Why Every LinkedIn Blogger Should Be A beBee Blogger.

I remember quite a while ago seeing a piece of art created by Yoko Ono who I have always considered to be pretty damn brilliant. It was a series of pictures of an apple that she had placed in a nondescript environment and periodically photographed it in its various stages of disintegration.

It was quite a beautiful photo essay on life and death.
As I have watched the brainiacs at LinkedIn tweak their Pulse Publisher post literally to death, it reminded me of this piece of Yoko’s art.
When Pulse was all shiny and new and LinkedIn was sending out invitations to every blogger who was posting links from their web site blogs, WordPress or any of half a dozen other blogging sites, a lot of people jumped at the chance to post directly on a site that advertised over 400 million live bodies out there waiting to read out their shit.
So away we went, both guns blazing.
And for the first year or so, it was OK. In retrospect the numbers were nothing to write home about but compared to what most of us were pulling on our own, we felt like we had died and gone to blogger heaven.
Then something changed.

The Lumpy Kingdom
Me

Maybe it was all of a sudden. Or maybe it was unnoticed in the exuberance of the new experience we were all having, but our numbers started shrinking.
Our writing hadn’t changed. We were all still doing what we did. But what was happening was that now that LI had established their platform, with the help of myself and thousands of other “Non-Influencer’ writers, we were quite simply being shunted to that back of the bus.
We were made to stand in line behind the so called INfluencers. Big corporate types. Big self help types. But guru types, the majority of whom were likely having their stuff ghosted by people like us.
These people would garner hundreds of thousands of page views and hundreds of comments, very few of which they would deign to respond to.
Around this time, I started referring to LinkedIn as something I called The Lumpy Kingdom Of The Mighty Hamsters, and this pretty much marked the beginning of the end for people like me.
Oh sure, we started a protest movement. AKA futile raging against the machine. But all that did was make me pissed off at myself.

Along Came beBee

It was around the time when a lot of us had burned ourselves out trying to get LinkedIn to understand how they were sabotaging our blogging with their apathy and decided preference for the vacuous over the substantive.
Personally, I was as close to depression as I have ever come in my adult life. But as that door was closing (to keep my sanity), Mr John White sent me a message to tell me he had just been made a brand ambassador for a new social site called beBee.com.
With it came an invitation to join and a promise that in a couple of months they would have a publisher up and running, and that I could blog their to my heart’s content, and reach out to a whole new and must more eager to engage audience.

Well, that’s called Kismet.
John also invited about 40 of the most active bloggers on Linkedin and literally three months later, we were all firmly established, up to speed on the new platform (producing honey, as it were), and very quickly starting to realize that we really did have a new home here.
One of the first things I noticed about beBee, was that the character of this site was very upbeat. A lot of the posts, in addition to being interesting, were also quite positive.
This struck me as an almost complete contrast to LinkedIn where all we had been doing for the last three months we were there was essentially lashing out at a system over which we had zero control.

Reverse Culture Shock

This all took me quite by surprise. And it took a bit of time for me to adjust to the fact that I no longer had to strap on my guns in the morning and head out to do battle with the mighty hamsters.
I also noticed that, with a simple mouse click I could send whatever I wrote on beBee over to my LinkedIn page where all my connections could see it.
Something LinkedIn promised to do with Pulse, but failed to deliver on.
I could also post to Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and even my email.
This was great. And after a bit of an adjustment to the culture shock of a social media site that ran the way most of us thought these things should, I started to get back into the kind of groove I was in years before when I was writing mainly for my friends and advertising associates.

So Much Pollinating, So Little Time

To me, LinkedIn is like the photos at the tail end of the Yoko apple concept.
It is shriveling. it has tweaked its Pulse publisher algorithm to the point where really smart people like Samantha Bailey are writing comments like this:
"Publishing/Pulse? Analysis - Only available on a post-by post basis...no one place to see views and engagement On the new view of post analytics, nothing is clickable. I cannot see here WHO liked it...WHO commented...WHO shared...I cannot interact with all of these folks from right here without logging into each post individually. And, I miss shares of the content. If I do not look through the entire list of notifications, I miss shares. How can I fully engage with my network if I cannot see all of the activity on my posts in a single place? "

Is This Deliberate Suicide?

Some people think that LinkedIn has the ultimate goal of turning its Publisher into a dump for online article from sites like Inc and Huffington Post and the major newspapers. It certainly smells that way.
But one thing is, in my opinion, absolutely certain: Any non-influencer blogger who is continuing to post on Pulse is essentially participating in the whipping of a dead horse.
Publishing on Pulse is like sending your post to solitary confinement. Nobody will see it. And this is really strange when you consider that posting on beBee and linking it to your LinkedIn page will actually get you page views on LinkedIn that you just can't get from Pulse anymore.
The world is a crazy place. But some of us bloggers…actually a lot of us and the numbers are growing every day…have figured out how to make things a little less crazy. And make our blogging that much more worth doing again.
If you have read this far and are still thinking that LinkedIn is the place for your blogging to be…you have my sympathy. Because, honestly, for all but a few, this is delusional thinking.
But then again, there’s a hell of a lot of that going around.

If you liked this post, let me know. If you liked it enough to share it, please feel free.

If your business has reached the point where talking to an experienced  communication professional would be the preferred option to banging your head against the wall or whatever, lets talk.
Download my free ebook Small Business Communication For The Real Worlhere:
 https://onwordsandupwords.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/small-business-communications-for-the-real-world/
All my profile and contact information can be accessed here:

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/this-post-is-my-about-page



All content Copyright 2017 Onwords & Upwords Inc.

"""""