Many European towns and regions have been getting hot under the collar about the over-abundance of tourists.
While they may rely on tourists for their ongoing economic survival, too many over-taxes infrastructure and pushes up house prices, forcing locals out.
Too much of a good thing is … a bad thing.
It’s the same on LinkedIn™.
We all want strong organic reach. Most of us don’t get it much anymore – although the new video feed seems to be the current exception for some.
But when people break the rules – like tourists do with their appalling holiday behaviour – and game the system, it is detrimental to the entire platform.
I’m talking about AI-fed, industrial-sized pods. This is where people gain thousands of followers, reactions and comments by allowing companies like Lempod to take over their LinkedIn™ accounts and generate comments that appear on their posts. These are LinkedIn™ scammers.
If you see a post with many more comments than you believe possible, it’s because it’s not possible without artificial assistance. These people are gaming the system and often these comments are from fake accounts.
The problem is that we all like big numbers. We’re impressed by them. If you’re a European tourist trap you want more visitors than the next town. It’s what brings in more tourists.
But it’s a con and can backfire on you.
For instance, if your town promises a medieval cathedral, family-run cafes, and idyllic beaches but visitors find a rundown church, a McDonalds and an overcrowded, stony seashore they will not be best pleased. They’ll review you badly on Trip Advisor and your seasonal source of income will dry up quick smart.
On LinkedIn™, if you don’t provide what you promise, if you turn out not to be the person you claim, and if your content turns out to be artificially enhanced via a pod you will be similarly outed. Your reputation will be shredded, people will block you and all the genuine good you might have done will be lost in a cloud of bad feeling.
But here’s something worse to consider: these pods can subvert your content by dumping a huge pile of comments onto it that aren’t genuine either. And you have no comeback except to delete them one by one. All the power is in their hands.
Terrifying, isn’t it?
The problem is the same as for those European tourist hot-spots: how to deal with it without your reputation being shredded.
After all, we are judged on the quality of our network. If we have these scammers in our networks, it’s likely that others will see them. And once they realise their perfidy, they’ll wonder what it says about you. None of us wants to be tarred with the same brush.
LinkedIn™ supports these pods. It allows these companies to have pages advertising their bogus wares. It claims pod behaviour doesn’t flout their community standards. Why? Because it makes money off this.
By allowing it, LinkedIn™ can claim many more hours of time spent on the platform when touting its services to customers. And that’s what every advertiser wants to hear. They’re not interested in real ROI, only perceived ROI and for that they measure impressions and other vanity metrics.
As LinkedIn™ members we can only be vigilant about this behaviour and whenever we see it, block the person responsible.