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.

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.)

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Alerti Social Media Monitoring and Management Service

Guest Post, Murray Newlands, Influence People

As a Public Relations professional, keeping up with your campaigns is a big part of your day-to-day work, and staying current on industry trends is a must. A social media monitoring and management service can be a big help. Whether you are a newcomer to the idea of social media monitoring or a veteran who is one of the 2 out of 3 professionals who isn’t “happy” with their current social media monitoring tool, I am happy to announce the launch of Alerti in the US and UK this week.

Alerti’s founders were on a mission to create a single, customizable interface for managing and sharing information from the web. Their result offers all of the advantages of the big name services at a fraction of the cost. I expect their current userbase of thousands of French users to grow substantially in the coming months. I’m working with Alerti and am excited to offer Waves PR readers a chance to try Alerti FREE for 3 months. More on that in a minute…

Alerti In Action

Alerti provides a simple, effective tool with a single interface to collect and manage relevant information from around the web, empowering you to follow what is being said about you, your brand, or your competitors on the internet, to measure the engagement of your communities, and to interact with them.

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The PR Week That Was

Femke and Rob, SIG, in training

So another busy week went by at Waves PR

Early in the week I visited Elegant Cuisine, who have had some changes.  There are some super plans ahead for their Cafe Bar @ Cornerstone, based in the Cornerstone Art Centre in Didcot. It has some lovely engagement going on through its Twitter account @BarCornerstone – making some firm friends along the way, without worrying about the numbers game – and has plans for great things using social media. It’s even holding a Tweetup in December (in Didcot), a brave move for a small bar.

Elegant Cuisine also briefed me on a pretty amazing wedding package on offer – more details on this later – and a website refresh in the offing: more on this later as well.

On Tuesday I worked with SIG – the Software Improvement Group – on some multi-cultural, multi platform media training, which was great fun, and again, it wasn’t just traditional offline media that we discussed. We had been discussing a fun campaign, but off the back of the training changed tack a little, and are developing a campaign based around great software development teams.

Global Integration’s global working video competition has been getting a lot of attention, if no entries yet (although we’ve had some brave attempts from spammers). This has been an amazing learning curve. We knew before we started that we wouldn’t expect thousands of entries, even with a prize as big as $15 thousand. What we perhaps hadn’t anticipated was that the real value has been around the conversations that people have been having and the interest stirred, and if just one of the ideas that people have been discussing materialises, the competition will have been well worth it, and may well run again next year.

The Global Integration new website is also developing behind the scenes, and we may have something to show there soon.

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