Part One: “You’re the Greatest! And You, Too!”: Breaking Trust
One day I got a message. Someone had “endorsed” my work on LinkedIn. Then someone else did. Some were clients and others I knew who knew my work. I was grateful. One was a friend who knows my work only through our conversations about it over the years. That felt a bit odd—not that I wasn’t grateful, but I knew he didn’t have direct experience with my work.
But it didn’t matter, really. Because while I was grateful for the acknowledgement, I already knew the whole thing was meaningless. I found out the first time, when I went onto the site and was bombarded by suggestions I endorse lots of other people, some I knew well, and others I didn’t know well at all.
The message was always the same: “Does _______________ know about ______________?” followed by a box to check to endorse him or her.
My heart sank.
“But why? Everyone knows testimonials are written by request. What’s the difference?”
A lot, if you ask me.
Facebook’s latest gimmick is telling us to “Give a Gift” every other minute. Now, I like gifts. I like giving gifts, I like receiving gifts, and I have another business in which I also encourage people to give gifts and I even recommend which gifts to give. But that’s upfront. People know when they come to my site or call on the phone that I am here to help them with buying something for themselves or for others.
Just as some of us flinched at a certain court decision because we knew corporations weren’t really people, we flinch at phony endorsements and suggestions we give gifts to everyone from here to Timbuktu.
Remember last time we were talking about how discounting your services amounts to “devaluing the currency”? So does any kind of phoniness. It makes us all lose faith in people’s word—“If he says this about someone he hardly knows–“
At its worst, it not only creates distance, it creates genuine bad feeling. When Facebook asked me the other day to give a gift to someone because we’d known each other three years, and the person in question was my best friend for 31 years and she died in April, I was left shaking my head.
When financial currencies crash, people say the money “isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.” It’s not just about goods and services; the lack of value in the currency becomes emblematic of a lack of stability in the ruling body. People lose whatever faith they had that they can believe what the government is telling them. The world becomes unreal.
LinkedIn’s attempt to cash in on its own version of Facebook’s “like” feature is worse than it seems at first glance. Why? People have different expectations of the two.
Part Two: Come Back, Betty, or Different Strokes for Different Folks
People have a pretty good sense of what Facebook is and how it operates. Facebook moved pretty seamlessly from being purely social to also being a way for businesses to reach customers (called “fans”). As it did, artists and small business owners already on the site began announcing to their existing community—their Facebook friends—that they were in business or were looking to reach more people for shows, and asked their Facebook friends to become fans on their Facebook Page. (Of course, there are also fans from outside the Page owner’s circle of Facebook friends.)
Because Facebook is a known quantity, when their Facebook friends asked them to become “fans,” people made the decision to do so or not do so, without the request having any impact on anyone’s sense of what Facebook was about (or on each other).
Not true for LinkedIn.
For better or worse, LinkedIn has been seen as stodgier than Facebook, more “business-y.” Even as Facebook has expanded its business offerings, some people have chosen to stay with LinkedIn for their business. One of my clients said, “I don’t want to do Facebook.”
I think that’s a mistake and he’s missing out on a lot of potential business, but he’s the client. Still, what’s he to think when LinkedIn suddenly—and sorry, this is how it comes across—dumbs down?
Don’t misunderstand: it’s not that Facebook is dumb or “less than” LinkedIn. Far from it. Ask the people whose Facebook fan pages have replaced their websites as the preferred mode of connection with their customers. If Facebook is crazy, it’s crazy like a fox.
I’m tempted to say this is a bit like those pictures we see from time to time of stars wearing the same dress. One of them usually wears it better.
But that’s not it. Does Facebook “wear” making connections better? No. LinkedIn is a very powerful social media platform. People trust it. If we view this through the lens of friendship for a moment, one would invite LinkedIn to housesit a lot sooner than we would Facebook. We wouldn’t trust Facebook with the silver. It could get sold to the highest bidder. (They’d give it back, though, if we put up a fuss.)
Facebook changes policies at the drop of a hat, only pulls back if there’s enough pushback from users, and has often run roughshod over its customers. But we tolerate that behavior because of the upside: the connection to our friends and others we value, both online and offline, and the worlds it makes available to us.
LinkedIn, we expect more of you. In your race to catch up with Facebook, you are trampling on us. When Facebook makes self-serving changes that we don’t like, it makes itself look bad. But when you “fake” endorsements, you make us look bad, too. You interfere with our ability to trust your platform as a place to look for trusted business associates. No, of course we weren’t born yesterday. We’ve seen alumni groups morph into a mini-Craigslist, and we know discussion groups sometimes provide more heat than light, on LinkedIn as well as on Facebook. But that never caused us to lose faith in you. We saw you, one the whole, as pretty darned trustworthy. Now we don’t know what to think. It’s almost like losing a friend.
LinkedIn, remember Archie? Please stop pretending to be Veronica. Veronica is fine. But you’re not Veronica. You’re Betty. And we love Betty, too. Come back, Betty.
©2012 Laynie Tzena. All Rights Reserved.
Really good piece Laynie. Your comment about LinkedIn changes policies at a drop of a hat is so on target and nobody attacks them for it. A great example is LinkedIn Answers, which was a beehive of information on every conceivable topic. It was fantastic and much more useful to me than Quora. Quora is still valuable but I really leaned on LInkedIn Answers. One day they just pulled the plug on it and literally ERASED all the content. And people were using LinkedIn Answers to build their online credibility. You could actually get points for answering the most questions, or having “the best answer.” Now that they pulled the plug all that brand building is GONE. That’s why I always recommend companies build a blog as their home base of their online company brand. That is something you completely control, from the content to the rules of use.
Thanks, David. I don’t know if LinkedIn has changed its policies quite as frequently as Facebook–they’re the ones I see as seeming to change things “at the drop of a hat”–but what you’ve said about how they handled “Answers” is certainly on point.
Not sure why they did that, but it seems a bad idea for several reasons. Answers served three purposes: problem-solving (the official purpose, and a real one–just ask anyone whose question was answered), brand-building for those providing answers to questions (“Here is a trusted resource; perhaps you have other needs?”), and the creation of a kind of home for people providing those answers–only to pull out the rug when it no longer served LinkedIn’s purposes.
That’s my biggest quibble with this type of unannounced action. Companies have to make changes. Customers often don’t like changes, unless we’re the ones making them. But we accept changes if they seem reasonable or if, as I said about Facebook, we know how they operate: they’re going to do whatever they want, but we get enough out of the relationship to stay put.
My theory is this: ignoring the customer is always a bad idea. You need to make a change? Fine. Tell the customer. You’ve invited people to contribute content? Give them a window within which to retrieve that content before you delete it.
Otherwise, despite how “new, new, new!” everything is supposed to be, people tend to use time-honored language to describe your actions. They tend to feel “used.”