Breaking news – yet another high profile company has been damaged because an employee included confidential information in their LinkedIn profile!
At least it’s been 18 months since I’ve had to mention this, but come on, it’ll be fun…
Tough to be HP today
But here’s the part where they go astray – they’re blaming the error on the “Hazard of Sharing LinkedIn Profiles” when in fact, the error is McClellan’s for placing secret company information on a public site…
We’ve been here before
And as I said before – it wouldn’t be funny if this were the first time, but it’s not – this seems to happen much to regularly.
The fix
Just don’t do it.
Tell company employees that they should not do it either.
Especially the ones that are working on secret projects – if they can’t talk about the work they are doing when they are at a conference, they can’t put it in their profiles either!
Or plan to be highlighted…
And I suppose the alternative is to have a contract with a PR firm that will cover your behind when it happens – but planning to do that, and not taking the time to explain healthy use of social media would seem to be backwards.
(And remember – to be followed, your advice has to be reasonable. Saying “no use of LinkedIn is permitted” just means that they’ll ignore your advice, because you simply cannot control an employee in this manner. (regulated positions like financial advisers excluded;-))
But let me know, right?
So here’s my plea – if you happen to come across something like this, let me know and we’ll break it here, and then get Bloomberg to quote us instead of the other way around, ok?
And if you’re not cool with giving me the skinny on your company, send me stuff about your competitor – that works for me.
To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock