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Show notes.
How do you report someone and what happens when LinkedIn ignores your feedback?
LinkedIn has a new CEO: Daniel Shapero
Content DNA is 6 years old – read sample chapters
Espresso+ members now get the full 32-chapter audiobook for free.
What comment features do you want?
Your LinkedIn headline matters
Full transcript.
How do you report bad actors on LinkedIn and what happens when the corporation doesn’t pay any attention to your feedback? That’s what we’re going to look at today in episode 488 of the Informed podcast.
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Informed podcast. I’m your host John Espirian, and this is a show all about LinkedIn best practice.
Now, we would normally start with a Postbag section. We’ve got something a little bit modified today, because really the main thrust of the show is an interaction I had with a listener who also happens to be a member of my Espresso+ community. So, we’re going to dig straight into that.
So, that person is Melanie Goodman, and I saw one of her posts in my feed this week, and she was sharing a document post to share some screenshots of an interaction that she had with someone who was not even trying to connect with her. It’s a message that she received via InMail – a wholly inappropriate one – and I don’t want to read it word for word, because I might have to put an explicit language warning on this podcast episode and I don’t really want to do that, but someone started a message to her by saying “hello I will BLEEP you.” Not appropriate at all.
She’s taken some screenshots and shared what happened. I did like her reply. She said “As a LinkedIn consultant I’d suggest a slightly different opening line. You might also want to add this to your Services section. Really lean into your niche.”
I love that sarcasm from Melanie, and she later went on after a couple of other messages from this person to block him and say that she was going to immortalise him on LinkedIn, and indeed she has.
Now, sadly this kind of stuff still happens quite a bit. It’s really depressing that anyone would use a professional business platform to send inappropriate messages like that. I mean you shouldn’t send inappropriate messages regardless of what platform you’re on, but on a platform that is meant to be about work and that is designed not to be anonymous, why you would take such a stupid risk as to send inappropriate messages, I’ll never quite understand.
But what was really saddening, though, is that Melanie rightly reported this to LinkedIn and got a message back saying that no violation was found, and yet this is just about the most blatant case you could imagine.
It’s wholly inappropriate language. There’s no way of misconstruing the message, and so that suggests or suggested very clearly that no human being had actually looked at the message, and it was just an automated tool that LinkedIn were using to assess this kind of content. And yet sometimes you would expect even an automated tool would pick up on words that surely ought to be banned and yet nothing was found.
Now, Melanie then subsequently made a bit of noise in public and managed to get it escalated and I do believe at the time of recording that the person in question who sent those stupid messages has actually been kicked off the platform and quite right, too.
Now, there’s no way of supporting someone who has been affected by something like this, because there’s no reporting tool for things like direct messages.
So, I could for example I could go to that person’s profile, but if I wanted to report him via the profile, the only options I’ve got are to say things like well this person isn’t real or that they’re impersonating someone else, and that’s not the complaint I’m making. The complaint I’d be making is, this person has sent an inappropriate direct message to someone else.
So, that’s not good, and LinkedIn’s method here is to make sure that they tie back their reporting of any objectionable content to the content itself. If someone has put out a public post, you could go and report that post by finding the post and hitting the 3 dots and reporting there.
If it’s a direct message, which it was in this case, you can only report something if it’s been sent to you, and obviously this hadn’t been sent to anyone else other than Melanie, and so no one else can chime in and say this is inappropriate, you know, check this person out.
So, the only other option available to you apart from making a load of public noise, and that kind of relies on you having quite a big network, is to raise a support ticket to the help team and that’s probably going to be ineffective anyway.
So, none of these solutions are really great, but I do think LinkedIn needs to invest a bit more time and energy in having human reviews of these things to make people feel safe on the platform.
Maybe LinkedIn’s new CEO, and I’m going to be talking about that in a second, will hopefully prioritise things like this so that people can actually enjoy using the platform.
I’m thankful that I don’t really get any inappropriate messages at all. I would say I’ve got the wrong kind of chromosomes to receive some of the messages that Melanie and others have received, but I know that lots of people are affected by this, and if that puts them off using the platform and means that they look elsewhere because they don’t feel as though it’s a trusted space or they don’t know what kind of abuse they’re going to get on a daily basis, that’s not good for any of us, really.
So, not a fan but well done Melanie for raising this issue and also I particularly like the fact that she didn’t try and blur out this person’s photo or his name. Doesn’t actually matter now because he’s been kicked off the platform anyway but I don’t really have any sympathy for people who are very obviously transgressing the rules, even if LinkedIn’s bots don’t think they are transgressing. So, I don’t recommend blurring these identities but anyway there we go. I will link to the post so you can go and check out what Melanie reported and all of the supportive comments that came thereafter.
Now, some unexpected news: LinkedIn has a new CEO. I did not know this was happening. I was aware that the previous CEO, Ryan Roslansky, had recently published the Open To Work book, and he’s been there for some time now. I didn’t realise that he was planning on moving on from his role but we have a new person. That person is Daniel Shapero, and he posted and I just saw it in my feed and saw this thing blowing up with loads and loads of likes and comments, so I realised that this is the new CEO.
So, I’ll link to his post. I don’t know whether there’s going to be a complete change in LinkedIn’s focus and strategy, but Dan did end his post by saying that he was going to start by “learning and listening and connecting with our team, members, creators and customers, each of whom make LinkedIn the platform that helps create economic opportunity.”
It sounds very generic and bland to me. I don’t know whether he’s really going to be listening to people. I’ve been saying for years that loads of people in the independent LinkedIn training community have loads of great ideas about how to make the platform better for everyone, and many of the ideas that I’ve heard suggested would probably make LinkedIn more money as well. So, whether we can get the attention of Daniel Shapero remains to be seen, but anyway, good luck in the role it’s a big task certainly and let’s see how LinkedIn changes as a result.
This past week saw the 6th anniversary of my personal branding handbook release. It’s the book called Content DNA, and for some time now I’ve offered written and audio chapters as a sample on my website. It’s not gated at all so you can just go to the page and read the content and listen to the content, but I’ve also decided as it was the anniversary of the book’s release, why not provide a gift to my Espresso+ members, and so they can get the full unabridged 32-chapter version of the audiobook.
So, if you’re listening to this and you didn’t receive your email about that then please let me know and I’ll send you the direct link – that’s if you’re a member of the Espresso+ community.
People have asked whether I’m going to be doing a revised version or a new version of the book but actually having looked through it while I was remastering the audio recently, it just still stands up to scrutiny, and I wrote the book to be evergreen, so no plans there to rewrite anything really, but I hope you enjoy the content.
Go and take a look at the sample and if you want to get the real thing it’s available on Amazon as a paperback, as a digital ebook and also as an audiobook via Audible. Hope you enjoy the content.
Someone who works for LinkedIn in the comments section has made a post asking for suggestions for comment improvements. I’m never that hopeful that people will really listen but when someone is actively asking for feedback I’ll always put my thoughts in, so I’ve replied to this post and I will link to the post in the show notes so you can check it out as well, but what I’ve said for my initial thoughts on how comments could be improved, I said that I’d love to see a separation of comment notifications from reaction notifications.
I’m a power user of LinkedIn. I get loads of notifications all the time, and I love comments: they give me something to hold on to and to build relationships and have better conversations.
When I get a notification about a reaction, it doesn’t give me anything to respond to. You know, you can’t really just say thank you for reacting there’s just no space for doing that, really.
So, I would rather not receive notifications about reactions but continue to receive notifications about comments, and there’s no elegant way of separating those two things, so I’d love to see that in the first instance.
I’d also love to see support for multimedia replies beyond just images. So, at the moment if you leave a comment on someone’s post, you’re going to be writing text and you might be attaching an image. But why not have a system where you could reply with audio or video, so if you could leave a voice note reply, for example, some people like voice notes I know a lot of people don’t, but also maybe you could leave a video reply. I’m thinking TikTok style where people stitch replies and leave a brand-new video that answers people’s questions.
I did an experiment on this once where for a whole day, I just did nothing but video replies and I had to use a third-party tool to do that, because there’s no native way of uploading a video to a LinkedIn reply, and that worked quite well.
It was a lot of effort and I certainly wouldn’t recommend others try and do that all day – it will really exhaust you – but as a proof of concept I thought it worked really well, and it helped me start better conversations with people and keep those going in the DMs as well.
I’d also like to see some more visual indicators in the comments to say, look in this part of the comment feed there’s something that mentions you and something that needs your attention. That’s not really clear right now. Sometimes, when you respond to a notification, it jumps you to a certain part of the comments but it’s not always accurate in doing that.
I would like to see a flagging system where you can kind of downvote a comment or you could say something like “I think this comment is written by AI or a bot” – something like that, and there are loads of other bits of feedback that are now filling up this person’s post. So, I will link to that. Take a look, see what you think.
Whether she and the rest of LinkedIn actually can act on these things remains to be seen but we travel in hope I guess, and I do think comments are such a massive, underrated part of LinkedIn, so anything that can be done to make them even better is something I really welcome.
This week LinkedIn started rolling out an AI feature called Crosscheck on a limited rollout in the US. It’s an AI chatbot feature where you type in a question as you would normally do with any AI tool and then LinkedIn sends that question to two different AI tools and gives you the answers on the left- and the right-hand side of the screen, and you then need to decide which of those answers is better and once you’ve selected, you then find out which of the AI tools was used to provide those answers.
So, the idea is that your questions can help LinkedIn to work out which of the AI tools is best for different types of question.
It’s a good idea in theory. How much your data is protected, I’m not really sure.
The blurb that comes with Crosscheck says that nothing that’s personally identifiable will be sent back to the tool-makers or used in any other decisions about your LinkedIn profile or anything like that. It sounds good in theory. Can you really trust it? I’m not sure.
Personally, I don’t use AI very much at all and when I do I always use a tool called Claude, the paid version. That suits me for my very limited AI needs but it’s interesting. If you don’t know about some of these AI tools you don’t have access to all of them it. Could be a nice playground for you to experiment with some stuff that isn’t necessarily mission critical and see what kind of answers you get, and it’s totally free, which is great but it’s on limited rollout so I don’t have it in the UK. I’ve seen it briefly through a colleague in the Espresso+ community, Kevin D Turner, who has early access and has shown me it.
There’s also a leaderboard on the way so LinkedIn will be able to rank who is performing, who’s getting the most upvotes if you like, to try and work out which is the best AI tool out there. So, look out for that it might be coming to you sometime soon.
I’ll leave you with something fun and it’s always the irreverent stuff that tends to get me good visibility in my LinkedIn posts, but I was just thinking about how important LinkedIn headlines are.
It’s the only bit of text that follows you all around the platform, and I was suggesting to people that they think about what they write especially in those opening characters of the headline, because you want to grab people’s attention but you also want to try and make it relevant to what your product and service is.
I do see a lot of headlines that start with something that I suppose does grab attention but doesn’t really tell me anything about the person, and if I’m just scrolling my feed it feels like a wasted opportunity.
So, I just mocked up a silly version of my LinkedIn profile top card where I had my name there my photo and then beneath my name where the headline goes I wrote “Oxygen consumer. Former baby.”
That’s probably true, well, certainly should be true of everyone listening to this podcast unless AI has finally become sentient, but you know something like that probably would grab people’s attention, but it doesn’t tell anything about what I do, and I’m a LinkedIn trainer and coach and community manager and so forth.
Use this as just a reminder to go and think about how can you grab attention but also tell people something relevant about what you want to be known for. And doing that in a short number of characters is difficult.
You’ve only got about 40 characters or so before your headline trails off, certainly on mobile. So, if you haven’t grabbed people’s attention meaningfully in that time, then you might have missed an opportunity. So, if you haven’t reviewed your headline recently go and take another look. It’s the kind of thing I help some of my clients with so if you need a hand drop me a line maybe we can chat about it.
OK, that will do for now. As ever, please keep your questions coming and I’ll include them in a future episode of the show in the Postbag section, and thank you to everyone who has supported the show. Have a great week. Speak to you soon.
