LinkedOut

 A German network pal of mine recently asked what gets people’s goat about LinkedIn, for a talk he was preparing. Although he called it a rant. 

Replies (in no particular order) included: toxic positivity and enthusiasm, humblebrags, Simon Sinek, “Great Leaders do ....”, banal everyday experiences dressed up as profound insights “My cat was sick in the kitchen today. Here’s what I learned”, or once-in-a-lifetime experiences dressed down as business tricks “I proposed to my girlfriend this weekend - here’s what it taught me about B2B sales”, being scammed - yes, you ghastly creatures that want your grubby hands on my pension, woe-is-me victim stories, self-righteous virtue-signalling posturing, AI-generated and AI-stolen bullshit content, a general lack of lightness all around ...

Phew. I recognised most of it, along with the cultish nature of the site as described here by Coco Khan. She bemoans that the site now has its own language - no surprises there as it’s all prompts and AI. It takes a bit of effort, but I refuse to sound like a 5-year old at a party with a bouncy castle and a clown ("super-excited and thrilled!”), to “reach out”, to blab on about authenticity and vulnerability or read posts that hundreds or thousands have already liked.

What made me sad was Coco’s description of her friend whose experience is rich and diverse, yet doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes of LinkedIn. Know the feeling. And she puts it well when she says: “It’s shifting how we see our accomplishments, what we assign value to and what we don’t.” 

I am not a brand, I am a free woman. Or something. 

But, as a freelancer I’m stuck with it. Sort of at its mercy.

I’ll play the game up to a point. But I’m happy to be LinkedOut when it comes to real life.

My German pal, who’s smarter than me with this sort of stuff advised doing some proactive culling to get the algorithm working more in my direction. And it was strangely satisfying.

My most helpful brand of 2022

 

With all the trend reports and round-ups of 2022 I’ve been reading, I gave pause for thought. What has been my favourite brand of the last year? I was tempted to go for something that had done brilliant brand communications, but realised pretty quickly that I’d probably only seen those communications by reading Campaign and the rest of the trade press.

Rather, it’s a brand that entered my life just over a year ago, and one that, in the words of the “meaningful brands” questionnaire, I’d be genuinely upset if it disappeared. 

It’s DeepL. In November 2021, I was searching around for a decent online translator that would do a better job than my memories of Bing, or Google or Facebook. I’m still not sure whether DeepL found me or whether I found DeepL, but does that matter?

It’s a quiet, unassuming, unobtrusive brand - in fact, I’m not sure whether it officially thinks of itself of a brand or not. But it has a logo and a look, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. What is certainly true is that I have developed an extreme loyalty to DeepL over the last few months and it has become ingrained in my working life, particularly when I’m working with predominantly German clients, as has been the case recently.

DeepL is just one of many AI-based brands that I’ll be getting used to using in my work. The next one could be ChatGPT - but that’s a story for another day.