Celebrating 20 years around the digital campfire

Last week I received an email from LinkedIn congratulating me on my twenty-year anniversary of being on the platform.

I like posting on LinkedIn. And when I’m advising clients with their stories, I always urge: test it on LinkedIn.

Whether crafting stories of the highs and lows of your career journeys or talking about what you’re building and why, LinkedIn is the ideal spot to test it out. Its character limit provides a good constraint; the opportunity to illustrate with a photo gives it a visual boost; the audience is near-immediately accessible and responsive. People are actively listening. They want to hear from you. Posting on the platform gives us a “Minimal Viable Story” opportunity: the most readily available and fit-for-purpose space to tell a story in a work setting.

And anyway, LinkedIn itself has the key ingredient of a good story: a transformation at its heart! In the early days, LinkedIn was a place to talk about jobs - to announce new ones, let people know you’d been promoted or had moved to a different company. Later came the ability to post status updates but it was very limited.

Now it’s developed into the number one place for telling stories about our work and business lives, for sharing expertise, asking questions, testing ideas and building relationships.

And it’s not just an external tool. Many of those leaders I work with find that around half of the people reading their posts work within the organisation. It shouldn’t be underestimated how valuable it is for letting your teams know more about you as a leader, what’s on your radar and the things that are important to you.

So today I’m raising my coffee cup to Reid Hoffman for having - and acting on - the idea back in 2003 and to current CEO Ryan Roslansky: thank you for providing a modern day, digital campfire we can all sit around - and share the stories that matter.