Marketing Dopamine • October 3, 2026

The Resume Problem

When I looked closely at my LinkedIn connections, I noticed something I should have seen years ago.
Most of them are not active. They have a profile, a job title, maybe a photo from a few years back. Then nothing.
I was not judging them. I was one of them. For a long time, I used LinkedIn exactly the same way.
We built our networks the way we build a resume.

A resume is a record of where you have been. A relationship is a reason to stay in touch.

Somewhere along the way, someone told me that if you run a business, you belong on LinkedIn, because that is where the business people are. That is true, as far as it goes. The business people are there. Many of them are just not home.
A network built like a resume looks impressive and does very little. The connections were collected at a conference, after a meeting, during a job change. Each one made sense at the time. Few of them turned into an ongoing conversation, because nothing was ever designed to keep the conversation going.
That changes how I think about growth. A larger list of dormant connections is not an audience. A small group of people who actually read, respond, and return is worth far more than a thousand names who never will.

You cannot build community out of people who stopped showing up. You build it with the ones who are still here.

The work is not to wake up the whole list. It is to find the people who are already awake, and start there.
Lisa Carmichael is the author of The Marketing Dopamine Workbook: From Awareness to Action, available now, a companion to her book Marketing Dopamine: What Your Brain Is Really Doing When You Think You’re Building a Business, coming soon. Learn more at marketingdopamine.com