Of Baked Potatoes and Corporate Branding
My favorite LinkedIn-related quote of the past few weeks is from Erik Dafforn at ClickZ, who asks, “When does social media matter in SEM?“:
LinkedIn has been a workhorse of social networking sites, sort of a baked potato to FaceBook’s bag of Skittles. People likely spend less time per visit on LinkedIn than they do on other networking sites. This is fine for most of its users, as LinkedIn is designed to work for you while you’re doing your job, rather than trying to avoid it.
I love that last line! (my emphasis)
Erik then goes on to offer some very sound advice for companies:
Your HR department or some other official body must get into LinkedIn to consolidate and verify certain issues. Chances are that scads of your employees already use the site and have listed your company in their profiles but have been inaccurate in describing the company. As a result, LinkedIn company profiles are only as accurate as the details individual users have added.
An employee’s profile is not “owned” by their employer, but it’s perfectly reasonable — in fact, I’d say it should be obligatory — for companies to review employee’s profiles and make sure that they are representing the corporate brand correctly and consistently.
There’s a fine line here — you don’t want all your employees sounding like robots programmed to recite the company’s mission as a mantra. You want to give employees leeway to offer their own unique personal perspective on the company. But you also want to reinforce the corporate brand.
Just handle with care. Think of it as a training opportunity.
Image: Jesse Sneed via Flickr
