As part of my experiments on how adults make friends, I’ve reviewed the most recent direct messages I received from strangers on linkedin that I presumed were lead gen but wasn’t entirely sure. For this first batch, I sent replies that were about things I was doing & thinking where I would value feedback, but without any particular reference to anything about them.
In reviewing these twenty messages, some of them had a tagline / personal subtitle / whatever you call the accented line of blue text. Most of these were links. Taglines is probably the wrong term.
The most common were
- visit my website
- request services
- book an appointment
In each and every case where I had been unsure of the intent of the writer, the tagline moved me further toward the “ignore it, it’s just lead gen” point of view.
The taglines always made me view the author less favorably
We will see whether it has any predictive value on whether the message was worthy of a response.
And so, our friendship experiment now has its first unanswered question.
