All noise and no signal
On publicists, invasive species, and the clutter now junking up LinkedIn in the name of "thought leadership"
Large companies have had PR departments for a long time, whether they’ve gone by simple titles like “publicist” or more complex ones like “brand ambassador” or “community engagement facilitator”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a little bit of self-promotion, especially when justified by the sincere belief that a good or service really does bring lots of value to the customer.
■ But at least since Lee Iacocca became Chrysler’s own starring pitchman, an entire cottage industry has sprung up around trying to turn executives into celebrities. When those efforts had to sway either Madison Avenue or a hard-nosed press corps, there was at least some gatekeeping to offer relief to a weary public. But so much of that has eroded in the social-media age that we are now awash in people styling themselves as “thought leaders”.
■ Like an invasive species choking out native plants, “thought leadership” has reached what deserves to be a terminal stage: Clout-seeking executives are now hiring English-speaking remote assistants from the Philippines to churn out AI-assisted content packages that are cluttering LinkedIn. Worse, they are hiring other assistants to provide totally artificial “engagement” because it juices the algorithms that make the content look popular.
■ For most people, writing is hard. Hiring ghostwriters and ghost-in-the-machine writers to pad the numbers and churn out more is a fairly predictable choice for some to make. But Say’s Law (”Supply creates its own demand”) misleads us here: Nobody really demands low-quality, mass-produced “thoughts” that don’t even belong to the author, or else they wouldn’t be paying for the synthetic engagement.
■ Ironically, in purporting to discourage “low-quality content”, LinkedIn itself has featured predictably low-quality content right near the top of the page (just beneath a low-quality AI-generated summary of that content). It’s as though nobody wants to learn the real bottom line: There’s a giant gap between the amount of worthwhile writing that can ultimately be produced and the quantity of “engagement” that social media services are bound to demand.
■ Thus, there is no real “suppression” of low-quality content, just an industry of “strategists” offering suggestions on the next technique to win more publicity through the same old channels. It’s probably less damaging than William Randolph Hearst’s (perhaps apocryphal) approach (”You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war!”), but it’s hardly more enlightened.