Sometimes LinkedIn posts are as valuable for what they don’t say as they are for what they do say.
Case in point: Jeffrey Strickland, Ph.D., CMSP (which stands for County Medical Services Program, California Motorcyclist Safety Program, Custom Medical Stock Photo, Children’s Medical Security Plan, Certified Modeling and Simulation Professional, Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning, or Center for Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics — it’s hard to tell) wrote a post called, “Dear LinkedIn, LinkUp Before We LinkOut!” And I have to tell you: I don’t know what the boy’s on about.
Since Jeff lists nine of his beefs with LinkedIn, it’s easy enough to tell what he doesn’t want. But the leading cryptologists from The Chautauqua Center for Idle Griping have studied the post exhaustively and can’t find a single denotation of anything having to do with what he does want.
Fear not. Since I happen to be singularly astute at reading between lines, I’ve been able to glean a few of Jeff’s desires:
- He wants LinkedIn to do what he wants LinkedIn to do.
- He wants LinkedIn to stop doing what he doesn’t want LinkedIn to do.
- He wants people who’ve published fewer books than he has to stop posting to LinkedIn.
- He wants an alternative to his delete button because he apparently can’t find his delete button.
However unintentionally or unwittingly, Jeff’s enumerated diatribe recalls Marketing Precepts 1 and 2, which have the additional advantage of being applicable to almost every single thing we might choose to undertake:
- Formulate your objective.
- State your objective.
Formulating our objectives gives us some indication of what we want before we go looking for it. Stating our objectives gives us a prayer in Hell of expressing them coherently enough that we might give others even the foggiest notion of what we want.
So, unless Jeff’s objective was simply to list nine beefs with LinkedIn, he’s given us the opportunity to learn one of two valuable lessons here: The first is that if we heed Marketing Precepts 1 and 2, we’ll improve our chances of actually getting something accomplished. The second is that CMSP, at least as it pertains to LinkedIn (or blogs on other platforms), might be an abbreviation for Crybabies Make Shitty Posters.
Either way, we’re in Jeff’s debt.
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Image by johnthan, courtesy of pixabay.com.