LinkedIn Corp. offers one of the industry-leading social networks and online communities in use across today’s fast-paced information technology industry. LinkedIn’s focus on business-to-business networking and facilitating the sharing of ideas and strategies has won the trust of technology businesses. More and more business professionals are turning to LinkedIn because of its overall effectiveness in the marketplace. It is the focus on business with technology that has IT business leaders adopting this social networking platform.
Not unlike many of its counterparts, LinkedIn does have privacy challenges, according to many C-level executives. Many are unaware of the apparent risks to corporate contacts when setting up their LinkedIn accounts. While these security concerns are not a showstopper, there are many settings turned on by default that automatically allow for browsing of contacts and also leave a trace of who visited which profiles.
As LinkedIn is built on a community and like many other online networks, embraces the sharing of information and contacts, how do businesses balance the foundations of LinkedIn with the compliance and confidentiality measures of business today?
Many organizations, as part of a social media acceptable-use policy, are now requiring that specific changes to LinkedIn privacy settings be made, ensuring business contacts and information are kept confidential.
The following recommended key privacy setting guidelines are ideal for organizations leveraging LinkedIn to make sure a certain degree of privacy remains in place. These settings are accessible through the SETTINGS menu in the top right corner of your LinkedIn page. Here is that main menu:
If you click on Settings, you will see an option for “Connections Browse” under Privacy Settings. That option allows your contacts (those connected directly to you) to browse your LinkedIn connections. Disabling this feature will prevent your connections from seeing whom you are directly connected to. This will make sure key vendor contacts and clients connected through LinkedIn remain confidential.
Also under Privacy Settings, you will find Profile Views. This setting controls the “breadcrumbs” you leave behind when you visit another person’s LinkedIn profile. Engaging this setting will leave your LinkedIn network confidential from those looking to harvest information about you. When you visit a profile on LinkedIn, your information becomes available to that member; turning this off disables this information from being left. You can choose to leave your full details -- your job, industry, and title only -- or simply leave no trace that you were there.
Privacy online is important across many technology organizations large and small. These recommendations can protect your key contacts. In addition, you also will protect your identity when viewing the profiles of others. This is something your IT firm or department can share as a matter of policy with your peers and clients.
This is just a first step. It is extremely important that organizations ensure privacy is maintained at all times online. Social networks have the potential to connect the business with the market when used correctly. I advise that IT departments check security on other online services such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs in addition to having a corporate social media acceptable use policy for all employees.
— Stuart Crawford is a strategic online communications and IT marketing professional with Ulistic.
That's good advice, Nathan. But I also don't completely trust privacy settings. There are sites that can pull pictures and other information from people supposedly private Facebook accounts. My policy has always been to consider anything I post -- whether it is on my blog, FB, or Twitter to be completely public. I don't post family photos or private information.I also don't use social networking sites for confidential conversation.
Or someone could do what I've decided is best for myself and the main organization I work for; add a corporate Twitter account and add it to your Linkedin profile. I have various Twitter accounts for various projects and separate startup I founded, just as I have separate accounts for Facebook (personal and business).
If people can at least try to keep social networking accounts independent, they will save the individual and company a lot of embarrassment in the future. Privacy settings, modify them. Never trust any social networking organization's default privacy settings.
Good point but many CEO's are concerned that with open policies on LinkedIn for example a competitor may go through and harvest contacts and even ideas from one of their salesperson's LinkedIn accounts.
Twitter and LinkedIn. Yes the option exists to share tweets to LinkedIn but I really don't recommend it if you are someone who lives on Twitter all day. If you have the setting that takes every tweet and sends it to LinkedIn well you can annoy some of your LinkedIn friends.
I don't recommend linking tweets to LinkedIn...it is like speaking german in France, some people may understand you but others may not and wonder why you are not speaking french. Twitter with their hashtags and other shortcuts is a different language than the LinkedIn world.
You're right, Nathan. There is an option to link the LinkedIn account with other feeds. Though all your Tweets can then be seen by those in your network, the default setting doesn't send all that information in the same way that group digests get emailed to the subscirbers. Of course, those also sometimes reflect shallow opinions in the discussons and comments.
As tamiur-tz said, those who use LinkedIn consider it a tool for business networking. They do not post personal pictures or details about their health or relationships like they do on FB.
- Unless of course they were foolish enough to add their personal, non-business Twitter account to their Linked in account as I've seen so many do. Then those of us who are unlucky enough to be part of their network will be inundated with their personal and often shallow opinions and irrelevant "IRL (In Real Life) updates".
As tamiur-tz said, those who use LinkedIn consider it a tool for business networking. They do not post personal pictures or details about their health or relationships like they do on FB. In fact, some are rather derisive of LinkedIn because they see it as a bunch of resumes talking at each other about their qualifications. Sometimes even the group boards are turned into opportunitites for shamelss self-promotion by the many freelancers and other job seekers who frequent them rather than true cdiscussion But the bottom line for the users is getting the job.
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