I follow THOUSANDS of people in the education sphere on social media and the things that go viral within my echo chamber sometimes crack me up. Cara North made a casual Monday morning observation on LinkedIn asking:
You know the best way to start your day on LinkedIn? With messages from new connections who want to sell me their instructional design services. I have a great network and I already know who I would recommend/ask if I had some work to be done. Does anyone else get these often? Do these actually work?! I call these the “pop-up spam ads” of LinkedIn 🙂
Cara is a regular poster of high-quality content related to our field, but I doubt many of her posts have received the attention of this one. Turns out everyone is annoyed when a contact (most often a new contact) reaches out with canned solicitations – especially those asking to set up a time to talk.
I add about 20 people per week to LinkedIn from the invites I receive and about 5 times a month, I get an immediate solicitation in my LinkedIn messages or email from the new contact. 99.99% of the time, it’s a product or service that has NOTHING to do with my work. I consider this spam and immediately unfollow the contact, and apparently so do most others in my network.