I am very much in demand.
If you look in the ‘trash’ section of my email files, you will find many communications from Linkedin telling me how in demand I am. Delightfully many. Maybe you have the same.
People, apparently, are ‘looking at my profile’. 35 of them this week alone. Many hundreds this year. I appear to be quite someone.
Quite what they think they will find there is one for them, not me. If I were less mean, I would have signed up to the bit you actually pay for, which tells you exactly who is looking. So the only ones I can identify are the ones who are also too mean to do that, and it mainly comes down to my bored mates, to bored people in my industry and to friends of my kids who have been told to get as many connections as possible. Oh, and there’s a bloke from Bangalore who does something to do with ‘delivery systems’, a Latvian lady who is into ‘strategic oversight’, whatever that is, and a man I have never heard of who is evidently deeply concerned that I will miss the news of his recent OBE. A number of people, who I was exhorted to congratulate, were even having ‘work anniversaries’, the knowledge of which never fails to fire up my day.
Just occasionally, like my friend who put up a post of some nice woodcuts he had done, the relentless tide of bland is temporarily halted.
None of this involvement has yet enriched me, disappointingly, but we live in hope. And yet, as a monument to stretching modern day credibility, it knows no equal outside Ryanair’s customer service strategy handbook.
Now, you don’t get to be worth $26.2 billion without being smarter than me, I grant you. And neither are the 630 million of us on the Linkedin platform completely clueless. We don’t actually join to read how ‘super awesomely excited’ someone is to launch their new ‘electronic dog collar’, or to ‘network’ our socks off with other networkers at joyless networking events. We probably understand deep down that it’s not really a community, any more than the Supreme Soviet was a community, and we won’t be ‘empowered’ by our membership any more than we would be empowered by our Jack Russell’s chewy toy. But, nonetheless, we clearly want something from it, or we wouldn’t do it.
Cards on table, I joined up because I thought that’s what you did to put it about that you were newly available for challenging and embarrassingly remunerative assignments. For reasons I now understand, the wait goes on. You can be subversive, or in the club, but not both.
I used its ‘degrees of separation’ service just the once four years ago, when I was particularly keen to talk to someone about cricket in Afghanistan. Via a vague friend and an old teacher, I made the connection, who promptly told me to ‘get lost’ (and both you and I know that he used a stronger version of that sentiment). I sort of understood where he was coming from, as it was purely about him doing a favour for me, and I was offering nothing but my thanks in return.
There is an ‘emperor’s new clothes’ feel about it all, where we are tacitly encouraged to inflate our own achievements to compete with all the inflated ones we will surely be compared against. Just scraping a sales target once becomes ‘consistent high achiever’ in the new language and I guess life eventually becomes an arms race of self promotion, like a reality version of Apprentice, albeit without a gigantic ego at the other side of the table.
But the genius of it all, the reason that founder Reed Hoffman trousered a reported $1.9 billion when Facebook bought it out, is that he and his team understood the eternal truth that, in order to make a fortune, you have simply first to spend enough marketing money to convince enough people that they can’t live without what you’ve just invented, discovered or developed. I’m not saying for a second that some people haven’t benefited directly from the connections that they have made on it, just that they also used to do it pretty effectively in different ways before. The jobs they go into aren’t better jobs in any sense, they are just jobs that recruit their staff in differing ways. The companies they go to still have chief executives and cleaners, they still hire and fire people and they still try to compete in a commercially brutal world. It’s just that these days their insecurity, and their company’s insecurity, has been neatly monetised.
It goes without saying that we are all super-awesome on Linkedin, but ‘when everyone is somebody’, as I seem to remember Gilbert and Sullivan saying in the Gondoliers, ‘then no one’s anybody’
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