Writing about internal communications

For free. 

I sort of don’t mind LinkedIn even if it is full of people madly patting each other on the back. So much PATTING it’s incredible. You see one person retweet an achievement. You see another person commenting “Congratulations” it’s one thing and the next. 

A virtual schmoozefest.

But it has been around for a while and is based on the idea that people have to declare their identity. So props for being sensible. Recently I’d seen things appearing in my feed asking me to contribute to stories. Today I saw an inmail regarding the same thing. I’ll include it below.

Inmail is a tool LinkedIn gives people letting them message each other. With a subscription you can send messages to people you’re not connected to.

As you can see from the above the company disabled replies. I wanted to ask them if they’d be paying me for my expertise. It was disappointing that the only thing I wanted from LinkedIn that they hadn’t already provided wasn’t mentioned. It’s like AI, the big companies want to get the content but they don’t want to have to pay any money for it. Big tech likes to get rich but sharing some of that bounty with struggling writers isn’t part of the getting-rich plan.

Now, I’ve been in business since 1985 and have written countless emails, messages, letters, postcards, you name it even end-of-year cards that they use in Japan. So it’s only right that to get the benefit of that expertise LinkedIn should pay me something that I can actually use: some cash. 

Hoo!

On the other hand maybe I should get involved just to get my name out there. Presumably LinkedIn has a mechanism with these stories to publicise the names of the people who are involved in their capacity as writers. With this insight ringing in my head I visited the post again and added comments to two parts of one article about writing. To minimise the effort involved in this task I reused some text I’d written some years before for my daughter who, at that time, had writing plans of her own. In the end she ditched them but I kept the MS-Word file on my computer which I found. I did some more of these posts later on, I mean on subsequent days because I felt like I knew something about internal communications. After all I’d worked in PR – both internal and external – for a decade. No, more than a decade, because my work with the change manager at Sydney University was also internal communications. So that’s 9 years in Japan plus sic years in Sydney: a total of 15 years in IC. Then there was my work with Eastern Suburbs Art Group from 2022 to the present. Total: 17 years.

I felt I had something to contribute. The money could wait. I needed to get a few things off my chest. I wrote for free and it felt GOOD.