LinkedIn is In, Are You?

Social media platforms come and go so it's up to individuals and companies to keep up with what's relevant. A good strategy for keeping yourself or your company relevant is to try and predict what platforms and sites are on the rise. Sometimes, this could be a fancy new app or website but other times, promising media can include older platforms that are undergoing an update or are in a position to succeed during an external change. LinkedIn is one such platform which we all should be keeping an eye on. Need some proof that LinkedIn is adapting as a modern social media platform, check out this recent video ad from their YouTube channel.

Who is this ad targeting and do you think it is effective in doing so? Does this ad remind you of any other companies' campaigns you've seen recently? Take a look at this video ad for Facebook Life below. Try and identify how the two ads are similar and how they are different. What image are the ads trying to portray for the company and how are they doing this? 

These two ads are slightly different, the Facebook ad is more focused on employee recognition and job satisfaction while the LinkedIn ad is more focused on what the platform offers a user. However, they both are conveying a similar image of professionalism, usefulness, and modernism. Additionally, they both use young individuals to convey how people are satisfied with their company. If both ads are targeting young professionals, which do you think is more effective at reaching this target group?

In addition to trendy ads that are on the same level as Facebook's, LinkedIn has been updating their platform's architecture to mimic and compete with other popular social media, like Facebook and even Instagram. These platform changes, like integrating more video with Vimeo, launching a 'Groups' feature, and giving users the ability to upload personal stories, represent LinkedIn's effort to reach out and appeal to younger professionals and bring them onto the platform.

LinkedIn Stories,
Source: TechCrunch

LinkedIn's strategy of marketing to young people works because they are directly targeting young professionals who are entering or exploring the workforce but they are also indirectly marketing themselves to other businesses who might be looking for young people to join their team. They do both these things in one step. But why else might businesses be interested in LinkedIn as an up and coming platform?

Source: DemandWave

In addition to generating engagement, as the chart above demonstrates, LinkedIn has proven to be a valuable source for generating companies revenue. The more valuable LinkedIn is for companies, the more valuable it becomes for individuals looking to connect with companies for any purpose, including employment. In turn, LinkedIn knows that by increasing their value to companies which increases their value to individuals, they can get more people interested and signed up for their platform. You can read more about how LinkedIn has recently improved other companies' abilities to advertise on their platform here.

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em! In a nutshell, that's the advice our text book is giving to companies dealing with the groundswell and navigating the changing landscape of marketing and advertising in an era after the explosion of the internet.

Source: me.me.

Groundswell is, at its core, a social trend with roots stemming from the collision of people, technology, and economics. It's rather democratic in this sense. As the textbook outlines, people draw power from other people and people power is multiplied in groups. Nowadays, we can sell and buy things cheaply with ease on Facebook market place. We can calculate which movie to watch based off of the quantifications on Rotten Tomatoes. You can plan your entire trip to another country by watching YouTube videos of other travelers. For the everyday Joe, this is great but for companies accustomed to advertising their goods and services in certain ways, everything is forever changed and  everything is forever changing. The internet threatens a companies institutional power if they are not prepared to learn from and grow with the groundswell.

Source: Medium.com

Companies that want to survive this new frontier need to be open to adapting. For this reason, the textbook recommends that companies focus on learning the relationships and connections that take place online rather than only focusing on the technologies themselves. Companies might want to consider why and how people are using the internet to understand how they can fit into a picture that already exists and is constantly changing. For examples of how companies have been adapting look at any fast food restaurant's presence on twitter.

Source: Twitter

But even after companies adapt, groundswell will always give people a voice:

Source: me.me

What are your thoughts on companies interacting with consumers on social media? Can we bring ethics into this and should companies be considering internet ethics as a form of preemptive crisis management?  For more thoughts on companies personifying themselves on Twitter, check out the video below!

How Misogyny Moved Online

(Trigger Warning: mentions of rape)

The internet is a place where many of us access local and global news, information on anything we please, endless entertainment, and most importantly, each other. We connect and communicate. We like and we follow. We laugh and we share. We use and enjoy the internet so much that sometimes we forget to be critical of it.

The internet is a great place but it is far from perfect. Internet spaces, from Instagram to Linked-in might not be physically designed to be places of discrimination and bigotry but that has not stopped humans from bringing everything things like racism, misogyny, and trans-phobia online.

A good way to begin thinking about how this happens is to start thinking about identity and how neither online nor offline spaces are blind to it. When we sign up for most online spaces we are asked to make a profile that replicates our real life identity. Uploading photos of ourselves is perhaps the most telling identifier but filling it our name, age, and gender also serves to create our virtual identities.


(Photo: Blogging Bistro)

So online identity exists in a similar way to our real world identity. We are defined. Put in boxes. And in turn we do the same to others. So what? How does this relate to gender discrimination.

In the "real world" women face things like hyper-sexualization, discrimination in the workplace, violence and harassment, and less pay for the same work. Women face these same issues online, sometimes at the hands of other users and other times at the hands of the platforms themselves.

Lets start with Gen Z's favorite pastime, Instagram. Aside from the harassment women might face from other users, Instagram itself discriminates based on gender. I'm talking about the "female" nipple and the fact that it is banned on Instagram in almost any form and it certainly isn't the first or last platform to do it.

(Photo: Tumblr)

If you aren't bothered by gender discrimination relating to the physical body, maybe job discrimination concerns you more. If it does, you can check out this 2016 article in the Seattle Times that outlines gender discrimination in LinkedIn's search engine. LinkedIn has since made moves to fix their engine's issues but what about other online recruitment platforms or sites? In this competitive digital age, it's unacceptable for companies and platforms to ignore potential online discrimination.

The media and different online platforms contribute to violence against women as well. In an age of sexting and hacking, technology can become a tool for abusers to leak nudes, stalk, slut shame, harass, and exploit women. Neither online platforms or legal systems do enough to discourage and punish this gendered violence or protect victims. If you are interested in reading more about one female journalist's experience with this on Twitter, you can read this article by Amanda Hess in the Pacific Standard.


 (Photo: Pacific Standard)