Reciprocity

In social psychology, reciprocity is a social norm of responding to a positive action with another positive action, rewarding kind actions. As a social construct, reciprocity means that in response to friendly actions, people are frequently much nicer and much more cooperative than predicted by the self-interest model; conversely, in response to hostile actions they are frequently much more nasty and even brutal. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(social_psychology)

I felt inspired to write about this topic by my stepson, because of his very obvious lack of reciprocity. So it got me thinking is it something we do naturally or do we have to be coached and trained to act in a reciprocal way towards our family, friends, colleagues and/or strangers?

Photo by Nikita Kachanovsky on Unsplash

When children who live with their parents for possibly over 20 years have had everything provided for them, I believe it’s really quite tough for them to make the transition to seeing the need to return the favour for all the services that are provided to them free of charge for many years. I know we should not be viewing this as some sort of transaction and you would hope that your child will eventually realise that they should contribute to the household in many different and selfless ways.

But what if they do not have any inkling that this is something they should be doing and even when you ask on a number of occasions in a gentle and persuasive manner that their contribution would really be appreciated, but they still refuse to do anything, what is the correct and supportive strategy?

Happy giving!

Michael de Groot

Does LinkedIn Help confuse you?

They say Robots are the future, but maybe they have already arrived at LinkedIn?

Well, I can confirm most definitely, I am totally and utterly confused with LinkedIn's Help. For years now I have received responses to my queries where the support team at LinkedIn, haven’t really got a clue what I am talking about.

Maybe it is me and the way I ask my questions is not clear enough?

I don’t know about you, but I find that all I seem to receive is a bunch of ‘template’ responses to try and close my ticket as soon as possible. In fact LinkedIn Help already closes the ticket, when they deem that my question has been answered satisfactorily by them. Most times I have to reopen the ticket to send a follow up response or question.

This brings me nicely on to my latest example, ‘The Reminder’.

This feature was introduced when LinkedIn had a major upgrade, released maybe a couple of years ago.

It allows any member to schedule a reminder on a connection’s profile. The reminder can be set for 1 day, 1 week, 1 month or recurring. A strange way of setting reminders by the way, normally you would specify a specific date. Anyway that’s the way it was set and is still the way it exists.

The 'Reminder' feature appears under the 'Relationship' tab, just under the Profile Header.

When this new feature was introduced, LinkedIn then also started to email us all a daily digest of our connection’s major activity, like a job change, a work anniversary and their birthday. If by any chance you had set a reminder, this would also arrive in the same email. Thereby listing all your reminders and you could take action on those. A great way to be reminded about your reminders don't you think?

In the past 12 months LinkedIn have changed their policy on the volume of email, because of some public criticism they had received.

I agree there was just far too much. However this has meant that they have done away with the 'Daily Digest' email, but you are still able to see your connection’s major activity under the ‘connections’ section and engage with your connection’s activity by sending them an email message, like or comment on their activity. You get daily new notifications on your mobile app too, although you can only message your connections to congratulate them, like and commenting at time of writing is not available on mobile. I won't bore you with the ’Connected app’ that was retired recently, which was created specifically for this purpose. 

Anyway, it now means that ‘The Reminder’ notification via email is missing in action. You no longer receive an email, because the ‘Daily Digest’ has been retired and it also doesn’t receive a flag, which would have been the most sensible thing to do, but it does appear under your ‘connections’ section (desktop), although you may have to keep expanding by clicking the ‘see more people to contact’ tab underneath the 9 cards that will show up.

Anyway I did know about the failure of this, but decided when I saw a forum thread on the subject to investigate further and ask LinkedIn Help the question about reminders.

Below is a screenshot of the thread of my email conversation exchange with them. In conclusion the reminder feature is no longer very useful, unless you are disciplined enough to view your connections page on a daily basis, just to check for reminders. 🙄

You’ll see from the email thread that support completely gets the wrong meaning of my question to begin with. Why? Answer: ’Template responses’. 

Conclusion:
1.  The ’Reminder’ feature will probably be retired very soon. 
2.  LinkedIn Help agents are robots 🤖?

Wishing you success with LinkedIn's features. Just remember that one day those features may be rendered useless or retired, you just never know. Whether you are a paying premium member or not, it doesn't matter.

@stayingaliveuk 😎👍

Are You Being Spammed on LinkedIn?

Inevitably you will be at some stage. There are over 347 million profiles on LinkedIn and with 2 new people joining every second, there are going to be individuals who are breaking the rules.

I know it will be annoying to you, maybe a severe nuisance and some of you will get disheartened and feel that LinkedIn should be doing more.

I know exactly how you feel, I have been there too, but now I just take my own appropriate action, which I have learnt isn’t that clear to inexperienced users on LinkedIn.

Usually these spammers use invitations to get themselves in front of you. In fairness I haven’t had many, maybe a total of 20 in the 11 years that I have been on LinkedIn.

When you receive an offending email, like the one shown below. A real-live example, which one of my connections received.

Here are a few steps in order to deal with these spammers: (Below are images to show you what it looks like)

1. Go to their profile and you will find a drop down arrow visible on the blue button that says ‘send jamie an InMail’.
2. Select ‘Block or report’.
3. A new window will open where you can select ‘block’ and ‘report’.
4. Add some detail to give LinkedIn some of your reasons why you are reporting this individual and click continue.
5. A warning message will be displayed to confirm that you wish to report and block this person. Confirm this step and the deed is done.

You can also do this at any time for any of your connections that may cause you any unnecessary stress for whatever reason.

Sometimes, and I have experienced this, the spammer may create another profile and send another invite. If this abusive behaviour does continue, I would advice that you contact LinkedIn support directly. Make sure that you copy the LinkedIn url of that member, as they need this to locate the individual concerned.

I sincerely hope you don’t get many of these.

@stayingaliveuk

Image Credit: @gapingvoid