Week 9: Email, LinkedIn and DMs
Email, LinkedIn and DMs as different environments for being skimmed.
19 April 2027
Every failure named so far assumed email’s particular constraints: a subject line, no read receipt, an inbox the reader chose to check. This lecture asks what happens when the same message moves somewhere else.
Before the lecture
This is just to get a quick understanding before the lecture. The examples and the rest are in the lecture, so it’s advisable you attend.
In brief#
This week’s failure is platform mismatch: copying a cold email into a LinkedIn message or a DM and expecting it to read the same way it would in an inbox. A LinkedIn message gets skimmed inside a feed the reader didn’t choose to open right now, and a DM sits inside a channel with its own expectations about how fast people reply. It matters because length tolerance and follow-up cadence both change across platforms, so a message that would pass in email can fail purely on where it landed.
Outline#
- skimming constraints specific to email, feeds, and DM threads
- which failure modes carry across platforms unchanged, and which don’t
- what has to change beyond length: tone, cadence, acceptable asks
- adapting one message across three platforms