For the past year I’ve been running a LinkedIn marketing campaign promoting…ummm…myself. Seeking either project work for Koerner Design or a new full time gig.

I just noticed that I surpassed 100,000 LinkedIn impressions across the past 365 days. Considering that is purely earned impressions (no paid advertising) and I wasn’t aligned with any major corporate PR initiatives to piggyback on during that time, that seems pretty good.

Hardly anybody actually shares what works or doesn’t on LinkedIn, so let’s do a play-by-play on some of my top posts. Here’s the top five from the past 365 days (as of 12-April-2023):

My #1 post this year, with 7,883 impressions, is my travel pic at the Barcelona Pavilion, in which I was trying to promote my conference session Every Surface a Screen at Integrated Systems Europe. Sadly, these vapid social posts work – they get lots of clicks and virality – but that is not what I want for my personal brand.

Thankfully, it looks like my #2 post, a future envisioning piece titled Healing Pixels is going to surpass that (within a couple days of writing this post) to become my top post of the year, having racked up 7,452 impressions in just 5 days and steadily climbing.

#3 at 6,722 impressions was my early experimentation with AI generated imagery in Midjourney, a topic which then exploded to nearly consume all popular and business media. I was early exploring that trend.

#4 at 6,474 impressions is my sharing of the Lightly launch. My efforts at promoting sustainable design for lighting have consistently been well received in social and at live events (and make sure to read to the bottom to see my all-time biggest post)!

#5 at 4,703 impression was my revisiting the topic of DC power micro/nanogrids. The video of my conference presentation on DC power at Integrated Systems Europe back in 2020 has been a slow burner – popular with a niche audience – but steadily accumulated 3.7k views on YouTube.

In the next tranche, my post sharing the amazing Light & Magic series on Disney+ was quite popular. For sure, a bit of another vapid social post, but I study the art of innovation and referencing the series was at least legit for my personal brand. Posts on Michael Eisner and my holiday post on roller coasters were purely for fun. Also for fun was sharing an interesting article on Frank Gehry’s commercial ROI.

Surprisingly, a post I thought was almost a “throwaway” for some old colleagues of mine earned 4,243 impressions, looking at my abandoned projects from Micron.

Last comments: I made a series of “future envisioning” conceptual pieces that performed OK, but not as predictable as I would have hoped. Healing Pixels was genuinely a viral hit at 7,452 impressions, clearly reaching far beyond my direct network of followers. But Reimagining Fitting Rooms at 2,819 impressions, Immersive Digital Walls at 2,212 impressions, Sumptuous Darkness at 1,761 impressions and Enchanting Hotel Rooms at 1,433 impressions clearly didn’t reach virality, even with the snappy names and gorgeous carousels filled with eye candy. Clearly, I don’t really understand the algorithm gods!

The Best of the Best?

So what have been my biggest posts of all time?

My second biggest post, at 9,592 impressions in 2021, was another retro glimpse, looking at the beautiful industrial design we did during the glory days 15 years ago at Color Kinetics:

And my top post of all time?

Coming in at a whopping 13,809 views in 2019 was when I shared winning the U.S. DOE’s Manufacturing Innovator Challenge for my popular “bamboo pendant” concept:

See that? Society is redeemed! My posts about design for genuine sustainability ultimately trounced the vapid travel pic!