The Thought Follower Gazette #1 - Profiles & Potatoes

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1. LinkedIn’s ‘About’ Section has changed

Psssst - things have changed on LinkedIn. And I don’t just mean the fluffy inspirational quotes & people posting their own Tweets with funny graphics.

The ‘About’ section on your profile has flipped. Turns out, it’s not About You. It’s about your reader.

The days of whacking people over the head with slabs of text about your experience, credentials & qualifications are over. That’s 2014 Linkedin.

A winning LinkedIn strategy in 2024 invites your network into your world.

It’s about who you help & how you do it.

Solopreneur or Founder? Write about your ideal customer, what they’re struggling with & how you solve those problems.

Executive or C-suite leader? Write about how you help your team, the business challenges you solve & what that means for your boss / stakeholders / peers.

Here’s my checklist of the Top 5 things that make your LinkedIn profile boring. Try to avoid these:

2. An 18th Century marketing campaign…for potatoes?

In the 17th Century, the Spanish brought potatoes into Europe from South America.

But outside of Spain & Ireland, most European countries only used potatoes as feed for livestock.

The French even went so far as to ban the cultivation of potatoes, believing it caused leprosy.

At the same time, food poverty was a major strain on the French population.

Enter Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, army pharmacist & potato-eating prisoner of war.

Parmentier had dined on potatoes as a prisoner of war in Prussia during the 7-years War, so he knew they were fine to eat.

On his return to Paris in 1763, he kicked off an ingenious four-pronged marketing campaign to generate demand for the humble potato.

Parmentier’s brilliant strategy included:

1. Authoring a cookbook on how to make potato bread (thought leadership content, anyone?)

2. Serving potato dishes at his dinner parties for high profile guests like Benjamin Franklin (a classic executive roundtable)

3. Giving bouquets of potato flowers to the King & Queen (influencer marketing 101)

But la pièce de résistance? La crème de la crème? Le coup de…OK that’s enough.

Our legendary potatoes-man created a sense of scarcity & value for the potato. How?

Parmentier had a large patch of land which he used to grow potatoes.

One day, he made a big show of posting armed guards to surround the patch, in full view of the peasants. He was creating a sense of scarcity, sending a message: those round things buried in the dirt must be valuable.

And then he did something really clever.

He removed the guards from their posts at night, so the peasants were free to steal his potatoes.

The rest is history.

Fast forward 250 years and you won’t find a bistro in France which doesn’t have potato on the menu.

Parmentier was immortalised with the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest accolade, and more importantly became the namesake for the French version of Shepherd’s Pie - Hachis Parmentier. This recipe is particularly delicious.

The Thought Follower, Your #1 source of LinkedIn advice & writing tips, plus a fresh anecdote each week to dazzle dinner party guests & help you seem smarter around the office water cooler. If someone forwarded this to you, why not subscribe here?