On Sept 1, 2008, I received my first of more than 10,000 direct messages on LinkedIn.
Over the years, more and more of them have seemed like lead gen.
Yesterday, I was discussing the research on the difficulties adults who are not students have in making friends.
And I thought back to the presumptively leadgen messages.
I have categorized any message from someone I didn’t know that didn’t contain something non-generic as leadgen and ignored it.
I wonder how many are misguided attempts to find customers and how many are just ineffective overtures toward friendship.
In judging pitch competitions, I often say:
It is impossible to tell the difference been a brilliant add presently badly and a stupid idea presented accurately.
I wonder whether it is as hard to find the actual overtures in my messages feed.
I wonder how many there are.
I wonder whether there are any at all.
My thought is to extend the benefit of the doubt, where I can find even a sliver of doubt and keep extending it to a correspondent for as long as any doubt remains.
What’s your prediction of how many legitimate overtures I will find in 100 trials?Please add your prediction to the comments.
And if you have tried such an experiment, let me know what your results have been.
Regardless, wish me luck!
