Has anyone noticed that LinkedIn could easily be labelled SpammedIn? I belong to several groups, as do many LinkedIn members I’m sure. Lately I’ve found that my daily inbox of LinkedIn alerts has the “Discussions” section turning in to a sales-pitch section more than any thing else. The items themselves are not necessarily objectionable; most relate to helping one find a job, what to say or avoid saying during an interview, or how to optimize your LinkedIn profile. I am finding that these “discussions” are not discussions at all, merely pitches to sell some sort of career service. With all the fluff in each email alert, it’s getting more difficult to separate the worthwhile material from the spam. It is getting to the point that soon I won’t bother reading the message thread at all or simply unsubscribe to that group’s alerts, and both would be a shame.
This past week I recieved several annoying message alerts. One came in the guize of a comment regarding a recent thread posted in the Cloud Computing SaaS & Virtualization group discussion. The comment appeared to come either from a kook, or from somebody’s account that had been hijacked. The subject title was Why American men should boycott American women and the diatribe went on for several paragraphs. Following on the heels of that post was another spam promising $$$ for online writing assignments. Again today several comments titled “Congratulations…” started popping up across several ongoing threads with a shortened URL to a Chinese counterfeit clothing site.
What’s next? Discussions on how Viagra can help you in your job search and interview techniques? How high you’ll climb the corporate ladder if you drink a particular brand of java? How a specific deodorant will make you look more confident when the job pressure build? I hope not!
LinkedIn needs to take control of this situation before it degrades. People and companies selling career related services need to be labelled as such when organizing how email alerts are packaged. There also needs to be some sort of monitoring and policing of appropriate content to ensure that it is truly business related.
Without propper measures in place LinkedIn will degrade to the point that it will cease to be the social media site that business professionals prefer for networking with colleagues and friends.
LinkedIn is great, lets hope it remains that way!
Hello! Just want to say thank you for this interesting article! =) Peace, Joy.
The best group (signal to noise ratio is near 100:1) is the Mac-managers group, headed by Chuck Goolsbee. The format is:
member posts a question to the group, using his/her return address;
other members answer the question directly to the questioner;
the original poster is responsible for posting a summary (so marked in the subject line) wherein he condenses his original question and adds on the suggestions and (hopefully) final solution.
The list has a good to great spam filter – partly human and partly programmed. I don’t know if this format would work here, but it might be worth investigating.
For those interested in this group, you can visit: http://www.mac-mgrs.org/ for more information.
Fully agree, too many sales pitches and advertising showing up in what is supposed to be a professional support network. Quality control lacking. As you do, I have lately just deleted notices without reading, as the spamming has gotten completely out of control.