LinkedIn, a professional networking website, is making all kinds of waves lately. Its stock price is arrow up, and, Wall Street is creaming itself thanks to a 62% reported earnings increase for this quarter versus last. But there is another wave hitting the social network, and, it hasn't received any attention at all from the mainstream press.
The digital tsunami known as SWAM is wreaking havoc and raging unabated. Largely unacknowledged by the network (and nowhere to be found in either the Users Agreement or Community Guidelines) and unbeknownst to most LinkedIn members (who don't read terms of service agreements anyway) SWAM stands for Site Wide Auto Moderation. It was supposed to combat spam, but, like any other well-intended measure that is meant to be a benefit, it has quickly turned into a hazard, and an annoying one at that. Think of SWAM as LinkedIn's own mini-version of the federal government's No Fly list. You don't find out that you're on it until after you attempt air travel, and, once you know you're on it, there is no way to find out why you were put there or how you can be removed. Well, you can certainly try, but even Sisyphus would tell you that you're acting the fool. Now, to be fair to LinkedIn, if you do happen to get SWAM'd, you can always contact customer support, but the cure is as bad as the disease. Here's how it works.
A spammer continues to post his garbage in the group comments. The group's owner/manager/moderator grows tired of seeing it and bans the spammer from the group. Now the SWAM is fully enabled site wide and every group the spammer belongs to forces his comments into a time-out and won't post. Yay for anti-spamming controls!
Except SWAM does not quite function as smoothly and flawlessly as must have been imagined by LinkedIn management.
Spammers are always ten steps ahead of this sort of pest control and so it's not a problem to just create another account and begin happily spamming all over again under another name. What SWAM does do, unfortunately, is to punish the rule-abiding members who are just trying to network with their fellow humans. And if you happen to express an opinion that is unpopular with a group and/or the group's owner happens to be a petty tyrant who is threatened by anyone with a perspective different from his own, you can just as easily be sharing the same cell block along with the spammers. Of course, remember that since SWAM is site wide, you will also be prohibited from commenting in all of your other groups as well.
If you contact LinkedIn, it will tell you that you must contact each and every owner/moderator of each and every group you belong to and ask to be permitted to post. And while this may sound beautiful in theory (only if you're in the air conditioned section of Hell, maybe) the reality is that most owners/moderators do not respond. Like ever. Whether this is due to ignorance, apathy, or just plain malice, there is no way to know; the result is the same. You are left for dead in a digital gulag and will remain there unless and until your groups' owner/moderator decides to let you out.
But let's say, arguendo, that you succeed in reestablishing yourself in one of your groups, and the group owner/moderator decides to ban you thereafter. After all, you've been branded as a spammer, so he has taken it upon himself to preemptively nuke you from perpetrating the same activity in his digital fiefdom. Now, you must start the process of contacting each of your groups owners/moderators all over again. Isn't networking fun? (Especially if you're paying the premium monthly price for the privilege of using LinkedIn). One look at the minimum price of $39.95 per month certainly lets us know exactly where all the money is rolling in from, doesn't it. And that's just for the cheap tier. The super duper El Deluxe level is $399.95 per month. Small wonder Wall Street needs a change of skivvies.
So after reading about SWAM, the operative question then becomes what can you do? The answer is not much. You can, I suppose, write an impact statement to LinkedIn informing it how SWAM has adversely affected your networking endeavors, and, that you disagree with the program, but good luck with that. Owner/CEO Jeff Weiner has not bothered to address the SWAM problem in any meaningful way, and, really, why should he. He already has your money and his company's finances are soaring into the stratosphere.
In all matter of practicality, what you can do is stop paying for using the network, or don't bother to start in the first place until LinkedIn provides a substantive recourse for its ill-conceived and completely networking-blocking FUBAR. Like say, a year's worth of FREE premium access for your trouble. But don't hold your breath.
Barring that you can also join the LinkedIn group SWAM (Site Wide Auto Moderation) Support and the G+ Community. But don't expect a favorable result any time soon. Like any other publicly traded corporate entity, LinkedIn does not pay attention to anything that does not adversely impact its bottom line.
©2013 Greensleeves and Heart Like A Wheel blog. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Greensleeves and Heart Like A Wheel blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
