Recently, the founder-CEO of a startup was ‘canceled’ on social media after a man, via a LinkedIn post, advised 20-somethings to work 18 hours a day and stop crying. The post was rejected by so many that the founder had to announce a sabbatical from the platform. Even as the incident garnered international media attention, another founder put out a LinkedIn post about scheduling recruiter interviews at odd hours to test applicants’ determination to get the job. It was widely criticized for various reasons, including its extroverted nature towards working women with family responsibilities.
A fortnight later, you would think people would have forgotten all this. far from it. Last week, a unicorn founder put out a Twitter post about a tractor being empty as several parts of Bengaluru were inundated by incessant rains in the country’s startup capital. In response, some users commented on how ambassadors for the 18-hour workday would have swum to work even in this scenario, while others would have kept the interview for that particular day “to test their hustle.”
Online outrage has a maximum shelf life of a day or two, we often hear. This is partly true, but it is also a myth. The Internet moves toward the next target of outrage at warp speed. However, it never forgets. The trolling isn’t that intense – it calms down over time, but doesn’t go away. The ghosts of trolls can haunt you, until you are reduced to a meme format. It seems to have happened to these two founders, whose warmth gave netizens a free pass to judge them and their workplace culture negatively. For many, they have become case studies on what not to do.
Meanwhile, the CEO of 18 Hour Workday fame took a sabbatical from LinkedIn to tell followers that, despite the trolling, the episode had earned the company a few crores in free publicity. That’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it?
Once upon a time in digital times, social media was used to build or rebuild connections. Today, it is used to build your own brand. From Twitter’s threadboys to LinkedIn’s thought leaders, everyone harps on hot tech or rambling on packed as wisdom to ‘watch’.
It’s embarrassingly easy to ‘like’ and ‘follow’ on platforms like LinkedIn, now to the extent that “this would have died on LinkedIn” or “this is killing on LinkedIn” tech is an ongoing joke format on Twitter. No joke that last month an Israel-based marketer, Tom Orbach, launched a website called LinkedIn Viral Post Generator, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze hundreds of thousands of viral posts on the professional networking platform to create a template for more users. Uses intelligence. Prepare such ‘cringe posts’ in a big way. The tool was even acquired by US-based LinkedIn-focused startup, Taplio, for an undisclosed amount in a short span of time.
Regardless of the means, these ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ give people some degree of internet clout. Instead of cold-emailing hot startups and tech companies asking for jobs, it empowers them to send online messages directly to their founders/CEOs with the confidence, “I want to work with you.” Often, the founder-CEOs they approach have fewer followers than they do.
It makes you wonder whether the hotness of many startup founders over the past few weeks is due to the increasing pressure among this cadre to convert from leaders to thought leaders. Because if it’s so easy to gain traction online, you can be blamed for not using a system that’s designed to help you grow your internet currency. Word is that adding hashtags like #LinkedInformers or #LinkedInNews increases your post’s chances of getting picked up and promoted by the platform’s editorial teams.
The benefits of becoming a popular founder-CEO online are obvious: it can help you attract talent and investors faster, especially in an environment where both are hard to come by. In addition, it allows you to be your own distribution machine, which means you can diss the media on the off chance that they are critical of your business, because you no longer need them to do your public relations. Will be
However, the way these hot techs are being largely banned also shows that desperate attempts to build social media credit (FAST) could boomerang anyway and not only toward them, but those companies. may also draw negative attention to the people they lead. ‘Any publicity is good publicity’ doesn’t always apply to internet fame.
While it’s reasonable for anyone to build an internet personality and profit from it, perhaps those with high-stakes jobs need to be more savvy about the discourse as we’re well behind in year three. There is a pandemic and everything from great resignations to a wave of ‘quiet quits’ has affected our professional lives. If everyone starts using growth hacks and viral post generators to build a personal brand, one wonders if our online brand would have any value in the real world.
To borrow from Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow and to make it relevant: When enough leaders post hot, the words cease to mean anything. Then there are no more thought leaders, only better and better trash talkers.
Shefali Bhatt covers internet culture and maker economy for Minto
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