If you've trawled LinkedIn for longer than about seven minutes (yes, that's a scientifically verified number), you'll see someone post a screenshot of a wild DM interaction they've had with someone. Rude, obnoxious, abusive—nothing is off the table when it comes to the land of DMs.

If you haven't seen that, you'll definitely have seen someone complaining about how DMs are dead, how LinkedIn as a lead-gen platform sucks, how it's not worth their time to be there anymore. And then, underneath every single one of these posts is some dude or dudette who responds that it's not LinkedIn that's dead, it's their approach to DMs.

What's going on here? Why do some people love DMs whilst others hate them? Why do some people have such success with networking whilst others flop?

What is LinkedIn for?

We're going to explore, by way of this example, an important concept in communication that many are not aware of, or if they are, stridently ignore—context.

You see, what people are ignoring when it comes to LinkedIn DMs is the context of the DM. The platform is a business platform, often used for social selling, and so naturally, people assume that any DM that comes their way from someone they don't know is going to be a pitch. Why would someone talk to them otherwise? Because this is the case, they are primed by the context to see messages in that light.

You know how when you were a kid and your room was dark, so every shadow looked like a monster? It's not that it looked like a monster—to your brain, it was really a monster. It's only with more data that your brain resolved the picture it was seeing into something resembling reality, because your brain is a prediction machine, not a reality prediction machine. It sees what it expects or fears to be there, not what's actually there. Only with higher resolution data does the brain realise that what it saw was inaccurate and so it recalibrates.

This phenomenon is not only reserved for seeing bigfoot in the mountains or Jesus in a piece of toast; it happens quite often with all sorts of social situations as well. The message from your spouse that, when you read it, sounded a bit rude in your head (despite them leaving that morning in good spirits). The guy who cut you off in traffic who is obviously a class-A asshole (despite you not knowing anything about him). In normal parlance we call this "jumping to conclusions" and it's a normal part of how our brain works. Context loads up a half-formed mental picture in our minds, and the brain does the rest.

So back to LinkedIn—it's a business platform with people looking to sell you things. Most DMs you get are poorly veiled pitches or even outright pitch slaps. They're not even done in an interesting way—after all, we do have problems that need solving and would probably be open to a pitch that actually was something we needed. The bar for quality is quite low, and therefore your expectation of any given DM is, well, that it's probably a steaming pile of horse dung (I'm trying to stop swearing).

Context was a thing in Aristotle's time as well

Aristotle thought deeply about persuasive communication (was he also social selling?) and wrote about something he called decorum. This isn't the decorum of today's parlance—sit down and behave yourself. No, this is classical decorum—the expectations of the crowd when you get up to speak, and the fitting of the message to the "style." Horace, a Roman poet, put it like this:

A comic subject is not susceptible of treatment in a tragic style, and similarly the banquet of Thyestes cannot be fitly described in the strains of everyday life or in those that approach the tone of comedy. Let each of these styles be kept to the role properly allotted to it.

In other words, the message has to match the context, or meaning risks being lost. This extends far beyond the mere ephemeral context of the message though. It extends to anything that the audience expects—dress, tone of voice, method of delivery, whatever. Decorum is, in other words, what's expected. What's normal.

But once you realise what that context is, what the expectations are and how they're being used and understood by the audience, you can profitably play with it to your benefit.

Understanding context allows us to be interesting

Context is often out of my control, so we're going to take it as a given. No matter how many posts I put up on LinkedIn railing about bad DMs or the algorithm or whatever, I'm not going to materially change anything. So we'll relate to it like gravity and put it as a given in our equations.

What is in my control, however, is the message, and the expectations of that message. I can state outright that I'm not selling (this only works if you're really not selling, otherwise when you do end up selling your reputation takes a massive hit). You can show up genuinely interested in the person you're talking to, not as a unit of economic gain but as a person. You can talk to them as if they were a friend and not a corporate robot like everyone seems to act on LinkedIn (have you noticed that btw? It's the weirdest thing. Like, we all know that you binge watch Netflix in your spare time and love a good chinese takeaway. Why can't we just talk like humans?)

In short—you can violate the expectations that people have of you in the DMs (this goes for all contexts, but we're using LI as an example). Be friendly, kind, giving. Give before you take. Show a little personality. These things are so effective because of the context in which they're in.

All of life is like this

But it's not just LinkedIn that's like this. It's all communication; context is king. If you're looking to have a deep conversation but you're tired, on the go, on your phone, you're in a context that's not conducive to deep ideas.

Screenwriters have started to adapt to this in recent times. I don't have a TV at home (following James Clear's advice to make the habits you don't want to do harder to do) but I was travelling recently with my brother to Chicago to visit family. Whilst we were there, someone had the TV on and my brother (who also doesn't have a TV) commented that he thought the dialogue was the worst he'd heard in a long time. "Everything is so over acted, so dramatic!"

I explained to him that that's on purpose. The context for TV watching has changed. Screenwriters understand that people no longer watch TV on its own—they're on their phones as well, maybe even on their laptops and phones. To compensate, they've made the dialogue and plot lines explicit and over the top so that you can follow with minimal effort. Context changes, and they change with it.

That's why it kills me when a speaker gets up at a conference and starts to launch into a wildly complex keynote—literally one guy is following you and the rest have all spaced out. The context of a keynote doesn't allow for the exploration of complex ideas. Have you ever watched a TED talk? They're about one thing for this exact reason. If you're mildly paying attention, you get the idea in the first five minutes and can save yourself the other thirteen.

It's because of the medium—the context. Think of the last deep thing you read—a paper, a book, whatever. You probably sat down and put aside time to deeply focus on. You're able to go back and reference things you didn't understand or remember. Live speeches are not like that—if you space out for a few minutes, you can't just go back to the top of the page and re-read, so the message has to be that much simpler and easier to digest.

The next time you talk, keep this in mind

Have something to say, by all means. Sell something. Have big ideas. Sit down for that difficult conversation. But for God's sake, remember context. You can't defeat it, just like you can't go floating off to the moon. It will take over everything, it will warp your message, it will break your heart. Godspeed to you.

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