I went to a developer conference and accidentally learned something profound about human nature. It started innocently enough – the All Things AI Conference in Durham, NC had a title too good to pass up.

What I didn’t expect was to be the only marketer among 2,500 developers, nodding along as whurly, CEO of Strangeworks (one name, all lowercase), dove deep into quantum computing and AI. I was in over my head. But sometimes that’s exactly where the best insights hide.

It was until Luis Lastras, Director of Language and Multimodal Technology at IBM began talking about “small models” that I finally found something I recognized. Luis said something that struck me that I didn’t realize – and I think I’m not alone – “hallucinations are intentional.” Say what?

According to Luis hallucinations are a way for developers to learn how models work. Because the models operate autonomously they don’t filter out what they output – at least not yet. Think of letting your grandfather who lost his filter loose at a dinner party.

It’s one of things that IBM is working on.  Small models validate outputs and commands at various stages in the process to reduce hallucinations.

Anyone who’s worked with AI has experienced hallucination from made up sources to statistics that are just plain wrong. But what Lastras shared was something I didn’t realize, it’s the little extra pieces of information intended to be helpful that AI tools add in that weren’t asked for in the prompt.

For example, he showed a demo of a prompt asking how many moons Mars has and the response came back with two and their names, with the added extra – the distance from Earth which was not requested.

The distance between the planets may have been right but it requires another step to validate which then triggered a fascinating article I had read over the weekend.

In a study by Elon University conducted with 500 AI users (US adults) last year, almost 70% believed that AI models are at least as smart as they are, with 26% believing that they are “a lot smarter.”

What is more concerning is that we believe that AI is thinking like humans. As the article in the Wall Street Journal article Why Even Smart People Believe AI is Really Thinking goes on to say “our cognitive biases developed to help us survive in complex social environments…evolved to view linguistics fluency as a proxy for intelligence, engagement and helpfulness as indicators of trustworthiness.”

The same tendency innate to humans that leads us to trust social creatures who must cooperate for survival are leading us to trust systems that appear to listen, understand and want to help us.

The more AI tools and bots act like humans, the more likely we are to trust them. Which brings us back to the hallucination. The more AI tools act like they’re being helpful, the more likely we are to miss that “little extra” piece of information that wasn’t requested.

The convergence of intentional hallucinations and our deeply wired human instinct to trust fluent, helpful communicators creates a perfect storm of misplaced confidence.

As AI tools grow more sophisticated and human-like, our evolutionary instincts will only make it harder to maintain the critical distance needed to catch the errors, embellishments, and unrequested additions that slip through.

The good news is that awareness is the first step. Whether it’s IBM’s small models validating outputs in real time or simply slowing down to verify what AI hands us, the antidote to a cognitive bias millions of years in the making is something refreshingly simple – a healthy dose of human skepticism.

The post The Fluke of Evolution Causing Us to Miss AI Hallucinations appeared first on Carbon Design.

Back when I was a client-side marketer, I noticed a pattern slowing our team down: the habit of holding onto work until it felt perfect.

To break that cycle, I led the team through what I called the “Embrace Your Suckiness” exercise – an honest conversation about what we were each great at, and where we genuinely fell short.

Out of that came the CRAP process: Create, Refine, Act, Perfect.

The rule was simple: if you got stuck at any stage, you passed it to someone else. It increased our speed to market and later that year we won an internal award for the best performing department.

We borrowed IBM’s 70% rule – get it to 70% and go. Let the market, the audience, the world complete the other 30%. Then we refined the campaign.

Fast forward many years, and I applied that same process to a book I just finished – three years in the making.

I sent the first draft to friends and family. What came back was hard to hear after all those late nights and weekends.

But that’s exactly the point.

The people who matter most told me: “It’s good… but it’s not good enough.” Good, because they appreciated the work and effort that went into it. Not good enough, because they respected me enough to push me further.

That feedback is a gift. And it only comes from people willing to tell you what you don’t want to hear.

If you’re early in your career, here’s the most important thing I can share:  Surround yourself with those people.

Not people who echo your worldview.
Not people who validate everything you do.
People who are honest – even when it’s uncomfortable.

We live in a time that makes it dangerously easy to only hear voices that agree with us.

Don’t fall for it.

Here’s the truth:  Everyone is great at something, and everyone sucks at something. That’s not a flaw – that’s just being human.

You may only have 70%. That’s okay. That’s why you need the right people around you to help you find the rest.

Embrace your suckiness. It just might be your greatest strength. 💪

To learn more about The Hidden Buyer Journey click the link https://carbondesign.com/the-hidden-buyer-journey/

The post The Tough Love We Need…and a New Book! appeared first on Carbon Design.

After 7 years of research – analyzing hundreds of buyer journeys, profiling the personalities of thousands of decision-makers, and tracking what actually drives B2B deals – I finally finished the first draft.

Unlike other books in the sales and marketing space, this is not survey driven. We didn’t ask buyers for their preferences, we observed their behaviors in the data.

The work took longer than I ever expected, but every extra year added a layer of insight I wouldn’t trade. The 📕 title: The Hidden Buyer Journey.

Here’s what I discovered that changed everything:

● 85% of buyers influencing your deals never make it into your CRM.
● Most personas are built for selling, not buying.
● Corporate culture predicts deal velocity better than any other factor.
● Although there are a dozen or more buyers involved in the journey, only 4-5 make the deal happen.
● Reps can sabotage deals by not adjusting their style to fit the buyer’s personality.

These aren’t just interesting data points – they represent a fundamental shift in how modern B2B sales needs to be approached.

The book explains why win rates aren’t improving, why sales cycles are stretching, and why “personalization” isn’t working. More importantly, it shows exactly what to fix…and how.

I’ll be sharing more over the next few weeks. If any of this resonates with challenges you’re facing right now, follow along.  You won’t want to miss what’s coming.

To learn more about the book and to reserve your copy visit https://carbondesign.com/the-hidden-buyer-journey/

The post This book outline has been on my wall for 3 years. It came down today. appeared first on Carbon Design.

AI rewards original insight, proprietary data and firsthand experience over length and polish. Here’s how content strategy must evolve.

There was a time when content marketing followed a predictable formula: pick a keyword, write 2,000 words around it, sprinkle in some headers and wait for Google to notice. It worked. Pages that said very little but said it at great length climbed the rankings and stayed there.

That era is ending, and most content teams haven’t realized it yet.

When we read web pages, we start at the top, skim the introduction and decide whether the author sounds smart. Google’s AI processes content differently. It breaks content into small semantic units – individual claims, definitions, data points and explanations – and evaluates each one on its own clarity and usefulness. A 3,000-word article that circles the same idea for 20 paragraphs doesn’t look comprehensive to an AI. It looks redundant.

This is a fundamental shift in how value gets assigned to content. Length used to be a proxy for depth. Now it’s just noise unless every section carries its own weight.

The long, keyword-circling blog posts that once dominated search are quietly losing ground to something leaner and more specific. AI Overview panels, featured snippets and conversational search results all pull from content that answers questions directly. They don’t reward buildup. They don’t care about your brand voice. They care about whether a specific paragraph contains a specific, helpful answer.

The old content playbook – where you’d research what competitors wrote and then write a slightly longer, slightly more polished version – is becoming a dead strategy. If five sites all paraphrase the same general knowledge, they’re not sources. They’re echoes. AI is getting remarkably good at telling the difference.

If you’re not a source, you’re a remix

If you’re not publishing original research, proprietary data or genuine firsthand insight, you’re not creating source material. You’re remixing what already exists. Remixes don’t get cited.

Think about how a large language model builds its responses. It synthesizes information from across the web, but it gravitates toward origin points – the study that produced the statistic, the company that ran the survey, the practitioner who documented what actually happened. Everyone downstream who rephrased that information is, from the AI’s perspective, a less reliable copy.

This isn’t speculation. We can already see it happening. Sites that publish original benchmarks, case studies with real numbers and first-person accounts of specific processes are showing up in AI-generated answers at disproportionate rates. Meanwhile, the ultimate guides that aggregate other people’s findings are getting compressed out of the picture.

Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up.
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.

The new content strategy

The path forward is more straightforward than most people want to hear. Stop trying to sound authoritative. Be the source of the information.

That means running your own experiments and publishing the results, even when they’re messy. It means sharing internal data that your industry would find valuable – conversion rates, timelines, costs and failure points. It means writing from experience rather than just research, because experience is something AI can’t fabricate and can’t find anywhere else.

It also means getting comfortable with shorter, more focused content. A 400-word post that introduces a single original insight is worth more in this new landscape than a 4,000-word guide that synthesizes 10 other people’s ideas. One is a source. The other is a summary.

This doesn’t mean writing quality is irrelevant. Poorly structured, confusing content still fails. But the competitive advantage has shifted. Clear thinking matters more than elegant prose. Having something to say matters more than saying it beautifully.

Add something new or don’t publish

The content teams that will thrive in an AI-driven search environment are the ones that treat publishing as a knowledge contribution, not a marketing exercise. Every piece should add something to the conversation that didn’t exist before – a number, result or perspective earned through doing the work.

The question to ask before you hit publish is no longer “Does this rank?” It’s “Would an AI cite this?” If the honest answer is no, you’re not writing content. You’re writing filler.

The post Why original thinking is your competitive advantage in the AI era appeared first on Carbon Design.

Most of your best buying signals show up late in the sales cycle, but they’re invisible if the right contacts never make it into your CRM.

This problem has plagued sales and marketing organizations for as long as these functions have existed. Companies invest massive amounts in Martech stacks and sales databases, only to see them underperform – not because of the technology itself, but due to poor input.

Specifically, the issue is qualified, highly engaged contacts held tightly – like clutched pearls – by the sales force.

For years, the prevailing theory has been that sales doesn’t want marketing anywhere near its most valuable relationships. Sales executives often attribute the issue to competing priorities or a general lack of interest in “data entry.” Interpret that however you’d like.

The visibility gap

I’ve encountered this problem repeatedly when trying to map content consumption to the buying journey. Typically, we’re only able to connect 10%–15% of sales contacts to any measurable marketing engagement, such as content downloads, event attendance, or other interactions.

Recently, however, we had the opportunity to take a closer look under the hood.

A client shared their contacts, intent data, engagement data and – most importantly – sales email correspondence tied to active opportunities across more than a dozen accounts. The data covered hundreds of emails exchanged over a seven-month period. In some cases, we observed opportunities at inception; in others, we jumped in midstream and followed them through to close.

We mapped the emails chronologically and tracked every individual included in the conversations. It was only after reviewing the full arc of these communications that the real reason sales reps don’t enter new contacts into the database became clear.

Where are all these names coming from?

The first question we wanted to answer was simple: Where do these new contacts come from – and why?

What we found was remarkably consistent. As deals progress, new contacts tend to appear at three distinct points in the sales process:

1. Demo requests: These typically expand the buying group by an average of seven to 10 people.
2. Trial setup: This stage typically introduces an additional three to five contacts, often including stakeholders from other geographies within global organizations.
3. Final presentation: Procurement and finance frequently enter the picture at this stage, and if the presentation is on-site, even more participants tend to appear.

Why don’t reps enter the names?

Contrary to popular belief, this isn’t about laziness or disinterest. It’s about focus.

As opportunities near closure, activity between the prospect and the sales rep increases – sometimes dramatically. Last-minute trial configurations, contract negotiations and master services agreements consume nearly all of the rep’s time and attention.

The excitement of a potential win – like the smell of blood in the water for sharks – puts reps into a sales frenzy. Their behavior becomes almost entirely reactive.

New contacts who aren’t directly participating in the email threads are viewed as peripheral. In practice, they become invisible. This blind spot is especially pronounced at the very moment when insight matters most.

Why enter them at all? What’s the upside?

What most reps don’t realize – given their narrow focus on closing the deal – is that these late-stage participants are often scrambling to get up to speed.

They visit the corporate website.

• They search for case studies.
• They download white papers.
• They watch on-demand videos.

Their goal is simple: become informed enough to influence the final decision.

That behavior is precisely what makes them valuable.

If – and it’s a big if – reps take the time to enter these contacts into the database, their sudden spike in activity can surface powerful intent signals.

A real-world example

In one opportunity, a CEO entered the buying process shortly before an on-site presentation. The decision came down to the incumbent vendor and our client.

That CEO searched for a specific term more than 35 times over two weeks.

Because the contact was identified, that insight surfaced. The sales team redesigned the final presentation to focus heavily on that topic and directly connect it to the client’s value proposition.

They won the deal.

The fix is cultural, not technical

This isn’t a Salesforce problem.

It isn’t a HubSpot problem.

And it certainly isn’t a marketing problem.

It’s a process and mindset problem.

The most valuable buying signals often appear late in the sales cycle, introduced by stakeholders who weren’t part of the early conversations. When those contacts never make it into the system, organizations lose visibility at the exact moment insight can influence outcomes.

Sales teams don’t need more tools – they need a clearer understanding of the upside. Capturing late-stage contacts isn’t about helping marketing run better reports. It’s about giving sales an unfair advantage: real-time visibility into what decision-makers care about most.

When those contacts are entered, intent data lights up. Content consumption becomes visible. Messaging can be adjusted. Presentations get sharper. Win rates improve.

Until organizations address this blind spot, marketing will continue to look ineffective, intent data will appear incomplete, and sales teams will unknowingly leave leverage on the table.

The post The real reason your best leads never make it into the CRM appeared first on Carbon Design.

Now that the dust has settled, the branding agency fired and the old brand restored, it’s a good time to look at what really happened with the rebranding of Cracker Barrel – something the mainstream media largely overlooked.

Let’s start with the firing of the agency behind the rebrand. Prophet – founded by Scott Galloway and Ian Chaplen with David Aaker as vice chairman – is a powerhouse branding firm known for rigorous research and disciplined strategy. This isn’t a group of amateurs crowdsourcing a logo.

Prophet does its homework, has A-list clients and has successfully delivered hundreds of rebranding and branding projects. What went wrong?

How bot activity fueled the rebrand backlash

The most interesting part of this story never made headlines – likely overshadowed by the president’s comments that turned the rebrand into a politicized moment.

What was largely missing from the uproar was the real source of the rapid outrage: bots. According to the Wall Street Journal, bots posing as real users drove a disproportionate share of the social chatter that media outlets picked up. PeakMetrics – which works with the U.S. Air Force to identify foreign misinformation – found that the backlash originated from high-follower human accounts but was quickly amplified by bots.

By August 20, the day after the launch, X saw about 400 Cracker Barrel posts every minute. Molly Dwyer, director of insights at PeakMetrics, said 70% of accounts posting used duplicate messages, with some repeating the same text dozens of times – a clear sign of bot activity. Nearly 45% of Cracker Barrel posts on X during that 24-hour surge were estimated to be bot-generated. PeakMetrics also reported that almost half of all posts calling for a boycott came from bots.

Why the spike? Foreign entities often try to stoke political tension by tapping into what Dwyer describes as a ready-made audience primed for negative engagement. In Cracker Barrel’s case, its rebrand landed squarely in the politicized crosshairs of social media – and bots did the rest.

What this means for B2B marketers

Consumer brands have greater visibility and appeal to a broader set of buyers than most B2B brands, so it’s easy to assume the business environment carries less risk.

But that isn’t necessarily true. Years ago, Google and CEB (now part of Gartner) researched the role of emotion in B2B purchasing decisions. One of the key findings was that buyers feel a stronger emotional connection to B2B brands than to consumer brands.

For many people, that’s surprising – but the reason is simple. It comes down to personal risk. If you buy the wrong L’Oréal lip gloss, it may be annoying, but you won’t lose your job over it. Choose the wrong enterprise software and you could damage your reputation, waste company money or even jeopardize your role. The stakes are higher, which drives a stronger emotional connection.

In our survey of over 400 B2B buyers across a dozen brands, we asked which brand attributes mattered most in their final purchasing decisions. Trustworthiness ranked number one, with reliability close behind.

What the Cracker Barrel backlash reveals about brand vulnerability

The Cracker Barrel episode is a stark reminder that even the most thoughtful, research-driven branding efforts can be derailed when they collide with today’s volatile digital ecosystem. The real story wasn’t a misstep by a seasoned agency or a logo that missed the mark – it was how bot-driven outrage can hijack a narrative and turn a routine brand refresh into a cultural flashpoint overnight.

For B2B marketers, the lesson isn’t to fear rebranding but to respect the emotional stakes involved. Buyers are more invested, more risk-averse and more attuned to signals of trust and reliability than we often assume. And while B2B brands may not receive the same amount of public attention as consumer giants, they operate in a space where reputational missteps carry significant professional consequences.

As lines blur between genuine sentiment, manufactured outrage and political polarization, marketers must approach rebrands with both courage and caution. Rebranding will always involve risk – but in a world where algorithms and bad actors can amplify negativity at scale, clarity, authenticity and stakeholder alignment have never mattered more.

The post The real story behind Cracker Barrel’s rebrand – and why it matters for B2B brands appeared first on Carbon Design.

Carbon Design Winning Streak Continues at The Davey Awards 🏆

Last year was our first experience submitting work for industry recognition at The Davey Awards – and to our surprise, we took home a gold and a silver for a logo and website redesign.

This year, we decided to give it another try and entered our work in the Integrated Campaign and Design & Print categories. The Davey Awards recognize excellence in design, storytelling, and strategy.

Our team at Carbon led the research, copywriting, and design that helped bring these stories to life, and continue raising the bar for how data and design can empower GovCon and AEC leaders alike.

We’re incredibly honored to have been recognized again, with a Gold for Integrated Campaign and Silver for Design & Print.

A huge thank you to our amazing teams at Carbon Design LLC, Unanet, and CohnReznick for making this collaboration a success.

It’s truly a team effort, and we’re proud of what we’ve built together. We look forward to building more award winning work in 2026.

We’re inspired to keep pushing our creativity and look forward to what’s next!

The post The 21st Annual Davey Awards appeared first on Carbon Design.

What if you ignored your “high intent” signals – didn’t follow up, didn’t call, didn’t email – just to see if leads would self-identify and reach out to you?

It sounds counterintuitive, but if a lead is really interested (at least according to your scoring tools), they should eventually fill out a form or call you, right? That’s the experiment we’ve been running.

For the past six weeks, we’ve been quietly tracking web traffic and running a test we know many of our clients would love to try but can’t. No outbound, no follow-ups – just observation.

The Setup

Using Warmly, we set our parameters around ICPs, buyer personas, and first- and third-party intent signals. For this experiment, visitors had to meet two criteria:

● Spend at least 28 seconds on the site
● Visit at least 2 web pages

The Results

After filtering out competitors and consults, 15 visitors from the last 45 days fit the criteria:

➖ 10 Moderate confidence lead
➖ 3 High confidence lead
➖ 2 Very high confidence lead

(“Lead” comes from the platform, not us. )

Our “highest intent” visitor came back to the site 24 times over two weeks, spending a total of 26 minutes across pages like Team, Services, Solutions, and Blogs. That person sounds like a qualified lead, right? We’re still waiting on a form submission.

So… Why Haven’t They Converted?

We dug deeper and found a few possible reasons:

1. Bad Data – when we looked into the contact records, some were miscategorized – for example, individuals associated with a company but are no longer employed there.

2. Wrong Personality Fit – using our proprietary personality profiling tool, we found that some visitors’ motivations were likely exploring on behalf of someone else, or just passively learning.

3. The Nature of Our Business – we don’t sell widgets. We offer services – thoughtful, consultative, relationship-driven solutions. Our sales cycle is longer and leans heavily on word-of-mouth. It takes time, trust, and timing.

Now let’s play this out and say we did hit the button on pushing them into Hubspot as a lead, as many organizations do every day.

The “leads” would make their way over to sales and be assigned to SDRs for follow up. Here’s the dirty little secret that marketing and sales knows but they don’t talk about.

Marketing knows those leads aren’t qualified but has a “lead target” to hit so off they go. Sales also knows that marketing knows those leads are qualified, but they have SDRs that need to be fed. This is the game that is being played across sales and marketing organizations every day.

Marketing with an increasingly vast number of tools and ways to capture anyone who merely glances at a website or email are able to capture more contacts than ever before. Tool providers using the wrong term “lead” for what is maybe at best a “response” are complicit in this charade.

Sales, which in the past would ignore (and still do in some ways) these non-qualified responses are now stuck with sales capacity they need to make productive. They’re using reps to qualify “leads” that aren’t leads, in the hope of making them leads. Sounds ridiculous right, because it is.

Even though they know the chances of a conversion are low, I’ve never met a sales manager that will give up sales resources voluntarily. The mentality of “the more reps I have, the better shot I have of making quota” is pervasive.

All of this to hopefully expose the charade so that sales and marketing can have a candid conversation about how ineffective the game is and finally take steps towards realistic performance goals.

The winner in all of this? Potentially everyone – marketing, sales and most importantly prospects who are just trying to learn who you are. and what you do, or to simply just read some content that you have posted.

Just because you can track every visitor doesn’t mean you should hand them off. Let your prospects explore. Let them learn about your company, your services, and your value – at their own pace. Let them raise their hand when they’re ready.

It’ll save your team time, effort, and energy – and likely lead to better conversations when the moment’s right.

The post What Happens If You Don’t Follow Up on MQLs? appeared first on Carbon Design.

Late last year LinkedIn changed its algorithm, signaling a pivot in its business strategy and taking a dramatic shift. The question is, why?

Has LinkedIn come to the realization that other social platforms are increasingly coming after business (especially small business) or is it their advertising model they covet?

The truth is, LinkedIn needs growth. Revenue growth has slowed to 9% in 2023 and 2024, driven mostly by premium subscription and talent solutions.

And new growth looks like advertising, and lots of it. The old free “networking” platform is quickly transitioning to becoming an ad platform.

The Change

Many users of the platform will tell you they saw a dramatic decrease in their engagement metrics at the end of last year. According to Richard van der Blom and Just Connecting’s Algorithm Insights Report 2025, overall organic reach has declined 50% over the last year in hope of connecting content with the right audience…quality over quantity.

LinkedIn’s AI-driven ranking systems now resemble those of platforms like Instagram and TikTok, meaning you are more likely to see content coming from less creators, and more from creators you engage and/or connect with. Compared to the past which was more balanced towards professional relevance and interest.

Just as the other platforms mentioned have created content “rabbit holes” to dive into, those same content holes are being created in a quest to drive deeper engagement. Where it was once believed that LinkedIn favored organic content creators, it’s now fully on the side of the content consumers.  For businesses, this change (unless you have a broad following) means that little of the content that you are sharing on your corporate page will make it through to your audiences organically.  In fact, according to a report, organic corporate page content showing in a LI feed has now fallen to 2% in 2024.

The Big Push for Video

What is increasing is video. Lots of it. The use of video increased by 69% in the past year according to the Algorithm report and Daniel Shapero, LinkedIn’s COO who stated that viewer time has increased by 36% year-over-year.

To continue the push to video, LinkedIn has now built a staple of 50+ B2B influencers to promote it. They’ve signed business partnerships with well-known content creators, like Steven Bartlett (The Diary of a CEO), Guy Raz (How I Built This), and Allie K. Miller (AI Business), to make more video content for the platform. Anyone want to guess why?

If you guessed ‘to sell more advertising’, you’re correct. Mr. Shapero also stated that advertising revenues saw significant growth in the quarter, and they see video as a great way to extend business reach.

What Does it Mean for Business and Paid Social?

The first question…is LinkedIn an important media channel for your business? If so, then the second question is, what is the goal? What is your expectation – do you see it as an awareness or demand generation channel?

If it is the latter, you may find the new direction frustrating. LinkedIn pushes video mostly for reach and impressions. And, as I mentioned in my last post, LinkedIn posts and promotions are very difficult to connect to business impact metrics. You may be better off investing in LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.

If the goal is awareness, then you are in luck! Here’s what you need to do in order to align with the new direction.

• Ramp up video – Identify thought leaders who are camera ready to use for short form videos. Candidates should be subject matter leaders and not salespeople.
•  Videos should be vertical in format and under 1 min in run time.
• Shift budget from promoting posts on your LinkedIn corporate page to higher performing thought leadership ads sponsoring videos.
• Posting video should be done by the person featured and reshared by the corporate page…and hopefully, employees within your organization.
• Focus on storytelling. Personal stories perform best. Go easy on the selling.
• Link your metrics to track performance from impressions to form fill or website visit.

Will it Work?

LinkedIn says that the changes have been made in an effort to bring more of the content consumers want by mining engagement data. By doing this, it is restricting the organic reach of content creators. And that organic reach drove results, according to The Social Shepherd, 77% of B2B marketers said that organic content and engagement produced the best results.

Now those creators will be ones who will be buying the ads. The question is, can they create the quality and style of content that will fit the new advertising vehicles, like Thought Leadership ads.

Will LinkedIn influencers be effective? If you don’t have the inhouse talent to build a following you may consider “renting” one. But, a business audience is very different from a consumer audience. Will LinkedIn influencers be creditable enough to move an audience to take action?

All good questions that we’ll watch play out over time. In the short-term ad revenue will grow, but in the long run, will it adversely impact user experience? One thing is certain, you will see more sponsored content, especially from LinkedIn, on your feed.

I don’t knock LinkedIn for making the pivot. TikTok owns small business retail and Instagram is coming for corporations. Business buyers are consumers and have been programmed to prefer video on social feeds.

Users of “free” platforms also get that is a price to pay for usage, but will this pivot drive users to spend less time on it. Currently, 16% of users check in daily for an average of 1 minute and 17 seconds, according to The Social Shepherd.

Let’s also keep in mind that the platform was built and grew by catering to recruiters and job seekers. Can it balance the need for revenue growth while staying true to its original charter?

It’s a big bet and only time will tell. TikTok goes the clock…

The post LinkedIn Wants to Be the TikTok of Business: Will it Work? appeared first on Carbon Design.

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