Welcome to episode 174, this week I want to return to a subject close to my heart and also one that I think is really important to all of us.
18-25-year-olds and their use (or lack of use) of LinkedIn!
This episode features an interview with John Morley about the work he has been doing with school leavers.
More of that later …

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn launch a new ‘Welcome to the team’ prompt
A LinkedIn Editor Reveals How to Get Featured and Go Viral on the Site This is a real clickbait headline but worth a read anyway.

Last Friday I had a wonderful day with three other LinkedIn Trainers in the UK.
Steve Philip
Angus Fraser
Greg Cooper

We had a really productive day sharing ideas and expertise in a very open ‘nothing to lose, everything to gain’ atmosphere. If you get the chance to get together with your competitors, take it. You will gain a lot from the experience.

On Sunday I attended the start of the Round the World Clipper race. I really knew very little about it beforehand but I found the whole thing incredibly inspirational and it’s really helped me get some new focus into my business.

Click on the image below to find out more about the race

Company Page Followers Hack

It’s very annoying that LinkedIn prevent us from seeing who are followers are but thanks to Glen Smith I have a cool hack to show you.
This might not last long but if you use the url;
https://www.linkedin.com/company/company-name
You will be able to view them. Remember if your company name is more than one word you must separate the words with a dash -

It’s a useful hack but my advice is to focus all your engagement efforts on your personal page anyway.

Is this poor communication?

This fascinates me. Is this good communication or not? Is it good design by LinkedIn? What are they hoping to achieve by this?

A Focus on Youth

This week I chat with John Morley about the work he has been doing with school leavers via the National Citizen Scheme in the UK.

Key Points
Most Teenagers don’t even know what LinkedIn is
Most teenagers are ‘socially engaged’ on other platforms
We need to help teenagers understand the importance LinkedIn can play in their professional personal brand.
Teenagers should be thinking about their career and they need to understand that LinkedIn will be very useful to them when looking for an internship or job
A great technique is to get them to focus on what they want to do and then visualise what their LinkedIn profile will look like.

I would strongly encourage you to spend some time with your teenage kids, family members or family friends and encourage them to think about LinkedIn. You could be doing them a real favour.

Welcome to episode 174, I’m going to share an interesting chat I had with AJ Wilcox this week. AJ heard me talk in sceptical terms about the new website demographics feature that LinkedIn are currently rolling out and contacted me to say he was very enthusiastic about the feature. So I thought I would record our conversation and share it with you.

More of that later but first…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Judge rules against LinkedIn in legal fight over its members' public data
Another great article on the same subject is in the Washington post: Is LinkedIn trying to protect your data — or hoard it?

This ruling could have interesting ramifications for other current and potential 3rd party products. I’m not sure it ‘opens the floodgates’ for plug-ins and extensions but it will be interesting to see what develops.

Feedback

This a great point from Sandra. Sharing a post, with attribution does allow someone to add their own perspective that is suitable to their audience.
Fair comment, I was probably a bit harsh about sharing, it’s not stealing likes and comments although I do think that you should always comment on the originators post as well to assist their distribution of that post.
That of course is not the same as the copy & pasting, which is always wrong, even with attribution.

If you want a copy of the cheatsheet that outlines how to achieve high post views and engagement then fill in your details below, it’s completely free.

New LInkedIn Features

Native video on desktop is now being rolled out, it doesn’t allow you to record unfortunately but you can upload a video from your computer

The video feature has suffered some problems this week as a new tranche of members have been given access which has caused uploads to be very slow at processing.
On that point, if you are adding video from your computer, these are the dimensions it needs to fit;

We now have a new ‘Connection’ filter in search results (mobile and desktop). This is different to searching a connections connections which is done from their profile. This is designed to be more of a secondary filter to an existing search result. For example you may be searching for prospects and then want to know if one of your good business contacts is already connected to anyone in the result. Thus revealing the opportunity for an introduction.

LinkedIn active status in Messages. Many users seems to have got this useful new feature this week but the way LinkedIn explained it can lead to some confusion. Hopefully the below video clears that up

It’s a positive enhancement to the messages function but I think this feature could be improved with;
Filtering by who is active in the Messages page
Active status to show in a connections profile

What do you think. Any other ideas on how they could improve this?

Website Demographics

Let’s hear what the world’s nicest social media expert has to say about this new LinkedIn website demographics feature

AJ explains how this tool can be used to get a much greater understanding of who visits your website. Not just your domain but each specific page so you should be able to get a much clearer idea of who is interested in certain aspects of your business or products.
It may even give you guidance of how those pages should be designed (to suit the audience).

Also you can combine custom audience advertising with website demographics by targeting the demographic of the people that are typically going to your relevant website pages. This should make your custom audience ad’s much more effective.

You might already have this feature. Go to your ad’s account on LinkedIn

Then click on an account and you will see website demographics if you have it. I didn’t have it when I spoke with AJ but as you can see, I have it now!

Apparently only 25% of members have it but it is currently rolling out to all.

Welcome to episode 173, this week it’s just me (no interview) and I want to talk about the controversial but also very important topic of plagiarism.

But before we get to that I need to catch up on some things I wasn’t able to cover last week plus some other articles I saw this week…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Hackers catfish tech execs on LinkedIn
Putin passes law that will ban VPNs in Russia
HOW RUSSIA IS USING LINKEDIN AS A TOOL OF WAR AGAINST ITS U.S. ENEMIES
Why LinkedIn will Never Tell You When to Post on LinkedIn

You can hear my interview with Janet Murray on the Soulful PR podcast here

LinkedIn Updates

Think twice before you reply to an InMail with a shortcut ‘No Thanks’!

This is very sneaky and I’m not sure it’s been properly thought through by LinkedIn. When you receive an iMail from someone you have the opportunity to reply with 3 shortcut phrases

On the face of it this looks like a time saving convenience feature similar to those inBot responses you see in normal messaging.
Beware, it’s not what you think!

When your ‘no thanks’ reply is received the other end the sender sees this message

So they can’t continue the thread….that makes perfect sense to me but what happens if they try to subsequently send you a new InMail?

So you have inadvertently ‘blocked’ this person from ever InMailing you again which could be disastrous for jobseekers and others who don’t wish to cut off communication altogether, it seems absurd to me that LinkedIn don’t make it clear what you are doing!

Long text posts are ‘killing it’ on LinkedIn

I have reported on this before but since then I have tested this further and it is clear that the algorithm that decides how many of your followers will see your post is massively favouring posts with a lot of text and really penalising any posts that include a link (unless it’s a LinkedIn article).

Here is a post I did last week about a news item regarding Sports Direct. As you can see below, this story was widely covered on LinkedIn by individuals and companies but everyone else made the mistake of including a link to the online article.

Knowing what I know, I simply took a screenshot of the letter and posted it as an image accompanied with some long text (triggering the ‘see more’.

As you can see, the results speak for themselves!

As I typed the above post I paused as I wondered if what I was doing was in some way a form of plagiarism. In the end I decided it was OK as the story had been widely covered by many sources in the national press….but that got me thinking about the main subject of this weeks episode!

LinkedIn Plagiarism - Is copy & pasting posts OK?

This seems to have become an increasing trend on LinkedIn, especially as text only posts have become more popular and successful.

Here is a classic example of what I’m talking about. This text only post from Ryan Cummings was phenomenally successful with nearly 40,000 likes and approaching 3000 comments.

Those are great numbers but could have been so much more because others decided to copy and paste his post and re-post it on their own feed. I actually found 27 posts like this.

This is the most blatant example and is classic plagiarism

The majority were like this, I even found someone who had made it into his own LinkedIn Article!

And someone who tried to be clever by changing the copy, ever so slightly!

And another who just copy & pasted a section

Some fool even had the cheek to add their product picture to the copied post!

It’s hard to defend these people. They clearly have extremely low ethical standards and will never find success by operating that way……..These losers are annoying but not the ones I’m most concerned about.

I also saw plenty of examples like this;

Whilst Ryan’s name is shown, it is not a link back to his profile.

There were other examples where Ryan is mentioned and linked (@mention)

Whilst this is an improvement, is still wrong in my opinion for this simple reason;

They are stealing views, Likes and Comments from Ryan!

and I think that is totally unacceptable!

Every post offers us the opportunity to Like, Comment or Share - using these is quicker and ensures that all credit, views and further engagement belong to the rightful owner.

Not everyone however would agree, look at this post from a CIO claiming that this practice is ‘standard behaviour’ across all social media - really? If this is common practice then that would suggest to me that it’s ‘common practice’ to behave unethically, surely that isn’t true for most social media users - is it?

Admittedly Bill also makes a good point about unwarranted blocking but his original comment is ludicrous!

This topic was also covered  and extensively commented on in a recent post by Simon Chan

I agree wholeheartedly with Simon’s comments but who cares what we think. How does it feel to be copied in this way?
Well I reached out to Ryan Cummings and asked him for his thoughts and this is what he had to say;

“When I first noticed that some people were copy and pasting my post, I was a bit flattered. However, when one particular post began accruing several thousand likes and gained momentum, I then had people commenting on my post saying that they think the story was made up or that I was the one who copied it.

LinkedIn can easily determine who the original author was, and I believe they should step in and take down posts/suspend users who do not give proper attribution when posting others' content.

So to directly answer your questions:
1. I don't like it, they should cite their sources. Those who don't will be exposed and look like clowns anyway.

Welcome to episode 172, this week I’m going to introduce you to a very interesting and somewhat entertaining character. Jon Buchan is a digital marketing expert who has a unique way of getting fantastic responses to cold messages (mainly emails) he sends by using humour.

But first we had some feedback from last weeks episode on Native video.

Native Video

My friend and fellow LinkedIn trainer Sandra Long sent me this voicemail

Gary Stockton also got in touch;

“I'm looking forward to creating videos for important job openings and new thought leadership content. Check out Screenflow for Mac. You can record screen from iOS devices and make great looking mobile demo videos. I think current release of Camtasia also allows for mobile screen recording”

Great points Gary. I think highly of both those products but they might be out of the budget for the average user who occasionally wants to post a video. In those circumstances, simply record on your phone.

The Charm Offensive with Jon Buchan

This is an intro’ from Jon that nicely sets the scene for the interview

“One night, I got drunk and wrote an email. I woke up and still thought it was a good idea to send this completely absurd email to very busy, Senior Marketing Directors at large brands.

I sent 6 emails manually. It wasn’t long before I got 2 replies. Both of them were highly complimentary but telling me they already had agencies in place. Then I got another response, and they wanted to meet me. I couldn’t believe it. The email I created should in no way work. It was out of the ordinary and weird and ridiculous. Yet it did.”

Here is an example of the kind of response that Jon frequently gets to his messages;

In this interview Jon takes time to explain the structure of his cold emails. This is equally applicable to LinkedIn messages and even posts. Below is an example of a recent LinkedIn post from Jon

You can check out Jon’s LinkedIn profile by clicking on it above.

The best information can be obtained in the Charm Offensive Facebook group

This weeks question is from Jennifer Holloway

Answer - Two options;

1. Upgrade to Sales Navigator and import your tags…….for the delightful price of £72 per month, which probably isn’t a good investment for tagging alone.
2. Use the Dux-soup Chrome extension. It’s free and allows you to add tags and notes and then search by tag.