Twenty million people were part of LinkedIn’s ‘top 10 per cent’ campaign. Congratulations to each and every one of them.
It was a clever campaign, designed to highlighting LinkedIn’s recent growth and bestow a good chunk of its user base with a fleeting sense of importance. If you somehow missed the flood of people telling the world that their profile was one of LinkedIn’s most-viewed accounts, then the real congratulations should probably go to you; it was very annoying.
This is the kind of marketing serving to turn some people off social at the moment. In an increasingly noisy environment the last thing social media users need is 20 million people sharing the good news that they are in possession of one of LinkedIn’s ‘most-viewed’ accounts.
In many ways, and this may start to offend more people now, it’s very similar to the updates you see saying so-and-so replaced ‘user X’ as mayor of Billy’s cafe. Such posts are often auto-generated, and so perhaps ghosts of the more innocent early days of social media usage. But they amount to little more than additional clutter.
Content producers are battling harder than ever before to get their content in front of the people that should be reading it, and social media – which should be a fantastic vehicle for achieving this – is rendered almost useless when clogged with chaff.
For this reason I am looking forward to the evolution of the social web. I think as more people become frustrated with the din served up on the major platforms, solutions and products will come to market designed to streamline content and give the user more choice over what they see on their screens, and that will be better for everyone.
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