I find articles and discussions I read on LinkedIn usually provide me with fodder for blogging on my site. This week I noticed a lot of articles that are reduced in quality, which makes me think LinkedIn has opened the floodgates on who is allowed to post on the site. But my real gripe are the growing amount of what I call LinkedIn Floaters. These are people who are aimlessly going around and posting comments on articles just for the sake of posting comments. These comments have no direction, some are just there to be put there.

Others totally miss the content of the article and may have really only slight relevance to what the author is trying to convey. It tells me that they really only read the title, and maybe the first paragraph and decided to comment on it.

Why are they posting pointless comments? My only guess would be to increase their LinkedIn profile views. LinkedIn has now provided a bit of a popularity contest as one of their features. For example, I can go to my profile now and see how my rank is compared to my connections, and also my company. The more views I have the higher up my ranking goes. You can see how this might interest folks, for example, a company may have many employees that are participating on the network. Maybe your profile is at the top of the list for hundreds of fellow employees. This might be appealing as the higher ups may find your effective at managing a personal brand on LinkedIn, or really just getting to know and recognize you from LinkedIn. I have worked in the entertainment industry, and as they say, any publicity is good publicity.

So people are participating as much as possible in order to increase their ranking and visibility in the network. What I have seen as a result is there really isn't any strategy to that participation. First of all, if you're going to establish a personal brand you should focus on a particular niche. What is it you know, that you want to find others that may know about it and establish relationships. Remember, it is called social NETWORKING, meaning finding people and establishing connections, people who are liked minded and interacting with them. Provide relevant comments that can let others know you have some idea of what you're talking about, but also that interaction can increase your knowledge of the topic as well. Shared experiences will grow all the interacting parties and increase your profile views as a result.

Most people are not going to click on someone's profile link to learn about someone who leaves pointless comments, THEY ARE going to want to find out more about someone who seems to be knowledgable and helpful on a topic. Be interactive, remember participation isn't only about you, it's about the network.

Oh yeah, while you're on LinkedIn, can you check out my profile? :-P