One of my recent construction industry connections emailed me yesterday about a dilemma he was having in Linkedin. This is what he said:
Hi Su,
Trying to get my head around LinkedIn and connecting to people who work for direct competitor organisations. Whether that is a good thing or not? For example colleagues who used to work for XXXXX who now work for YYYYY. They may not want to connect with me and I wonder what I would think if they wanted to connect to me?I suppose it comes down to what one actually wants to use LinkedIn for and the nature of ones business. I guess that no secrets are being given away and it works both ways with their contacts and yours. At the end of the day is it anything much more than an online contacts book?
I’m a bit of a newbie to LinkedIn and would be interested in your thoughts.
Here is my reply:
Imagine that everything on the internet is public. It is.
Linkedin is an online contacts book, but in effect, it’s open for everyone to see.
Your competitors (e.g. people who might use information about you to their own advantage) are always able to find you online, even if Linkedin is relatively closed.
It is impossible to fight the ability of the internet to get into the nooks and crannies of your online life.
The answer is to embrace this openness.
Imagine the people in the pub you go for a drink with who are in the same industry. Linkedin is like that but searchable, so your comments stick around longer.
Google caches loads of things – including whole websites – see the WayBack Machine at Archive.org for examples. Even the website versions you thought were replaced are still there.
Twitter tweets get lost from searches after about a week – try scrolling back… but if someone ‘favourites’ one it can be found much further on, so you always need assume things can be found.
With Linkedin, your connections are visible, as is much of what you do – posting status updates, commenting on groups, answering questions. Embrace these things as means to keep in touch with all your network and beyond.
As an employer, think about what happens inside your organisation and outside as being separated by an information barrier. This was always the case. People leave by the door and come back. You can’t control what they say. You have to trust them to be discreet, just like you trust them to deliver.
As an employee, just think of the above the other way round. Be trusted. Use your network to demonstrate your professionalism, value, trustworthyness. Be an advocate for the business.
Of course you will connect with contacts of yours in other organizations.Think about them as people. Treat them just as you would in real life. Take them out for a drink and tell them what you’re doing, but only tell them what you would tell them anyway.
The barrier protecting the confidentiality of your organisation is still there, but you take it with you when you leave, and you operate it with your own discretion.
I understand where you connection was coming from in being concerned about having too much information available online. For those newer to social networking, this is an extremely common concern.
You rightly point out that there is already so much information available online, even information about us which wasn’t posted online by us. By focusing on the risks, we may very well overlook the enormous professional and personal benefits which are possible if one takes the time to learn how to best leverage the features of the site and then follow through. The huge benefits include building a solid reputation, making oneself more visible, building relationships with people who may be great resources for help, leads, etc.
It may seem intimidating at first, but there is a huge community of people online who are happy to help all newbies learn the ropes and use the tools to help them succeed.
Thanks for that considered response Irene, Irene has some great Linkedin resources over at Almost Savvy.
This is one of the most common concerns raised when I talk about LinkedIn, especially with corporate clients.
You are absolutely right to say that these risks exist anyway. I would question whether too much is being made of them. If I have built and maintain strong relationships with my clients and continually deliver strong results, should I be worried about a competitor contacting them?
If people have such concerns perhaps the first step should be to look at their client relationship management. Get that right and you should have no other concerns.
Spot on Andy – lets face it this information is useful to us all, one could say that there is no place to hide from poor customer service any longer.
People have been used to doing business in a closed fashion where they control the process. What scares companies about social media is the randomness and the fact that there is nowhere to hide if things go wrong. But every situation whether good or bad can be turned in your favour.
People always fear the unknown because there is no precedent in place to deal with the ‘newness’.Habits can be hard things to break! 😉
Good point Roberta,
One of my twitter contacts mentioned last night that large companies can be like oil tankers when you’re trying to change culture.
Paul Wilkinson wrote about that recently on his blog – Ban social media, lose the marketing war, lose staff – giving an example of the downside of at least understanding these technologies and responding constructively.
Good blog Su!
You have rightly highlighted the “but Google already sees you” enlightenment answer to your colleague. Most still don’t see this – found an ex-girlfriend recently through her donation to a charity, and excluded a candidate on a job application thanks to his comments on a “closed” right wing website.
The advantage of embracing social media is the management of the “what Google finds out about you” answer that an employer or competitor will find about about you. But you shouldn’t see LinkedIn as that.
LI is generally non-Google searchable, except your profile page. Hence, LI is a network connectivity/span tool over a SM platform. However, once connected LI sucks in your SM details, and distributes it to your network. Hence connecting on LI increases your managed exposure and hence leverage across connections: which can be colleagues, customers and competitors.
We have never been islands, and SM just highlights how connected we all are. Either you embrace and manage your reputation on it, or you will be rejected by others at some point because of it. Of all the SN’s, LI is the safest and most essential for anyone calling themselves a professional. Facebook in comparison is a personal and legal liability!
Thanks for your input Ian, your expertise on Linkedin continues to impress me!
Su
It’s all been said by your other contributers. Individuals have to make up their own minds – it basically hinges on their own confidence levels whether they engage in social media or not.
It is an obviously case of paranoia. All those doubters will probably ‘run a mile’ when they read about this.
In readiness for new Conservative Gvt, the Conservative Party will publish a Competiton with a prize worth £1,000,000 http://www.conservatives.com/News/News_stories/2009/12/Harnessing_the_wisdom_of_crowds_in_policy_making.aspx
My personal feeling: a new platform to allow crowd-sourcing is one thing, but let’s not hide the obvious response – Why spend £1m of taxpayers money when the answers are already out there within the social media platforms?
Hi Rhianne,
Thanks for your comment and the interesting link. I didn’t know about the competition and yes, think its a bit of a headline – grabber rather than a sensible way to consult the public. After all, Barack Obama didn’t invent a new platform to connect with his supporters, he went where they already were – very successfully.
In spite of their faults, the most popular social media platforms have one important quality which is hard to ignore – they are popular.