In Today’s Issue:

📝 LinkedIn enhances Collaborative Articles and authority badges

🔒 LinkedIn broadens profile verification — if you can find it!

🎥 Google Ads mandates video recording during certification exams.

📋 Advertisers find Google Ads verification form lengthy and cumbersome.

 📊 Instagram tests polls in comment streams; will release soon

🔗 Threads posts might appear to Facebook and Instagram connections.

🚫 Slack discontinues its SlackStatus account on X, citing crickets on the site

🤖 LinkedIn faces trolls, oversharing, and a shift in user behavior

Are LinkedIn’s “Collaborative Articles” Your Ticket to Increased Reach?

LinkedIn this week announced updates to its Collaborative Articles tool — this lets users start a post with an AI-generated prompt then ask other users to weigh in with their comments on the post topic.

I’ve seen these — they feel a little artificial and generic… a little gimmicky, but I’m sure they’re technically increasing engagement, so those KPIs are probably being hit.

LinkedIn launched this in March, and says it’s had more than a million expert contributions using it.

If you reply to enough of these posts, by the way, you’ll get a special little badge, like “Top Brand Management Voice,” if that’s important to you. And, to be fair, it might be, given that it might help your profile stand out a little among the urinary updates populating the platform — more on that later.

Specifically, they’re changing the layout to better showcase contributors. They’re reducing the emphasis on the AI prompt. And they’ve turned emoji reactions on for other people to click on their way by.

LinkedIn Verification: In More Countries, If You Can Find It

LinkedIn will let people in more countries get their accounts verified.

“Verified” to LinkedIn means that someone has uploaded their government ID to the platform and LinkedIn’s identity partner Clear confirms whether you are that person or not.

It doesn’t cost any money, but does add a verification badge to your profile.

LinkedIn says verified profiles get 60% more profile views, 50% more comments and reactions on their posts, and 30% more messages.

I did try to find this in their app and on their site. All I could find was a screen saying my account didn’t have any verifications, which is true, then it linked to a very long help page about verification which contained everything you could ever want to know about the process — except how to actually get verified. So maybe it’s just not rolled out to me yet.

There’s another form of verification as well, and that’s proving you work for the company you say you do. They do that through an email confirmation, though only some companies are supported right now.

Google Ads Testing is Getting Weird

To Google now, and a change to how their Google Ads certification testing works.

From now on, anyone who takes the test will need to first send Google a photo of your government ID, then take a photo of your face, then record a video of you taking the test.

This is how many proctored exams work, of course. Google is outsourcing this to a firm called Honorlock. They use software that disables copy and paste, and AI that tries to detect if you pick up a cell phone while taking the exam, which will flag your session for a human moderator to check.

But it’s even more restrictive than that. Google’s new rules also say:

You are Not Allowed to have notes

You are Not Allowed to use scratch paper

You are Not Allowed to take restroom breaks

You are Not Allowed to use headphones

You are Not Allowed to wear hats

Yes, those bluetooth answer-giving beanies finally get their due.

Google’s Business Verification Becomes Longer

Also, some discussion on social about Google Ads’ new advertiser verification form. This is supposed to prove that you’re a legitimate business.

But rather than what most platforms do — ask for business documents or mail you a postcard to confirm your address — Google’s new verification form appears to have gotten completely out of hand.

It’s 28 questions long, and a lot of them are like what you’d write for a business plan:

Describe your business model

Describe your target customers

Describe how your company interacts with its target audience

Who will be responsible for writing your ad copy?

Do you run your web site, or does another company?

has lost their ad verification minds if they think anyone is going to fill out this 28-question form.  #ppcchat

— Nate Louis (@N8Louis)
Oct 16, 2023

And worst of all, people are reporting that this email comes without any indication of which business Google is asking about. So agencies are getting emails saying “Hey, verify your business or you won’t be able to run ads,” but that email doesn’t say which client Google is talking about.

I wish I knew which account this was for. #PPCChat

— Menachem Ani (@MenachemAni)
Oct 17, 2023

So, might be worth double-checking your email to see if you’ve got one of these waiting for you or a company you work for.

Instagram’s Forthcoming “Polls in Comments”

Instagram is testing a new way to drive engagement — polls. But these polls appear in the comment section of a post.

It looks like only the account holder can create these in the comments of either feed posts or Reels. This brings those formats up to speed with Stories and DMs, both of which have had polls for some time.

The company says this is in the final stages of testing and should roll out to everyone soon.

It’s doubtful this will be in the API — at least right away — so if you plan to use this for your brand account, you’ll need to do it via the Instagram mobile app.

Threads Posts Showing Up in Instagram

And you may have spotted a pretty big change in the Instagram feed in the last day or two — the app is now showing a selection of posts on Threads, Meta’s new version of Twitter.

It appears to surface posts from people you follow on Instagram who are also posting text updates over on Threads. So if your brand is posting there, this might be a nice little free reach.

It’s also pushing Threads content into Facebook — so fair warning if your edgelord posts on Threads make it to your crazy uncle in Alberta.

Slack Bails Out on X Because Nobody’s There Anymore

Slack has announced it is shutting down its status updates account on the former Twitter site. So if you relied on that to check outages, the company says you should visit its status web site at https://status.slack.com

In the announcement, they basically said ‘Nobody’s here any more, so we’re leaving.’ The actual quote was:

Slack joins other brands quitting X — American Express and Air France both shut down their customer service accounts there, pointing people to their web sites instead.

What Happened with LinkedIn’s Vibe?

An interesting piece today at Fortune.com talks about how the vibe over at LinkedIn has changed.

The LinkedIn feed has for the longest time been — well, let’s just say it — boring. People talking about their promotion. Or ads for white papers.

But now:

What’s behind the vibe shift? According to Fortune? The collapse of Twitter. People are jumping off, and some are landing on LinkedIn — bringing with them their content and sharing preferences.

There’s an Instagram account that tracks some of this — @bestoflinkedin more than 40,000 followers and curates the more bizarre of these.

Its most recent post:

Instagram post by @bestoflinkedin

I’m not mocking this gentleman’s urinary issues — hell, I’m past 50 now, trust me. I get it.

But… as a LinkedIn post?

Other examples: the lessons a Trader Joe’s grocery run taught their child, and some techbro bragging about how great an employee they are by sleeping in a car instead of a hotel room.

But there’s a darker side too.

A piece earlier this summer by Fortune revealed a growing number of incidents of sexual harassment on the platform. A survey of 1,000 women in July said nine in 10 women say they’ve received a romantic advance or inappropriate message on LinkedIn at least once.

And then there are the trolls — new accounts by the thousands without profile pictures, jumping into the comments to call people things like “a white privileged bougie piece of crap.”

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