Date: Wednesday, August 5, 2020 @ 1 pm Eastern
They’ve been gone for a few years, but recently LinkedIn brought back their Polling feature to give users a way to solicit thoughts from their connections. I recently conducted a poll that not only resulted in a couple thousand views, but over a hundred votes and several second, and even third tier individuals engaging on the post.
One thing the success of this poll showed me was the importance of crafting posts with an engagement goal in mind. Granted, the focus of my poll was to solicit which webinar platform people preferred (Zoom won by a landslide, in case you’re wondering), but in my description and post I also asked for readers to share comments as to why they responded the way they did, or if there was another platform that was not one of the four poll options.
I can tell you this generated some excellent conversations, and at the end of the day, resulted in me snagging a Zoom licence as well. You can check out the poll on LinkedIn and see for yourself. Some great conversations and comments - exactly the type of engagement you’d want to see on a LinkedIn post.
On the Internet Nobody Knows if You’re a Dog - But They’ll Know if You’re an A-Hole
That’s one of the most famous early cartoons about the internet, originally appearing in the New Yorker back in 1993. It featured a dog sitting at a computer uttering the above phrase to his buddy, with the message being the Internet allows for you to be anything you want… even if you are a dog, but want to be something else. Small retailers can serve a global marketplace, and to the rest of the world you're as big as you want to appear.
But, just because you may be a dog sitting at a keyboard, that can’t hide the fact that if you’re a jerk offline, people will find out you’re one online too. I’ve unfortunately observed too many instances of people behaving badly on social media. There certainly isn’t a lack of polarizing topics to talk about today. Politics. Social justice. One’s take on the COVID-19 pandemic. But hiding behind the insulation of social media and feeling like you can “say what you want” at the expense of others is never an excuse.
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