Please note: The names of individuals and groups have been changed to protect the guilty and avoid any frivolous lawsuit(s).
The professional networking site, LinkedIn, has been making a big splash lately becoming Wall Street's latest darling. Its stock price and earnings report are way up this quarter and the mainstream media, particularly, the Washington Post, can't seem to blow enough sunshine up Owner/CEO Jeff Weiner's caboose. But what you aren't hearing about is the network's SWAM policy. That's because it's best that you don't else it might make you reconsider shelling out for the privilege of a premium account.
But if you post comments to a group, sooner or later, SWAM will get you, and, you will find yourself, metaphorically speaking, that is, at the bottom of the social network's shiny, Olympic-sized pool, pretty much dead in the water. SWAM (Site Wide Auto Moderation) is supposed to counteract spamming activity, but as is the usual outcome when using a chainsaw to swat a fly, the results are ridiculously absurd. SWAM won't just rear its ugly snakehead and bite you in the backside; SWAM is Medusa on the rag and then some.
Say whut?
You read that correctly; I didn't stutter. Tell you what. As long as we're bein' girlfrenz, lemme share my own personal SWAM story, wit'cha. You may be horrified, or you may be amused (or both) but I can promise that you will shake your head, screw up your face and ask out loud, What in the actual fscuk?
Everybody SWAM Now
My odyssey began when I tried to join a group. I prepare legal documents for a living, which is also known under certain circumstances as being a paralegal, which is further known as doesn't make $400.00/hr. despite knowing what an attorney does. I can't remember why I was so intent on joining the group in question. Or maybe I was just so traumatized by the outcome that I don't want to. Henceforth, the group shall be known as Dewy, Screw, Em, and Howe.
So there I was knock, knock, knockin' tryin' to get my foot in the door. It was the kind of group that you don't just waltz into lickety-split. Your membership must first be (cue the dramatic dun-dun-dun sound effects) approved. Like you're tryin' to party like it's 1920 and all you wanna do is get into some gin joint downtown that you know serves hooch instead of birch beer. Sistah please.
After about a week-and-a-half, my request to join hadn't been answered. OK, fine. Maybe the owner/moderator was bizzy. And so I waited another coupla weeks before deciding to contact her directly and gently prompt to, yunno, approve my request. I specifically used the word gently to describe my correspondence because I didn't want to appear to be obnoxiously desperate about it.
Eventually, I was approved to join Dewy, Screw, Em and Howe. Hallelujah! But the owner, let's call her Sue (as in, poison sumac) made it a point to let me know in no uncertain terms, that she would be monitoring my activity. I have no idea why my personal commentary should be so deserving of speshul attention, but awright.
A couple months into it, I just lurked. There wasn't a lot of useful discussion going on, and, what little of it there was seemed to me to be a whole lotta bloviating mostly coming from Sue. It was clear that she had a very high opinion of herself, and, her little cheering section agreed with every single thing that she said. I always thought of them as the bobblehead brigade, and, found it odd that absolutely everyone agreed about everything 100% across the board 100% of the time. Also, I felt a little apprehensive about adding my two cents for fear of ruffling feathers. This group of women was obviously the online version of a Stepford community. Consequently, and since I wasn't getting anything out of it anyway, I was going to be on my merry way.
I made the mistake of announcing my exit with some light-hearted comment that was not intended to be anything beyond a cheery-O, yet somehow it had been interpreted exactly the opposite. Sheesh. You offer someone a sincere compliment on their mustache and suddenly, she's not your friend anymore.
But before I could navigate out to settings and find the leave group button, BAM! Sue had activated SWAM and fixed my little, red wagon so that I couldn't comment anywhere else, either. Of course, at the time, I did not realize what had happened. It wasn't until a few weeks after the fact that I figured out my comments weren't being published. And because LinkedIn has quite the not-even-ready-for-beta-phase web site, I just chalked it up to a glitch.
Some more time went by, I guess it was about a month, and the web site was still glitching because I still wasn't seeing my posts published. This was getting ridiculous now. What in the what was going on? I conducted some recon on the web and was able to determine from others describing the same problem with posting to their existing groups that I had been locked away in a spammer's gulag. Some random person had suggested contacting LinkedIn about the matter and so I did. Eventually, I got a reply from customer support advising me to (ta da!) contact my groups' owners/mods and ask for permission to post. I did not fully understand the mother-may-I routine since support hadn't bothered to be all that detailed, but OK.
Not fully comprehending how SWAM works, and not being able to find any info on it in any of the terms of service on the site, or for that matter, anywhere else on the web, my first correspondence was to poison sumac. I asked her politely to reinstate permission to post. From there, I just went down the list of groups and contacted the owners with the same polite request. It never occurred to me to join other groups because all my contacts were concentrated in the ones I was prohibited from commenting in.
Fortunately, at the time, I had only five or six groups that I participated in sporadically, so it was not a catastrophic loss. Annoying, but not the kiss of death as is so often the case for other professionals who have been SWAM'd and have spent countless hours cultivating relationships, generating leads, marketing and so forth.
I waited quite a long time and not one of my groups' owners/mods bothered to reply. OK, fine. In a fit of I don't know what, I abruptly decided to just leave certain groups. I thought maybe that would somehow trigger something in my favor. (I didn't know what leaving would accomplish after the fact, but I have a background in QA software testing, and was just throwing the jello at the wall to see what would stick.)
The only one who bothered to reply to me (two months later) was Sue. She decided to channel her inner Cersei Lannister and give me a good verbal lashing, only, you know, she was a lot less clever and a lot more mean-spirited about it. Sue proceeded to pick apart my profile and offer unsolicited advice as to what I should include versus not. Okaaaay. I didn't know to what exactly I owed the honor of a profile makeover. I try not to make enemies over trivial matters if I can help it, so I thought that if I humored her, she would throw the OK-to-post switch. It was my understanding at the time that I just needed one group to approve my ability to post and then I'd be golden to post elsewhere again. But she just disappeared instead.
More time passed (months, actually) and then, just as I was about to delete my account, one of the other group mods replied to me and reinstated my ability to post in that group. I later found out that the groups that I had left after I had been SWAM'd stops their ability to initiate SWAM a second time. Then I simply rejoined the groups that I had left after I had been SWAM'd. Please note: Group owners/mods will still have the ability the suspend/delete any comments they want to within their own group(s), but your comments elsewhere won't be suspended in the process. This is an important distinction to make as I stumbled upon it quite serendipitously. Since I'm the only who has noticed this, be advised that your mileage may and does vary.
Houston, We Have A Problem
It would really help to clarify to members exactly how SWAM works -what it is, what happens when you block participants from commenting, etc. Sure, some won't read the memo, but at the very least, detailed information that is pertinent to group controls should be available in an FAQ in the Community Guidelines.
Some group owners/mods contend that LinkedIn sent a network wide memo back in January 2013 explaining SWAM, while others insist that was not the case. Subsequently, it has been difficult to investigate and otherwise gather anything substantive. The members who know what SWAM is fall into one of two camps. Either they are very confused or they are very pissed off. And rightfully so. LinkedIn is supposed to be about networking. Networking means you spend righteous amounts of time marketing your services/goods and developing a rapport with your contacts. It is completely unacceptable that this can be wiped out without any sort of due process or even an official appeal. Instead, LinkedIn has taken a hands-off approach and put the onus on the member who has been SWAM'd to clear his good name with group owners/mods who are unwilling/unable or just plain ignorant of how group controls work. How fair is that to the members who are the site's lifeblood?
One thing is for sure, LinkedIn management has taken a hard line and is loath to publicly admit very much about SWAM. Based on the testimonials provided by others in the SWAM Support group on LI, I don't imagine the company changing its stance any time soon. The good times are rollin' for it on Wall Street, and, a program like SWAM with its unintended consequences could potentially be the turd in the pool that scares off the party-goers.
Suffice it to say, there was no lesson for me to learn as a result of this particular experience because I hadn't done anything wrong in the first place except to join a group whose owner/mod was definitely not functioning within normal parameters. I was simply an innocent dolphin caught up in the big, bad SWAM fishing net.
I have since started working LinkedIn a lot more hardcore than what I previously did, and, I belong to a lot more groups, but I won't be paying for a premium membership so long as there is precious little information or any meaningful recourse available to members who have been SWAM'd. I just don't see the point in paying for a service if my ability to participate in my favorite group discussions site wide is based on the say-so of any group owner/mod who can banish me to a dungeon indefinitely, and, negating in the process, all of my hard work spent in my groups networking with my contacts.
Are you listening, Jeff Weiner?
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