LinkedIn LARPing: The Neal Ungerleider Newsletter
+ Brain-computer interfaces! The pro sports cardboard cutout industry! + More!
Let’s just say it: LinkedIn is the weirdest social network.
And that takes a lot of doing. Especially for a social media service that largely lacks conventional memes, pictures of pets or children, conspiracy theory spreading, thirst traps, sports chat, political ranting, or any of the other topics that thrive on other services. (With that said, all of those are there on LinkedIn—just not so much).
LinkedIn is where you go to find a job, lay the groundwork for a promotion, boast about what your company is up to, get speaking engagements/podcast interviews/etc. or find new clients, vendors and sales leads. All of these, of course, make LinkedIn REALLY DAMN WEIRD.
And the bulk of LinkedIn’s weirdness comes from otherwise sane adults LARPing as Big Important Business People. Things like:
Job titles that sound like they’ve been ripped from the deepest pages of an absurdist play script. Chief Vice Senior Assistant President Officer, I’m looking at you.
Writing long and vaguely non-sensical status updates that, much as weirdly written web pages are designed to be read by Google’s computers for search result placements, are written solely to get the writer a promotion/noticed by the right people at their company.
The work anniversaries from people you know IRL who spend most of their time complaining about how much they hate their jobs.
Anyway, all of social media is performance. I highly recommend spending a few minutes on LinkedIn and seeing which examples of LinkedIn LARPing you can find. I think you’ll be surprised.
Give Money To:
A restaurateur fighting Stage 4 colon cancer. Brian Mita and his mother run Chicago’s Izakaya Mita restaurant, which has had a hard go of things during the pandemic. A few months after the shelter-in-place announcement, Mita found out his colon cancer metastasized into Stage 4. Donations to his Gofundme will be used for the restaurant’s rent, paying off Izakaya Mita’s debts, a stipend for Mita and his mother, and supplies for the restaurant.
The Big Picture
Bloomberg Businessweek’s Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style guide to potential complications and hiccups of the 2020 Presidential election.
“BuzzFeed News can reveal that in at least one instance during the summer of 2016, [Peter] Thiel hosted a dinner with one of the most influential and vocal white nationalists in modern-day America.”
Left-wing groups coordinating on “what the strategy is when armed right-wing militia dudes show up in polling places.”
Periscope by McKinsey’s new report on post-pandemic retail; TLDR is customers say they want more stores accepting mobile payment and contactless credit cards but are fairly unconcerned about frequent cleaning of aisles and dressing rooms.
Marketing/Advertising/PR
AT&T’s exploring the idea of low-cost wireless phone plans partially subsidized by ads. CEO John Stankey floated the idea of reducing phone bills by $5 or $10 a month in exchange for subscribers seeing ads on their phone. The backstory here? AT&T’s burdened by substantial debt and sees the subsidized subscriptions as a way to boost the value of their adtech assets.
A look back at the era when the CIA secretly ran & bankrolled book publishers in a quest to boost the influence of intellectuals judged useful for US interests. Some things never change!
Optics trouble AND public health nightmare: Healthcare provider Sanford Health sponsoring mask-optional indoor concert for 5000+ attendees for country singer Chris Young in South Dakota.
One post-COVID industry that’s booming: Printing cardboard cutouts of fans for pro sports teams.
Media
Natalie Burg at Contently/The Freelancer on the advantages and disadvantages of different newsletter platforms.
To absolutely noone’s surprise, Amazon Music is launching exclusive podcasts. First up: Originals hosted by DJ Khaled, Becky G, Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, and Dan Patrick.
NBCUniversal and Roku make a backroom deal and agree to bring Peacock to Roku. DO HBONOW NEXT, AT&T. DO HBONOW NEXT!
The TikTok-Oracle deal sets up a host of unintended consequences for both the tech industry and the federal government that set the stage for further intervention by both the US & Chinese governments in the workings of world’s biggest companies.
Microsoft is buying Bethesda for $7.5 billion. Lose a TikTok you never wanted, gain a huge strategic advantage for Xbox? Yuppers.
Tech
Bessemer Venture Partners just released a huge collection of investor memos that are totally worth checking out if you’re in the business of finding funding /investing in companies/promoting your business.
Product Hunt’s guide to Apple’s recent launch announcements.
Holy… this Amazon bribery story. “The six people charged—including two former Amazon workers—allegedly bribed Amazon employees to reinstate sales of products that were deemed substandard or dangerous, such as suspect dietary supplements and inflammable household electronics.“
Headline of the day: The brain-computer interface is coming and we are so not ready for it.
That’s it for this issue. I’d love to hear what you think and please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can be of assistance.
Love and coffee,
Neal
About This Newsletter: Neal Ungerleider is a strategic communications consultant who works with advertising/PR agencies and in-house clients. He worked as a journalist in a previous life. Neal’s newsletter focuses on marketing, media and communications news.
Follow Neal on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn and learn more about his services at nealungerleider.com. You can contact him at neal@nealungerleider.com.