LinkedIn adds birthdays to Updates – Good Idea?
Love, no, I LOVE LinkedIn.
Premium subscriber for years.
As a sales professional, LinkedIn is indispensable for what I do. I really can’t live without it.
But birthdays?
Do I need a “LinkedIn Updates” email about a business contact’s birthday?
Birthdays used to be a personal matter, not a professional one. Facebook was the place to share birthdays, not LinkedIn. After all, age questions are legally off-limits in the professional world.
Something is afoot here broader than birthdays. It is the continued blurring of long-established lines of privacy and professional etiquette.
This is primarily created by the symbolic fog machine of Social Media and their participant’s eagerness to connect. Plus, the clarion call from social media sites and social media champions are almost always for more self-disclosure from their members (and revised privacy policies that go with them). This additional disclosure often goes unchallenged and agreed to by a simple click.
Added fuzzy-ness within Social Media comes from the employer side as well. Companies with Facebook and Google+ pages interested in building their “brand” encourage employees to “like” and “follow” them on their accounts. Content marketing savvy businesses ask employees to “retweet” or “repost” their content – some even offering incentives.
Job site Glassdoor asks members to post “reviews” and give a “salary history” of current and previous employers (in a somewhat anonymous fashion). Wasn’t income the ultimate employee secret never to be talked about?
And while many (especially millennials) view making semi-public (via social network) information like birthdays, relationship status, political affiliations, salary, and personal preferences as a practical and essentially harmless activity, it’s not clear what will be the final impact on people and businesses down the road. All this information can potentially stay on the web forever. With big data tools, it can all be discoverable easier than ever before. Most importantly, it is almost all legally admissible.
Background screening company HireRight reports in “The Evolving Practice of Social Media Screening” only 21% of surveyed employers use social media as part of their selection process. They say the number is trending down – mainly due to legal reasons. It is unclear if this personal data requires “consent” to retrieve and check. Many employers are unwilling to burden legal responsibility by mining for this information without consent, opting for services like HireRight to screen them (and carry the legal liability). The bottom line is personal data is sensitive no matter how you slice it.
For LinkedIn, Birthday Updates are another way to connect more members through an event harmlessly. They are adding value and a good thing.
For LinkedIn members, who think personal/professional divisions are necessary, Birthday Updates can mean something else. Perhaps a flash point for reviewing their style.
Whatever you think, Birthday Updates cannot now be disabled on LinkedIn.
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Image: ©iStockphoto.com/StalkerJ
