Ron Fleming’s LinkedIn Profile Fanpage

When Amazon disbanded our content team in November 2015, I made some neophyte efforts to hit the ground running, hop on a moving train, or whatever metaphor you prefer that means “find work that resembled what I did at Amazon as soon as possible.” Most of the former colleagues I contacted for advice were generous with their time and patient with my inexperience picking up after a dried-up gig. Some seemed to go out of their way to help, in fact, and for that I’m grateful.

But the hooks I had in the water ultimately caught no fish, so I turned my attention toward beefing up my professional presence online in order to make more palatable the one thing I feared, dreaded, and avoided as a freelancer: self-promotion. Marketing. Yuck.

So I did some reading, and one bit of advice consistently offered by people in the know was to make sure that my social profiles linked to one another in order to increase my visibility online. And that’s what I began to do.

Now, I am an intermittent Facebook user, so I am not familiar with every feature available or nuanced term on that platform. This fact becomes self-evident when I add that, in an effort to add a link in my Facebook profile that points to my LinkedIn profile, I somehow ended up creating an entirely new page, administered by me and linked to my personal Facebook account. The title of that page: Ron Fleming’s LinkedIn Profile. Moreover, it was a full-on “business” page optimized for precision-targeted, paid promotion of just about anything a person could read or click on the page.

At first I just flipped back and forth between my two wholly self-contained Facebook identities, as confused about what I’d created as I was amused at the obvious mistake. I almost reflexively deleted the page, as I’d had no intention of creating it in the first place. But then it dawned on me: If a simple profile link from one social account to another is good enough to be almost universally recommended, wouldn’t an entire page devoted to that connection be even better?

Well, maybe and maybe not. Truth is, my full-featured LinkedIn profile promotional page has had little to no impact on my actual LinkedIn profile. But I have learned a lot of interesting things about Facebook advertising. And I’ve had fun with the absurdity of the whole thing. This is how Ron Fleming’s LinkedIn Profile Fanpage was born, and this is why I simply can’t let it go.

Welcome to my sense of humor.