They really do. Mind, not ALL of them.
If you think about it, writing on LinkedIn is hard, exactly because of the "professional performance" thing. Most people are afraid to get caught out as clueless (not saying they are, just imposter syndrome). BTW, that's why they share corporate guff: it's associating yourself with a brand you perceive as "strong". The majority of any segment is going to be like that. But the minority of any segment is actually there talking. And that's all you need, because once you hit on the pain points, you get talking about it as well, and the silent majority, who you don't see LISTENS.
I'll share my own data: Professionally, I live at the intersection between NLP and financial marketing (pretty small niche!). Marketers don't care about NLP, and NLP practitioners usually don't care about marketing. But marketers have problems that NLP can be used to solve. So the question was how to even have that conversation, and around which pain points. I did an experiment that ran over a year, and I tracked the data, to see how it builds. A year on, I'm amazed at the results.
https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-on-...
> dark patterns everywhere.
Not disputing that, unfortunately.
The people who hate linkedin with a burning passion (or at least see it as a bizarre, soulless hellscape of inauthenticity) are people who see sentences like this and think "the horror, the horror".
Maybe you really do "live at the intersection between NLP and financial marketing" but to me that just sounds like bullshit.
"I use NLP to solve problems in/for financial marketing(ers)" is all they said.
I'm fascinated how simple uses of language like this are such a turn off for so many people but correlate pretty highly to more pay. You say bullshit, I say knows how to present themselves, a little flourish generally goes a long way.
If the argument is generally people who use flowery language don't have the skills to back it up then I have experienced that before certainly, but then I offer you that if it works for people who don't have the skills then imagine how useful it must be for someone who does.
But all the times clients have told me about pain points have involved phones or meeting rooms and the assumption I'm enough of a pro not to discuss that with their clients or competitors!
I am going to put a question mark next to this dichotomy, and here's why.
This idea that you have "authenticity" vs. "corporate PR" is no longer true. For sure, there's still what we think of as "corporate PR" (Look at our employees volunteering! Look at the award we won!). But fundamentally, this idea that there are "corporates" and there are "workers" is fast becoming dated. You don't have to be a freelancer or an indie hacker with a SaaS side project to be a company of 1. You, and everyone else in the knowledge-work economy is a company of 1.
The lines between who's "in" (an employee) and who's "out" (unemployed) are really blurred - and will only become more so. Contractors; freelancers; side-projects; these are all manifestations of the same thing. So when I say "my content" and you say "it's your corporate PR" I think is the wrong way to look at it: Trust IS personal. Views ARE personal. Heck, employment IS personal.
> Your example seems to be more about you talking about potential client pain points.
No, it really isn't. Anyone who builds stuff, side-projects or otherwise, knows you CAN build all sorts of stuff, but the question is whether you SHOULD. To understand what's worth building, I was - and still am - having a lot of conversations with clients. LinkedIn made it a whole lot easier, of course. the pain points are not "potential", they're real. And because the building is done is tandem with the market, it's hardly a wonder I position the services as a solution to those pain points.
Maybe I got it all wrong but it seems to me this is what Steve Blank was talking about in the "The 4 steps to the epiphany."
They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s) mostly shared corporate content, reshared allies' content or posted memes about work ethic. Knowing what your client's PR line is can be useful, but there's a world of difference between that and them publicly admitting weakness by sharing actual pain points.
Also, whilst I agree that it is important and useful this variant of social network exists, I could hardly imagine a more user hostile implementation: dark patterns everywhere, a model which encourages invitation spam yet sometimes makes it unreasonably difficult to connect to someone you actually met, forums which seem designed to not result in interesting conversation.