Although I wasn’t able to attend Faye’s facilitation (sorry, Faye!) on LinkedIn and Professionalism Online, I did get the opportunity to read through her provided materials and to begin tinkering with LinkedIn myself – that in itself is a good result from the week. I’d always meant to construct a LinkedIn profile but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Now that it’s started but unfinished, I’ll probably obsess over it until it is done.
LinkedIn strikes me as very focused on the professional, which is a good alternative to Facebook and especially MySpace. As we’ve discussed at length, our online faces are important facets of our personality and presentation. Just as I behave differently (to a point) when playing online games, or when chatting casually with friends via Facebook, so to is it valuable for a site to place emphasis on the professional facet of my online self. Just like many of my friends, I do keep an eye on my Facebook presence so as to not make it entirely too casual in case a professional acquaintance ever comes calling, but I like the idea of an even more carefully attenuated face for those interested in me professionally. Furthermore, I appreciate the lack of some of the socially-oriented widgets on LinkedIn, such as downplaying photos (it’s agony finding something that looks professional, especially if you’ve got to do a complete album!) and restricting apps to professional utilities – no sheepzookas, thankfully.
But something sticks in my mind after Faye’s readings more than anything else: the legal issues. If there continues to be a focus on LinkedIn as your professional face – the one you could be held accountable for contributing to the image of your employer – this will take some of the pressure off of MySpace and Facebook. If we can more neatly cast the different sites into appropriate roles, with MySpace/Facebook as the casual side of someone who isn’t on the clock and LinkedIn as a place where we put on our professional attire, it’ll help to push employers back out of parts of life they are not welcome in. I would think the law could recognize a reasonable right to privacy on expressly social sites if the public standard includes this clear delineation from the professional sites. More succinctly – your employee has no reason to think you should look at anything but what is supposed to be professional. I see this as an important front in the ongoing war of private web versus public web. This is not to say that I routinely publish negative information either directly or indirectly about my employer, but it would be nice to know if precedent swings back to some semblance of reason in case I’m ever to slip.
Also, if I’ve restated anything already driven into the ground in class, sorry! Flu will do that to you.
You say you're going to obsess about your LinkedIn profile until it's done... This makes me a little paranoid. I want to keep using LinkedIn, but I feel like I don't know enough about the etiquette. Some of the profiles I've come across (outside our class) are really complete and put together, and some look a little sparse, but they're still informative. Maybe this is a dumb question, but is bigger (more complete) necessarily better? It's hard to tell.
ReplyDeleteGood point, I suppose. I've read you're better off to treat LI like how you'd like your resume to read if you could be a little more up on yourself. Not quite self-congratulatory or inflating, but spend a little more space fleshing out the parts of your history the resume may not be able to do justice professionally.
ReplyDeleteAll things in moderation, though, for sure. I know exactly the type you talk about, irrespective of venue.