Linking Wonder, Part 4

LinkedIn is getting to be as easy a target to hit as the Military Channel as far as ridiculing public displays of illiterate self-promotion.

And I understand that when you deal with UGC (user-generated content—a phrase that could only be a product of an industry that has reduced professional communication to the very lowest common denominator; “common” being the operative term), particularly in an un-moderated global medium, you’re going to find bloopers.

But what I really love is people (or businesses fronting themselves as people) putting themselves forward as trustworthy dispensers of advice—in this case, career/job-hunt advice—when they’re obviously devoid of any quality of either subject matter expertise (SME—another great post-Internet term) or language.

And when you have two or more of these faux-humans spewing the same illiterate appearance-of-content in the same group, well, that’s just icing on the cake.

Examples from a recent posting—interestingly, in a group for jobs in Europe:

Am I the only person who finds it odd that someone thinks a forum for finding Euro jobs is an optimum place for posting how to find US jobs?

Leaving aside, of course, the issue that no one is likely to view an entity that concocts those sentences as a trustworthy source of information on any subject.

I especially like the fact that “James Miller” not only posted the “information”, but he “liked” it and “commented” on it.

That’s because on Planet LinkedIn you’re told that you appear as a thought-leader (again, infobahn keyword) if you post, comment, answer and otherwise put your name and face in multiple public places.

Okay, fine.

Only, just a few pixels away on this forum, here’s what I found:

Like “James Miller”, “Christine Stone” has also “liked” her own post, which has been varied marginally from his. Her “comment” appears to be some unrelated content—but in this universe what counts is that you post, not what you post.

Another very interesting coincidence, to me, is that both “James Miller” & “Christine Stone” are located in…Pakistan:

  

And both work in the “airline” industry.

He cites UTexas (1990 MBA in “business education”) and she SUNY (1997 BBA in travel and tourism management) as responsible for their education. I hope to God neither school would have actually graduated someone (even in business) who would scrape content from sources as ignorant and derivative as these two have done.

But I could be wrong.