Bryan Shankman wrote a LinkedIn post earlier this year that started like this:
“I proposed to my girlfriend this weekend.”
“Here’s what it taught me about B2B sales:”
The 31-year-old from Los Angeles then detailed his learnings on prospecting and pricing, and ended the post with a photo of him at a beach on bended knee before his now fiancée.
Over 4,000 comments poured in, among them “cringiest LinkedIn post I’ve ever seen” and “if I did something like this, my wife would divorce me instantly”. The post also landed on LinkedIn Lunatics, a 670,000-member Reddit community devoted to “insufferable LinkedIn content”.
It was all a parody – part commentary on LinkedIn, part marketing stunt by Shankman, who runs two B2B startups. And it proved to be a savvy move, with all the mocking on Reddit catapulting his post across the web to UK meme pages and a news site in India.
That so many believed he was serious points to just how far the platform has departed from its founding two decades ago as a buttoned-up site for networking and job listings.
Acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for US$26bil (RM111.90bil), LinkedIn has pushed for more engaging content for years, luring influencer-types while encouraging people to post more often.
During the loneliness of the pandemic, the strategy ignited updates of personal triumphs and setbacks, prompting complaints that LinkedIn had become the next Facebook, with content veering into vacations, divorce and politics.
This is also when more GenZers – and their ease with sharing personal details online – arrived on the site.
With these initiatives, a shift into awkward posts was unsurprising, said Kevin Turner, who advises clients on their LinkedIn strategy as a managing partner at TNT Brand Strategist.
“It is ultimately a business networking platform,” Turner said. “If you’re pushed to share personally, people are always trying to tie that back to business.”
LinkedIn Lunatics, created in 2019, has seen its membership almost quadruple over the past two years as a growing part of the internet that calls out behavior seen as outside the norm or worse, joining like-minded subreddits such as TikTok Cringe (4.4 million members), Recruiting Hell (741,000 members) and Boomers Being Fools (725,000 members).
On LinkedIn Lunatics, cringe takes many forms. There’s the CEO who flexed about starting his day at 2.30am and the corporate team player who tried to “save the company some money” on a retreat by serving uncooked pizza. Then there’s also the poster who casually slips a divorce announcement into a list of career gleanings.
So far, the rise of LinkedIn Lunatics and other criticism doesn’t appear to have impacted the platform’s growth. The site surpassed 1 billion users in 2023, and annual sales have doubled since 2020 to more than US$16bil (RM68.86bil) in the fiscal year through June.
The social network has acknowledged complaints that the platform skewed too far into the personal and last year said it made changes to its feed to serve less celebratory content and more posts offering advice or insights based on a user’s interests.
“LinkedIn should feel human,” Dan Shapero, the social network’s chief operating officer, said in an interview. “There are times that some people sort of stretch beyond” what might be appropriate for a workplace, but “the trend of people bringing their whole selves to work is a positive one.”
After seeing his own LinkedIn feed inundated with content that clumsily mixed the personal and professional, Shankman concocted his parody, with his fiancée’s approval. It took off because it rings true, he said. The post reached meme status with riffs such as: “My wife left me today and took the kids with her. Here’s 10 things it taught me about B2B customer churn.”
For Ken Cheng, a London-based comedian, the behaviour on LinkedIn gave him the idea to post from the perspective of a draconian, out-of-touch executive. The 35-year-old has routinely showed up on LinkedIn Lunatics, including after posting about only hiring a candidate with a bad resume because the person is related to a pop star who gives him VIP tickets.
Cheng, who also riffs about LinkedIn in his stand-up act, said his material lands because LinkedIn is a “façade,” and the “total opposite” of the connection people are seeking.
‘Humbled to share’
While a lot of the banter on LinkedIn Lunatics is light and fun, its existence can be a lesson for corporate strivers. Lorraine Lee, a former LinkedIn editor who now does corporate training, said she recommends users ditch phrases like “I’m excited to announce” or “humbled to share”. Posts are better received when they’re a little more vulnerable and share mistakes and lessons learned, she said.
“Our professional personal lives are just more merged,” Lee said. “There’s a balance.”But not everyone succeeds at striking it.
On LinkedIn Lunatics, members have recently lamented posts that show too much skin and skewered a former FTX exec who shared his new position as inmate as he entered prison. A recent popular entry titled “Every single post on LinkedIn is a lunatic post now” may have summed up how a growing number of people are feeling about the site.
“LinkedIn has become so performative,” said a comment on that post. “It’s taken all the toxic positivity of Facebook and Instagram and somehow made it more insufferable. How did we get here?” – Bloomberg
