are genuinely losing a member of your family or they are fighting a serious illness I feel for you but LinkedIn is not the place for this content. More to the point why hammer it relentlessly?
You say I can hide the feed or unf0llow. I do. As I do with all those who post about religion. Again it's not the platform, sorry. This is business.
There is just something that jars with about these photos and their story on LinkedIn. As I said at the top I sincerely apologise if this post has offended you or you have been affected by something terrible personally happening to you. We all have to stuff to deal with, we don't all post it on LinkedIn, in fact 99.99% don't. To me it's the last place I would post anything like that. I wouldn't even post that on facebook (if I was on facebook.....).
I apologise if these are all genuine and you're going through a difficult time. I still don't see why you would post anything about this on LinkedIn. It has nothing to do with business. Just my view.
Your thoughts?
Continuous Improvement Consultant @ Bupa | Driving Operational Excellence
7moFor some people I feel this is appropriate, often our business and personal lives are quite separate - I have many colleagues across multiple roles during my career that I would also consider as friends but may not be known to my family. Whilst they would surely let my present role know, along with current friends and family - a to the point post on LinkedIn might be appropriate for letting my wider network know.
Chercheur en crypto chez CryptoLab | Expert en cryptographie et développement de nouvelles affaires
8yThey need money and they seek to attract the compassion and empathy, this is why they post on LinkedIn. May be more rich people than in other social medias ?
A free-thinking advisor with over 30 years of successfully digitising businesses. (MInstD, MIITP)
8yChris, A couple of thoughts on this. First, LI (and the other social networks) exist because of the relationships between people who are connected in one way or another. Stating the obvious, LI is based on business relationships. Between people. Second, for a lot of the people I am linked to LI is my primary connection. So it is my primary way of staying in touch with them as their lives change. I would be concerned if members of my network felt they could not share significant life events. I really hope, as LinkedIn drives its monetisation program as a business aid we don't lose sight that this is a network of people. And we retain the human touch.
I recently lost my son suddenly and unexpectedly. I haven't contemplated using LinkedIn to communicate this. I am learning that everyone deals with grief in their own way...and sometimes in ways others don't understand. It's easy to make judgments from the other side. Personally I don't see what the problem is. I do think there are other aspects of the use of LinkedIn that deserve more focus. The random Endorsements feature if one of them.