4 ms·

> You don't care about Mark Cuban or whatever, because it's a whole lot more interesting to hear your real target audience talk about their pain points. They d

> You don't care about Mark Cuban or whatever, because it's a whole lot more interesting to hear your real target audience talk about their pain points. They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s) mostly shared corporate content, reshared allies' content or posted memes about work ethic. Knowing what your client's PR line is can be useful, but there's a world of difference between that and them publicly admitting weakness by sharing actual pain points. Also, whilst I agree that it is important and useful this variant of social network exists, I could hardly imagine a more user hostile implementation: dark patterns everywhere, a model which encourages invitation spam yet sometimes makes it unreasonably difficult to connect to someone you actually met, forums which seem designed to not result in interesting conversation.

he11ow 6y ago
> They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s) mostly shared corporate content. They really do. Mind, not ALL of them. If you think about it, writing on LinkedIn is hard, exactly because of the "professional performance" thing. Most people are afraid to get caught out as clueless (not saying they are, just imposter syndrome). BTW, that's why they share corporate guff: it's associating yourself with a brand you perceive as "strong". The majority of any segment is going to be like that. But the minority of any segment is actually there talking. And that's all you need, because once you hit on the pain points, you get talking about it as well, and the silent majority, who you don't see LISTENS. I'll share my own data: Professionally, I live at the intersection between NLP and financial marketing (pretty small niche!). Marketers don't care about NLP, and NLP practitioners usually don't care about marketing. But marketers have problems that NLP can be used to solve. So the question was how to even have that conversation, and around which pain points. I did an experiment that ran over a year, and I tracked the data, to see how it builds. A year on, I'm amazed at the results. https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-on-linkedin-382a029e6e04 https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-on-... > dark patterns everywhere. Not disputing that, unfortunately.
- notahacker 6y ago
  Your example seems to be more about you talking about potential client pain points and relating it to your solution. I don't dispute that LinkedIn is excellent for that (including some of the content put out by companies I've worked for) and I'm sure that nailing it generated leads for you. That falls under corporate PR, and some corporate PR is actually interesting. But all the times clients have told me about pain points have involved phones or meeting rooms and the assumption I'm enough of a pro not to discuss that with their clients or competitors!
  - he11ow 6y ago
    > That falls under corporate PR, and some corporate PR is actually interesting. I am going to put a question mark next to this dichotomy, and here's why. This idea that you have "authenticity" vs. "corporate PR" is no longer true. For sure, there's still what we think of as "corporate PR" (Look at our employees volunteering! Look at the award we won!). But fundamentally, this idea that there are "corporates" and there are "workers" is fast becoming dated. You don't have to be a freelancer or an indie hacker with a SaaS side project to be a company of 1. You, and everyone else in the knowledge-work economy is a company of 1. The lines between who's "in" (an employee) and who's "out" (unemployed) are really blurred - and will only become more so. Contractors; freelancers; side-projects; these are all manifestations of the same thing. So when I say "my content" and you say "it's your corporate PR" I think is the wrong way to look at it: Trust IS personal. Views ARE personal. Heck, employment IS personal. > Your example seems to be more about you talking about potential client pain points. No, it really isn't. Anyone who builds stuff, side-projects or otherwise, knows you CAN build all sorts of stuff, but the question is whether you SHOULD. To understand what's worth building, I was - and still am - having a lot of conversations with clients. LinkedIn made it a whole lot easier, of course. the pain points are not "potential", they're real. And because the building is done is tandem with the market, it's hardly a wonder I position the services as a solution to those pain points. Maybe I got it all wrong but it seems to me this is what Steve Blank was talking about in the "The 4 steps to the epiphany."
    - DC1350 6y ago

he11ow 6y ago

> They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s) mostly shared corporate content. They really do. Mind, not ALL of them. If you think about it, writing on LinkedIn is hard, exactly because of the "professional performance" thing. Most people are afraid to get caught out as clueless (not saying they are, just imposter syndrome). BTW, that's why they share corporate guff: it's associating yourself with a brand you perceive as "strong". The majority of any segment is going to be like that. But the minority of any segment is actually there talking. And that's all you need, because once you hit on the pain points, you get talking about it as well, and the silent majority, who you don't see LISTENS. I'll share my own data: Professionally, I live at the intersection between NLP and financial marketing (pretty small niche!). Marketers don't care about NLP, and NLP practitioners usually don't care about marketing. But marketers have problems that NLP can be used to solve. So the question was how to even have that conversation, and around which pain points. I did an experiment that ran over a year, and I tracked the data, to see how it builds. A year on, I'm amazed at the results. https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-on-linkedin-382a029e6e04 https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-on-... > dark patterns everywhere. Not disputing that, unfortunately.

notahacker 6y ago
Your example seems to be more about you talking about potential client pain points and relating it to your solution. I don't dispute that LinkedIn is excellent for that (including some of the content put out by companies I've worked for) and I'm sure that nailing it generated leads for you. That falls under corporate PR, and some corporate PR is actually interesting. But all the times clients have told me about pain points have involved phones or meeting rooms and the assumption I'm enough of a pro not to discuss that with their clients or competitors!
- he11ow 6y ago
  > That falls under corporate PR, and some corporate PR is actually interesting. I am going to put a question mark next to this dichotomy, and here's why. This idea that you have "authenticity" vs. "corporate PR" is no longer true. For sure, there's still what we think of as "corporate PR" (Look at our employees volunteering! Look at the award we won!). But fundamentally, this idea that there are "corporates" and there are "workers" is fast becoming dated. You don't have to be a freelancer or an indie hacker with a SaaS side project to be a company of 1. You, and everyone else in the knowledge-work economy is a company of 1. The lines between who's "in" (an employee) and who's "out" (unemployed) are really blurred - and will only become more so. Contractors; freelancers; side-projects; these are all manifestations of the same thing. So when I say "my content" and you say "it's your corporate PR" I think is the wrong way to look at it: Trust IS personal. Views ARE personal. Heck, employment IS personal. > Your example seems to be more about you talking about potential client pain points. No, it really isn't. Anyone who builds stuff, side-projects or otherwise, knows you CAN build all sorts of stuff, but the question is whether you SHOULD. To understand what's worth building, I was - and still am - having a lot of conversations with clients. LinkedIn made it a whole lot easier, of course. the pain points are not "potential", they're real. And because the building is done is tandem with the market, it's hardly a wonder I position the services as a solution to those pain points. Maybe I got it all wrong but it seems to me this is what Steve Blank was talking about in the "The 4 steps to the epiphany."
  - DC1350 6y ago