LinkedIn Privacy

I had the following email, which I’m sharing here, with the English tidied up a little.

LinkedIn’s privacy settings have changed, meaning your picture can be used for their social advertising.

This has been a blanket change, rather than opt in, so it’s worth letting others know as well.

LinkedIn obviously recognised the value of trust in business, hence using the images of  people known to the advertisement target. I am surprised, however, that they haven’t seen the flip side of this and taken it to its logical conclusion. Creating a false trust can at best be short lived. In a business network which has previously been trustworthy, if a little staid (business and conservatism make good bedfellows), this could be very damaging to LinkedIn and individuals alike.

I’m disappointed that this is twice in one week that I’ve had good cause to write somewhat negative reports on a network that until very recently had more trust than the others.

I couldn’t see the point of business contenders like Viadeo – just more to manage – but LinkedIn could find itself with a serious challenger if it continues to abuse the trust of people who have been loyal to it for years by failing to consider the user as it grows.

The email: 

I received the following message from a contact and I am forwarding it for your awareness and due consideration.

Without attracting too much publicity, LinkedIn has updated their privacy conditions. Without any action from your side, LinkedIn is now permitted to use your name and picture in any of their advertisements.

Some simple actions to be considered:

1. Place the cursor on your name at the top right corner of the screen. From the small  pull down menu that appears, select “settings”
2. Then click “Account” on the left/bottom
3. In the column next to Account, select the option “Manage Social Advertising”
4. Finally un-tick the box “LinkedIn may use my name and photo in social advertising”
5. and Save

How to inform your connections? Simple! Via ‘Inbox > Compose message’ in Linkedin, you can send a message to up to 50 connections at once, all of whom will appreciate being informed.

NMA Awards now open

By Claire Thompson, freelance PR Consultant (Reading, UK)

The annual New Media Age awards for digital goodness and innovation are now open.

Key dates:

ENTRY DEADLINE

Tuesday 13th March 2012

AWARDS CEREMONY

Thursday 28th June 2012

I’m always amazed at how few businesses do put themselves forward. I suspect that in our day-to-day routines it’s easy to focus on what’s not done, or could be done better, rather than celebrating some of the great things that so many in the digital field achieve on an almost daily basis.

Did LinkedIn Just Set it’s Path to LinkedOut?

An email arrived today. Linked In and Tweets. My soul soared. At first glance it looked like LinkedIn was removing the Twitter spam from its update streams. Sense reigned!

It was a shortlived euphoria. I’d misread. LinkedIn is not only NOT eliminating the ability to send updates from Twitter to LinkedIn accounts. it’s stopped supporting the standalone Tweets Application.

I have no idea what LinkedIn wants to achieve. Pure hypothesis might be:
- it wants to appear more on trend and sees Twitter as a way to do it
- it’s playing a numbers game so that it can show exponential growth in status updates to investors, who notoriously overvalue numbers of users as a factor rather than profits (No, the dotcom boom appears not to have taught some people much.)

Read more »

On the future of mobile

If any PR person out there is questioning why mobile is important, they need shooting. Give up and go home. Really. With more people owning mobiles than fridges, not considering the mobile aspects to anything we do is unforgiveable.

(And yes, I know I need to dogfood where this site is concerned – I’m on the case!)

So here are a few predictions from last weeks mobile meetup (at Tech Hub) in highly visual form (note that these are the concerns from a primarily developmental perspective):

Mobile predictions for 2012

It was fantastic that Mike Beardmore  managed to capture a fantastic talk from this week’s Reading Geek. It’s well worth watching for an insight into the big trends.

Given the predictions here for heavy duty, faster downloads to mobile this year, and absolutely nothing to do with Apple, (indeed lots of focus on busting away from Apple/itunes) I’m beginning to regret having upgraded my phone from Blackberry to the iphone 4S already this year. Combined with all sorts of predictions about a Nokia comeback with their rather sexy new phone, I will, as usual, be the laggard stuck with yesterday’s phone for two years.

I’ve always felt professionally that it was important for my technology to stay mainstream to help understand users’ reality, but with mobile looking this exciting, it’s going to the the year of the green eyed monster for me on the phone front, I feel.

Claire Thompson, Freelance PR/Social Media Consultant, Waves PR