Why Linkedin best practices are a myth

By Neil Patrick

There’s no universal social media best practice, so stop looking for one

Last weekend over coffee, Gary Sharpe of Blue Dog Scientific and I were discussing LinkedIn Pulse. I think it is fair to say Gary has established himself as something of a renegade authority on LinkedIn.

He is an agent provocateur, evangelist, firestarter. He’s also a champion of fairness, a scientist and a driven man. He has an uncanny knack of spotting elephants in rooms that only when he points them out, do the rest of us recognise them.

Dr. Gary Sharpe of Blue Dog Scientific

Gary and I have shared values and core beliefs about things like authenticity, trust, collaboration, transparency.

We have also independently evolved entirely different ideas about how we use social media platforms in our day to day businesses.

It’s not that we disagree about much, but rather that we have totally different manifestations of our online presences.

Gary’s online presence mirrors who he is, what he cares about and what he wants to achieve. And so does mine. Neither of us copied any best practice or more prominent thought leader. We each figured out our own strategy that was right for us.

So who is right and who is wrong?

The answer is that we are both right. Because there is no such thing as a one size fits all solution.

But as friends and collaborators, we thought it would be interesting writing some content for each other. Gary has posted about our shared ideas and beliefs here. If you want to get some really authoritative insights into Linkedin, then you'll find much of interest on Gary's blog.

Why it is good that we are different

Gary has a great deal more courage than I in how he has taken on his mission to improve everyone’s user experience of LinkedIn. He ribs me that I am risk averse. I rib him that he plays with fire too much.

The fact is that we are each being true to our own personalities and backgrounds. If I tried to be Gary, I would inevitably be at best a weak impersonation and at worst, come over as a complete fraud. And vice versa.

Why I don’t post on LinkedIn Pulse

I write a lot of blog posts – there are around 400 on this blog alone, not to mention a ton of others scattered all over the web. But you won’t find me posting on LinkedIn Pulse. Gary on the other hand posts on Pulse almost daily. Often with biting critiques of the very platform he is publishing on.

My rationale for not posting on Pulse is this; I believe that LinkedIn like any corporation serves its shareholders first. Second it serves its customers. At best, its members (that’s us) come a very lowly third.

And as Gary has consistently reported, we users are getting an increasingly poor deal as LinkedIn continues in its quest to drive up revenues and profits. Worse, when we publish on Pulse we are providing our labours to LinkedIn for peanuts.

They acquire our content by the bucket load every day. We get an increasingly paltry compensation for our hours of toil. Our work may bring us a few comments and plaudits from our friends. We may trigger the odd new contact who likes what we have said. But this is a very poor ROI in my view.

My mantra is this:

Don’t build your house on rented land. Especially when the landowner has absolutely no vested interest in retaining your goodwill.

How I connect with people without using LinkedIn

We all want to find and build worthwhile professional relationships. This makes LinkedIn the natural platform choice for most of us. And just as Gary has built his following and network through his blog, LinkedIn and Google plus, I have built mine through my blog and Twitter.

I consider LinkedIn “high stakes” social media. The most senior people are rarely on the platform. They are too busy being successful. And most other people don’t want to be pestered by strangers. Either to connect or to read our latest musings, however profound or insightful they may be. People want choice and they want control. I get that. And I respect it.

Send out too many invitations to connect with people you don’t already know and you’ll potentially be classed by LI as a spammer, especially if you trigger a few IDKs (that’s when an invitee responds with the “I don’t know this person” button).

So I never invite connections from someone on LinkedIn I don’t already know from somewhere else. And the result is that I may have a smaller LI network than some, but it’s with people I like and who hopefully like me. This is the foundation for relationships which are meaningful and valuable.

Twitter on the other hand is low stakes. Every day I gain about 30 or 40 new Twitter followers. Most are what I call ‘randoms’ – people whom have absolutely no reason to follow me, because we have nothing in common. Yet within those 30 or 40 will always be 3 or 4 people I do want to get to know better. Many of these people subsequently request to connect with me on LinkedIn because I am nice to them on Twitter – I comment and interact with them. I share and favourite their posts that I like. Everyone is happy.

Why LinkedIn is still immensely valuable to me

A few weeks ago, the CEO of a business in my locality posted on LinkedIn he was looking for a board level marketing consultant. He wasn’t a first degree connection of mine, so despite this being exactly the sort of work I specialize in, I never saw his post. The first I knew about it was when people I was connected to started recommending me.

Within a few hours, four people who knew me well had all put my name forward. And sure enough this led to a meeting and the start of a valuable business relationship.

None of this happened because I had posted on Pulse. It happened because people in my network thought enough of me to put me forward. For all sorts of reasons, they had goodwill towards me.

We win goodwill not by brilliance, but by caring about others

The thing that each of the four people who recommended me for this gig had in common was that in different ways, I had helped every one of them previously with their work. In some cases, it had been advice, or I had previously worked with them. In others, it had been simple friendship and encouragement.

This was no clever strategy on my part. It was no brilliant post which established my authority. It was just people being nice to me, because in the past I had been nice to them.

My approach to social media works for me because it reflects who I am and what I want to accomplish. Not because I have copied anyone else’s strategy. And Gary does the same thing. So we are entirely different but also entirely the same.

Vive la difference!

10 reasons a blog is more valuable than money

By Neil Patrick

Plenty of people are completely mystified about why I write this blog. I don’t carry advertising and I’m not selling anything to anyone – so it earns me absolutely no money at all. It takes time I could be using to do other things. And yet I think it’s one of the most useful and valuable things I do in my working week.

If you want to know why, here are my thoughts about this question.

I think it was Publillius Sirus who said, “A good reputation is more valuable than money”. Whilst a blog cannot determine our reputation completely, it does present our thoughts and ideas to the world for the world to judge. And such openness requires more courage than I thought I really had. For me, as someone who had lived their whole life fairly successfully without social media ever being part of it, writing a blog was a personal challenge. It was the first time in my life I had ever put my thoughts up for the world to see. And that was a scary prospect.

Especially since at first, I had no real idea what I was doing. So I’m the first to admit that for many months this blog was erm, let's say... finding its way...

I’m not about to proclaim that it’s improved; that’s for you to judge, not me. But I can say it has taught me a lot and become immensely more valuable than I ever thought possible. And with over 300,000 hits so far, plenty of people must be at least looking at it occasionally.

When I started, I was obsessed with traffic. I would examine the visitor numbers every day – if it was rising, I felt good. If it was falling, I would give myself a hard time and knuckle down to putting up another post in the hope I could rid myself of my self-imposed fail badge.

I would dig deep into the stats to see which posts were getting most attention and comments and resolve to do more along those lines. A lifetime of marketing management had deeply ingrained these habits in my daily practices.

But none of this really matters a damn. And here’s why I think this.

First, I have learned that blogs should not attempt to be any of the following things:

A fact repository – Wikipedia does that far better than any blog can. If you want facts, you can get them there in an instant on just about any topic you can think of. Just don’t expect anything other than dull as ditch water fact after fact after fact…

A source for the latest news – whilst we can all grumble about this or that bias within the mass media, there are hundreds of thousands of people in the news industry worldwide posting news about everything, every second of every day. You’d be a complete fool to try and compete with that as a blogger.

A discussion forum – if you are a blogger who has many thousands of readers posting their comments regularly – I sincerely congratulate you. But my experience is that comments are becoming increasingly hard to come by for a mixture of reasons – folk don’t wish to publicly share their views or identity; they are super busy; they feel they have nothing to add. I also know that some people struggle with the comment facility on the Blogger platform and if you are one, I apologise, there’s little I can do about that, I‘m afraid. Of course they may also think I still suck at writing blog posts! I respect all these reasons but if you wish to comment, on any of my posts, I will be genuinely appreciative whether you agree or disagree with my opinions.

A way to trick search engines - I’m bemused by the whole SEO industry. It seems to rest on the premise that getting to the top of a Google search for a particular search query is the most important online goal anyone can have. I don’t waste my time with any SEO nonsense. Google will place me where it does and that’s fine. It’s got hundreds of people much smarter than me working everyday to deliver the best search results they can. I'm not going to distract myself and  adjust what I write to try and second guess Google's search algorithms. Social media brings me more traffic every day than I could buy from search engines anyway.

So why is a blog valuable? 

1. A blog is personal and as unique as you are. If you don’t care about something you write about, it shows. So don’t write about it. Choosing topics because they are popular might get you more traffic. So what? Do you want to be running with the pack or carving out your own distinctive voice and position? Personally I choose the latter. 
2. A blog serves as a notebook and therapy. It’s a place to record your ideas and thoughts at a moment in time. I sometimes look back at my old blog posts with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement at my own naiveté. But these retrospectives help me measure how much I have improved my knowledge, thinking and writing. It’s also a cathartic exercise. Sometimes I have an idea or nagging feeling about something rattling around my head for days on end. Somehow researching the topic and writing a post about it releases that pressure and allows me to lay it to rest…for a while at least. 
3. It forces us to challenge and refine our opinions. If you are going to stick up a blog post and not care if your facts are correct, your arguments logical and your presentation clear and engaging, then you are a braver writer than me. The process of posting our opinions on a topic for all the world to see imposes a requirement for critical self-assessment that would normally be absent. If we are expressing our opinions to family, friends or colleagues, that’s one thing. Posting them for the world to see is quite another. 
4. A blog gets you friends all over the world who care about the same things you do. This is the most precious value of my blog. It brings me into contact with great people whom I would never encounter otherwise. Many of them become friends, collaborators and yes even clients. 
5. A blog will make you much better informed. I’m not a career coach, recruiter, journalist or HR person – in other words the type of people who usually write about jobs and careers. I have no direct vested interest in gaining traffic for this blog. On the upside, this makes me neutral and unbiased. On the downside, because I don’t have a professional background in the areas I am writing about I can justifiably be classed as an amateur. And that’s fine with me – this blog forces me to learn and dig into things that I’d never otherwise bother to find out about. 
6. You don’t need to be an expert, but you do need to have a passion for your topic. I am seriously interested in how things work and what the future holds for the world of work. And this blog has made me even more interested in the subject as I have uncovered more and more intriguing ideas and analyses of what’s really going on. Writing a blog is the best way I know to increase my knowledge of that topic. It requires me to do my homework, to read as much or more than I write and to ask questions. 
7. It expands our knowledge and encourages us to consider other viewpoints. Not all writers do this, but I will typically research what other writers have said about a topic, before I write about it. Sometimes they provide useful quotes. Other times they introduce me to an aspect I’d not considered. Whatever their contribution, I learn. 
8. Doing it consistently and regularly is like going to the gym. It builds cognitive and communication muscle! I am not and never will be an Olympic gold medal writer. But I’m not trying to be. If I can be a workmanlike writer, that’s enough for me. 
9. It’s an opportunity to expose the guilty and praise the good. I have no sponsors that I must serve and please. I write what I believe and if something or someone deserves criticism in my opinion they get it! Others who I feel deserve recognition, I try to support and encourage. In that sense, blogs can be a democratic force for good in the world. 
10. If you’re not a digital native, a blog rockets you to the front with the cool kids. I’m well past 40 years old, and getting older and hopefully wiser. That makes me a dinosaur in the eyes of people who’ve never known a world without digital and social media. And yes I admit I like the kudos of not conforming to the stegosaurean stereotype. 

Blogs are everywhere these days. They are exploding as organisations recognise that having a lot of content on their website pushes their search rank higher. And their content reflects this. It’s copious, pedestrian, unoriginal and tame.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather read a heartfelt piece of writing by a passionate writer that challenges my assumptions than yet another sanitised click bait ‘news’ story any day…