Linkedin is a business focused social network, it started in 2003 and is now owned by Microsoft. Linkedin is a brilliant resource for the vast majority of its members. Digitising business network's has allowed people to grow larger networks with less geographic contrasts. The ability to share industry specific information within these networks is very effective, especially in an ever changing world.
Despite the positives there is an undefined limit to the benefit of this information. The limit is a result of incomplete, incorrect or outright lying on members Linkedin profiles. Company pages, and companies brands, are currently associated with a mixture of genuine employees, and those who, I suspect quite accidentally, also suggest they work at these companies.
This is typically a result of people not using the site correctly through laziness or misunderstandings rather than in an intentionally disruptive manner. I’ve seen a number of examples of misinformation on LinkedIn. Situations where after a promotion the current role is updated, making it appear, incorrectly that the individual has held the position for longer than they have. It’s not that uncommon for profiles to be updated with new roles whilst leaving the old role as current too, something which is a useful function but could be avoided by LinkedIn prompting the user to check if this is correct and I’ve even seen employees have moved companies and simply started another profile, leaving their original profile, now with incorrect information, forever.
Online there are many examples where people have just blatantly lied on their profile to increase their employability. In the past exaggerated experience on a CV would have needed to be quizzed by HR at the recruiting company, but now its online for your whole professional network to see.
The misinformation impacts the Company page on LinkedIn more than ever as the LinkedIn Corporation puts increasing effort into allowing companies to market themselves using the site. You can post vacancies through LinkedIn, advertise these to very targeted and specific people, which is a great feature by the way, and those would-be employees can even apply for a role right through LinkedIn.
Companies pages surface information such as number of employees, office locations and which university current employees are alumni of - all of which can be false through incorrect profiles, and that’s not all, LinkedIn serves even more metrics to its premium subscribers. Job hunters, for example, using LinkedIn Premium can see staff retention data, average tenure and even salary data which is all gleamed from the data provided by those who are associated both corrected and incorrectly with your company page.
LinkedIn is a storefront for your potential employees and, to some extent, clients, and it’s not proactively in companies control. LinkedIn does have a reactive system whereby companies can flag or report some incorrect information but this process is not straightforward and is not always successful.
For the company page section I believe more should be done to protect companies brands in order for LinkedIn to maintain its dominance in the professional social network market.
What could be done longterm?
Looking at options to reduce the risk of fake profiles for current employment takes us back to those pre-2006 early years at Facebook. For the first couple of years Facebook limited user accounts to people with email addresses from the select universities and colleges which it was targeting. This was a brilliant marketing strategy as it allowed the site to scale in a controllable and linear fashion whilst serving its target audience. Could email address validation work for LinkedIn today?
I think that a verified email, using the same TLD, would be the easiest way to implement this validation.
The issue with this system is that not all employees have company email addresses, and, sometimes, those email addresses use different TLD’s (top level domain, like google.com) to the companies website. In large companies, conglomerates, and media organisations this is often the case. It could also cause issues for those on long term secondments, or contract staff. This could be solved by a process whereby each members association with a company requires approval from the company.
If you set the employment date in the past, a key function for users to maintain a good record of their career, you would need to be able to set employment with any company as you would not have a verifiable email. Past employees aren’t shown on Company pages which limits past employees impact on a companies brand.
So in the short term is there anything which can be done?
At least one Linkedin member with an email address TLD which matches the company website can become the Company Page administrator. This person can then report misinformation on profiles, job adverts etc. which are incorrectly associated with the account. Its a pretty crude tool though immediately removing the associated content when really it would be good to see a more nuanced approach where the owner of the original content is notified that its been reported as inaccurate and given an opportunity to correct it before its takedown/disassociation.
The point is though that this is an administrative burden on the Company Page admin. Companies often end up on LinkedIn through employee action not company action and despite all of the benefits which can come from idea sharing, success celebrating etc, it could all be tainted by rogue comments from an individual who is incorrectly associated with the company page. So in short, as with most things, more and more effort is required to tame the increasing scale of the problem generated by the ever increasing number of data points which can be added to users accounts.
For me the big ticket item is incorrectly associated job adverts, I really think Linkedin should have a more robust procedure for these.
This all stems from the level of trust, or distrust you need to have when dealing online. We’ve been through a significant transition from widespread pseudonym use in the late 90’s to using your true identities online. The rise of Facebook and Linkedin especially are both places where your real name is used. Twitter are trying to replicate this, but it’s not an easy problem to solve. Some of the best of twitter comes from ‘non-real’ accounts, such as twitter bots providing updates on the weather or the latest scores from a particular sport.
No discussion about online trust is complete with a mention of the Block Chain. Bitcoin is an example of a continually updating a group-based trust algorithm but this expends a large amount of computing power to maintain the ledger (record of transactions). We are seeing Linkedin begin lean more heavily on community feedback for trustworthiness of some profile info which is ‘almost’ like using their members’ knowledge like a distributed trust ledger. Perhaps this is one step towards a more accurate Linkedin community of profiles.
Prefer to listen to this? Episode of the DMATHER.COM Podcast is based on this blogpost.
