How Not To Be A LinkedIn Influencer😭

Leadership do’s and don’ts from the Crying CEO

Hey Everyone,

I told myself I wouldn’t write anything new this month. Then the Crying CEO came along. I got a few notes about it, thought about why it bothered me, and, long story short, decided to write a post.

Back to school,

Ben

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How Not To Be A LinkedIn Influencer😭

Last week the CEO of a small company that helps businesses develop LinkedIn marketing content posted a selfie of himself crying after laying off a “few” employees.¹ The post received a lot of engagement - not all positive.

In this post, I’ll write about what we can all learn from his regrettable decision.

The Do’s

Let’s start with the positive. What can we learn from Braden Wallake, the Crying CEO of HyperSocial?

He took responsibility - He said the layoffs were "my fault," and he's right. He owns that decision. They were his fault.

The Don’ts

And now, let’s learn what shouldn’t be done after a layoff. Please note that this list is not exhaustive.

He posted about the layoffs. You don’t have to announce layoffs on your personal LinkedIn profile. Even if you run a company that generates LinkedIn content, the news will get out without you. Things can happen that you don’t have to post about.

He used “Broetry.” In his excellent “Why is LinkedIn so cringe?”, Trung Phan discusses broetry, the annoying LinkedIn posting style that has taken over the platform. Broetry is designed to boost the “engagement” of a LinkedIn post - which is in horrible taste considering the context here. 

He took responsibility (but not really). I despise apologies that lack a commitment to change. It’s easy to say that you’re sorry, but it’s much harder to commit to not making the same mistake again. Wallake offers no “here is what I’m going to do about it.”

He concludes his post by displaying a complete lack of empathy. Wallake ends his post with, “I can't think of a lower moment than this.” Really? Wallake doesn’t even have to deal with the full consequences of his decisions (that’s for the people he canned to worry about), and he can’t imagine a lower moment? Is this man a sociopath?

It is all about him. Of all the bad calls he made, the saddest is that Wallake made this post about him and didn’t even realize it. After his original post attracted criticism, he posted this the following day:

[M]y intent was not to make it about me or victimize myself. I am sorry it came across that way

This is the same person who:

• Posted a selfie of himself crying.

• Used “I” sentences in three of the first four sentences of his post.

• Told his employees that he loved them but made zero effort to use his considerable platform to ensure that those same people landed on their feet.²

How else could it have possibly come across?

The Worthless Currency of Attention

Wallake has built a career off of social media engagement. For him, there is no better virtue than virality, thousands of likes, and a rapidly growing audience. 

What Wallake doesn’t realize is that the engagement he worships is cheap, easy, and meaningless without action. It is easy to click “Like,” or fall victim to engagement-bait posts. It is much harder to drive action and change behavior - awareness and engagement are the first steps, but without causing action, what good are they?

I keep asking myself, “what is Braden Wallake trying to accomplish?” He’s not using his audience to find opportunities for the former employees who just entered the job market. He’s not sharing his learnings about misappropriating capital, nor is he committing to do any better in the future. There’s no furthering of a mission, no expression of vision, and no point of view that could, you know, help someone. The only thing Wallake accomplishes is drawing attention to himself - because attention, particularly on him, is all that matters. Braden Wallake’s brain has been broken by the very engagement that he peddles.

The obvious lesson here is that your actions after a layoff define you. Good people own their mistakes, learn, and do what they can for those affected - broken ones seek attention and cry about it.

1. I’m not going to link to the original post because I don’t want to give bad influencers engagement. I’m sure you can find and read the whole post if you want to (though I wouldn’t recommend it).

2. It took him several days, but Wallake learned his lesson here. He’s now trying to get the affected employees new gigs.