LinkedIn Bots

Laura, I do want to comment about the thing that you said about the profile picture. I can't tell you how many times somebody has connected with me or tried to connect with me, sent me a message, whatever, and there's like no picture. I find that such a turn-off. What about you?

Well, it is a turn-off. It is also a signal of a bot. Ah, tell me more about that. Don't accept those, okay? So, you know, unfortunately the world we live in today is all about automation and bots and not— and I guess trying to get out of doing actual work. But anyway, um, you still have to do the actual work. So, but when you get those connection requests that have no identifying information and maybe it looks like maybe they have 5,000 connections and you think, how can that possibly be, right? Well, it's a lie, okay? It's a lie, people. They have gotten in there and manipulated the system, and it's a lie. Um, but there are ways to detect that that I really don't have— I don't want to take the time to go into right here. But one of those ways is just looking at their connection request. So if somebody's sending you a connection request and it doesn't have a note with it, ah, and pictures, right, then that's a, a red flag. When it doesn't have a note, here's a cool thing that you can sometimes do. And so not everybody has this feature, but look for it if you do. If they send a note and it's like one of those notes that says, I'd love to connect with you, your profile looks great, or I'd love to connect with you and add you to my network. Okay, that's just generic, right? Right, right. So instead of just accepting it, you can reply without accepting. Ah, and what you do is say, well, what was it that made you want to connect? What about my profile made you want to connect? And then you can decline because you've sent them a message. Now, if they reply, then you'll get an answer and you can decide then, and it'll show up in your inbox. If they don't reply, they're not for real.