Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been two months since my last posting on this blog. My shame is palpable. I’ve been loyal to my blog for about 10 years. Why the lapse? Well, I confess, I have been having impure thoughts and I’ve been seeing another. A temptress. Yes, I’ve been led astray!
The truth is, as an experiment, I’ve recently turned my attention to the alluring and sexy offer to “Publish a Post”, which as many of you may know is the third of three options that LinkedIn offers users on its Home screen.
The first of these choices, “Share an Update” creates a timeline feed which old-school LinkedInners* might say brings the site a bit closer to FaceBook. Maybe so, but most of the content I see there seems to keep to the original work-career-networking direction of the site. True, this means there’s an inordinate amount of self product or company promotion, but ’twas ever thus.
The second choice on the home page is to “upload a photo”. This does feel more millennial and looks like an invitation to share one’s (business?) lunch, or (office?) wild-night out, or (team-building?) Grand Canyon pic, or (cheesy and miss-attributed) Ghandhi/Einstein/Twain quotes rather than anything else.
The third one, however, is more intriguing. A Post, on LinkedIn, is something like a one-off blog entry. Now that the LI groups have declined in both purpose and point, this is probably the strongest area on LinkedIn to serve as a platform for Thought Leadership. You should probably check out what you see then you click on “Pulse” (in the “Interests” drop-down menu on the home page), and if you click on the word Pulse when you get there, you can tailor the feed to follow people or topics that interest you. While there, you could model some of the more rampant influencers in LinkedIn and start to think of your own content.
Both sites – WordPress and Linkedin – offer you access to analytics and stats on how many people are reading what you have written. The dashboard for WordPress is quite detailed but focuses more on where in the world your readers are, which is less interesting than who. LinkedIn, to its credit, gives you some data on who has ‘liked’ and who (if anyone…) has ‘shared’, and when. In my case and so far in the experiment, the LinkedIn posts seem to reach more people, and you can embed a video, while WordPress allows much more creativity in design, layout and links.
But I needed to explain to the blog my guilt. Absolution follows.
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* another confession, I just made that term up. In fact, I’ve made up more such terms than you’ve had Link Dinners. LIers could be another one, but I don’t think it would catch on)
Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog 