The line between personal and professional on social networks has been much discussed already, but a new angle (for me) arose over a coffee yesterday.
As a CEO, how do you feel about the information being disseminated about your organisation by current or recently exiting employees? As Marketing Director, have you considered the description of your organisation in the Company Profile pages?
I’ve found these pages on LinkedIn to be enormously valuable in figuring out what is going on at a company I want to talk to – and understand. Take a glance at wunderloop’s profile on LinkedIn.
We’re in quite good shape here: the description of what the company does was written by one of the sales directors, so it gives a decent view. But it’s not the ‘authorised version’ per the company’s Director of Marketing. For a start, the styling of the company as ‘wunderLOOP’ is something that really winds her up. (I’ve asked LinkedIn to change that, so it may not be visible when you visit the site).
Other companies – I won’t name and shame, but I’ve seen some great examples – are less well served by their declared profiles, which can be edited by pretty much any employee.
So far so ho-hum. But here’s the biter: my friend reflected his COO’s deep concern that the details about current employees – and more importantly recent departures and hires – had the potential to breach commercial / confidentiality interests. Are people updating their profiles giving away commercially sensitive information? Is it their data to share?
Of course, my argument is that you’re talking about public domain information being made more accessible, so no big deal, legally.
But to me this mirrors the shift of control we are seeing in marketing communications from controlled information from the organisation to crowd-sourced information. In other words, what matters is not what you, as the organisation, say about yourself so much as what others say about you.
However, a dozen or so years in online marketing have shown that success of placing campaigns is rarely single-dimensional. In fact I’d tend to draw it as a compass, with the main axes pointing to geographic, timing (e.g. day and day part), socio-demographic and behaviour/interest based. In the centre of the compass I’d put context – because that is always a factor, regardless of the other targeting elements.
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