Last week,
scrolling LinkedIn before my first coffee, I was confronted with very drastic imagery from #OrangeDay.
A woman sharing her own story – humanly important, undoubtedly valid, per se.
But 8am on a business platform?
No, this is not what I bought into when I log in here.
On the day after that, I stumbled over
a guy’s post about defending a migrant on a train.
He’d shown quiet courage in an uncomfortable moment
and wanted to share the experience.
His DMs filled with threats.
Aggressive. Personal. Relentless.
From real people. Real names.
Companies present here on LinkedIn.
On the platform we chose to be on, engage with
BECAUSE it was “the professional one”.
Let me remind us that:
Brand risk isn’t just about your messaging. It’s about WHERE your messaging lives.
The medium is the message – McLuhan
told us decades ago.
And I will add:
The party you attend tells people who you are.
Two years ago, some this year – after it was hitting the eyes – smart brands quietly withdrew from Twitter when their carefully crafted campaigns started appearing adjacent to swastikas.
That wasn’t a reach problem.
That was brand risk by proximity.
The (justified) fear is that this stuff will SPILL OVER on their brand.
(and also… why finance this environment, but let’s not go there, shall we?)
LinkedIn for a long time felt like “the grown-up room”.
Yeah, maybe slightly dull, perhaps.
A bit too corporate (but hey: in a way real – that IS how real life corporate often feels).
But reliably about business mostly – and overall psychologically safe.
Now I watch that room change.
It had started with stuff I thought was ‘only me’ – nasty comments, the hitting on you DMs, yeah. It was not really inspiring, let’s say.
But now we look at:
Trauma as clickbait.
Threats as “engagement” (or at least not counter-moderated at all).
The algorithm rewarding whatever makes pulses race –
regardless of whether it’s professional
or simply profitable.
Setting the culture in a positive way… ?
Non-existing.
🤔 If this is 2025, what does 2027 look like?
Brands with genuine quality standards – brands that understand they’re associated at first, judged later not just by what they say but where they say it and what they play along with – will leave as soon as they have somewhere better to go.
Which is partly why I built Ägile Ässets. Not to abandon platforms. They remain useful for distribution.
But to ensure that the substance – the thinking, the expertise, the actual value, your assets 💎 – lives somewhere we, you and I, can control entirely.
Owned content at the core in your storage.
Platforms as temporary loudspeakers ,yes.
Ready to shift the moment the neighbourhood turns.
Because a brand built on quality can’t afford to be caught at the wrong party.
Where do you see LinkedIn heading?
#BrandRisk #ContentStrategy #PersonalBranding #LinkedIn