Brenda Meller voice note about the new "Seems like AI slop" feature

Is Social Selling Index (SSI) going away for free users?

My first collaborative post, with Lynnaire Johnston

Come to UpLift Live Nano Bristol! It's on Thursday 17 September at The Watershed.

Tickets: https://jesp.me/nanobristol

New book: Mic Drop: The Human Side of LinkedIn, by Mic Adam

"Eyes hurt" is trending on Google …

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Is LinkedIn's Social Selling Index score finally going away for free users? We're going to take a Look. It's episode 499 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the show. This is the Informed podcast and I am John Espirian, your host. I'm an independent LinkedIn consultant, and I'm bringing you free LinkedIn advice every week, or almost every week. At the moment, over the summer period, it has been a little bit slow in terms of LinkedIn changes, and so I've taken a couple of weeks off here and there, and we've got a short episode this week, but next week's episode will be episode 500 of the show. And I've got plenty of contributions from the audience already. I love receiving voice notes from listeners.

So, if you've got anything like that, if you've got any questions or contributions that you'd like to make to the show, please drop them to me on LinkedIn.

OK, we always start the show with the Postbag section, which is listener questions and feedback, and we've got one item this week from LinkedIn trainer Brenda Meller.

Hey, John. Brenda Meller from the States. Just listening to your latest podcast about the new LinkedIn feature: this looks like AI slop.

And I got to say, I'm very underwhelmed by the feature, and I'm really apprehensive that it's going to help us at all. I saw one of the LinkedIn employees commenting about it, saying it's not going to penalise users, so we can't do like a commenting pod thing. And I don't know, I'm just really nervous. But one thing, I don't use AI. I think you know that to write my posts, I use me and my knowledge.

But one thing that you said is LinkedIn will retire features if they're not used. And I think that's what's going to happen with this one. I don't think it's going to work.

So, those are my thoughts, and thanks so much for doing a great podcast. Take care.

Thank you for that contribution, Brenda, while you're out on your walk. I hope that audio came across OK for listeners. Yeah, I agree with you.

And to be honest, I haven't seen many cases where I've actually wanted to use the "seems like AI slop" feature myself. I haven't been massively active on LinkedIn for the past couple of weeks, but when I've looked, my feed has looked pretty normal.

I haven't seen anything that I'd want to report and therefore I can't see myself using this feature very often. And as I said last time, if it doesn't get used then LinkedIn will just pull it from service.

So, I don't know whether any of you listeners are actually actively using this feature if you're seeing loads of AI slop and reporting it to LinkedIn, but if you're not, then the feature will at some point go away.

A few days ago I was checking up on my LinkedIn Social Selling Index score and I noticed that the feature will soon be discontinued for free and Premium users of LinkedIn.

Now, you might not have heard of Social Selling Index or SSI before, but it's LinkedIn's way of trying to put a marker down, a marker score for the strength of your LinkedIn profile and your LinkedIn presence overall. So, it's a good way for people who are brand new to the platform to look up this score and quickly progress through the ranks.

It's a kind of a gamified way of making sure that you get stuff done so that your score goes up. When you become more experienced on LinkedIn, you'll realise that the SSI score probably doesn't really amount to much in the final analysis.

I don't tend to look at it very often, but I do have the page bookmarked and I took a look at my score and I was greeted with some bold red text at the top of the page that says:

"Your access to the Social Selling Index SSI page will be discontinued soon. SSI is a Sales Navigator feature. Get Sales Navigator to retain access to SSI."

So, this SSI system has long been used by LinkedIn to try and upsell people on the fact that if you go and buy a Sales Navigator paid licence, which is one of the most expensive things you can buy from LinkedIn, that will give you a chunky boost to your score. Or it certainly used to. I'm not quite sure whether it does right now, and it's long been debated that maybe the SSI goes way altogether.

This is the first time I've seen LinkedIn really give any strong hint about that. So, I've got a Premium Business account.

In fact, actually I've now got an All-in-One Premium account which is just a level slightly above Premium Business. So, even I'm getting that message.

So, free users, Career Premium Business and even Premium All-in-One, all of us looks like we're going to lose our access to the SSI score.

I don't think it's anything to lose any sleep over, but it's one of the first times I've ever seen LinkedIn really come out and say that's going to happen.

So, if you happen to be on the Sales Navigator version of LinkedIn, which I've never paid for myself, then you'll keep getting access to your SSI score. You've probably already got a very good score if you're on Sales Navigator, but as I say, I don't give too much merit to the score.

If you're brand new, it's a good way of making sure that you get stuff done so that you bump your score up pretty quickly. Once you're in the upper echelons, it's very hard to move your figure positively, so don't worry about it too much.

This week I had my first experience of collaborative posts on LinkedIn, which I've mentioned in a couple of past episodes.

I still don't have the ability to go off and create one by inviting someone to collaborate with me, but this week I did a live interview with Lynnaire Johnston for her podcast and she invited me to collaborate with her because she's already got the feature. She's down in New Zealand. And it popped up with an invitation at my end and then I accepted that, and then that means that I appear as having collaborated with her on the post. So, that post is visible to me in my own Activity feed and I can see that it says that I've collaborated with Lynnaire.

This stuff works better visually than on an audio podcast, so I'll put a link to what I'm talking about and the screenshots in the show notes that accompany this episode.

We're just over a month away now from UpLift Live Nano in Bristol. It's our mini event for people who came to the UpLift Live conference, a conference all about LinkedIn best practice, this is a much smaller, I suppose more intimate version of UpLift Live, where you get a chance to meet fellow LinkedIn users.

We have a spot of lunch together. You can ask any questions you have about LinkedIn best practice and I'll even be there to review people's profiles live in the room if you're interested. So, that's taking place at the Watershed in Bristol, a lovely venue, on Thursday 17 September.

It's going to be on between 11am and 2pm I'll put a link to the ticket page in the show notes. You can go and come along. Be great to meet you if we haven't met already. If you've already experienced the UpLift Live conference, you'll have an idea of the kind of vibe we're going for. It'll be a fab event and I really hope to see you there soon.

I don't normally do promo posts on my LinkedIn feed, but I did one this week because I wanted to support a fellow author, fellow LinkedIn specialist based in Belgium, Mic Adam, who has released his book called, well, I suppose you could call it Mic Drop: The human side of LinkedIn. This is not a book for beginners on LinkedIn.

It's based on Mic's 20 plus years of experience of LinkedIn, so it's a little bit more in depth. Not a complete beginner's guide, but a really good read. Lots of excellent content in there.

Mic's one of my most trusted voices in terms of LinkedIn expertise. Like me, he tests everything that he talks about so he's not making anything up.

It's all coming from his experience and dealing with his clients and his own tests. So, if you want an in-depth look at the human side of LinkedIn, go and check out Mic's book. It's a good read.

OK, I think that will do for a short episode this week. One other funny thing to mention, I think, is that we had a partial solar eclipse in the UK that a lot of people got very excited about, and I always look at the Google Trends websites for to see what's trending on Google, what searches are getting, lots of volume and every time there's an eclipse the day after the trend term, "eyes hurt" is always up there. And sure enough, the same thing happened again. People can't follow basic rules about not looking at the sun. I found that vaguely humourous.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that for now. If you've got any kind of questions, any feedback for the show, remember that next episode is going to be episode 500, the big one.

Looking forward to that one. So, look out for that next week. I'll speak to you soon. Any feedback? Keep it coming. Thanks for listening. Thanks for all your support and getting to the show to where it is now and I'll speak to you all soon.