LinkedIn Answers is a pretty neat tool. People post questions on certain topics, like PR or Writing, and the LinkedIn universe offers answers.
It’s a great way to get your questions answered and it’s useful for people who want to position themselves as experts (and enjoy the karmic benefits of helping others).
Sometimes people post to the wrong categories. Or they ask dumb questions that could be answered in a Google search. And sometimes the people who answer are guilty of being too promotional, recommending their company/product/service as THE answer to every problem.
But this incident here is the most egregious abuse of the system I’ve seen yet:
It’s not even worth listing all the ways this is wrong. Like I said, people do dumb things on LinkedIn Answers all the time. They don’t always do the dumb thing four times in row …
No, the truly egregious thing about this incident? This MCG place apparently is a marketing firm. Ouch. (I won’t link to them but they’re easy enough to find on Google.)
For their sake, I’m hoping this was the work of a misguided intern. Or maybe it was a demonstration for their clients of what not to do. An early (or late) April Fool’s joke maybe? Perhaps they were hacked?
Whatever. For me and the many others who flagged these posts as spam, it was mainly a curious annoyance.
But somewhere in Florida these people are counseling clients on effective marketing techniques. Good luck with that!