I get a lot of value from discussions within groups on LinkedIn. I’m a member of some groups to assist my clients with the distribution of their content, always matching the subject matter with the interests of the group. Other groups I’ve joined to take part in discussions with other professionals in the communications field.
In the Government 2.0 group I found an interesting discussion about too much “twitter spam” on LI. Courtney Hunt had written a strongly worded blog post and was promoting it via the group, taking many LI users to task for linking their Twitter accounts with their LI accounts, resulting in a flood of low value, unprofessional tweets in their activity streams. It’s a good post with specific recommendations on how LI can add better granular controls, located here.
(Click here for a post from last January in which I talk about a related topic, ghost tweeting and sending huge volumes of trivial tweets designed purely to drive traffic.)
I don’t see the issue of tweets on LI being as intrusive as Courtney does, but her post got me thinking. First off, she’s right about tweets often not being professional. People join Twitter and LinkedIn for different reasons. Some may only tweet about work issues, and those might be totally appropriate for a LI activity stream. But many of us also use Twitter to share personal thoughts, converse with friends etc. and those tweets have no context nor value when streamed on LI.
More broadly, the post got me thinking on how many users have reviewed the privacy controls they already have on LI. The service has definitely gone mainstream, meaning there are lot of non-techies out there using it. Once a new tool starts performing as we want it to, many of us don’t mess with the default settings.
To use a basic example, remember the first time you changed your profile, and one of your friends emailed you about it? That’s kind of cool the first time, but maybe it was a small edit and really didn’t warrant a broadcast to your connections. Or even more important, maybe you didn’t want that activity broadcast.
Those functions can be turned off, as well as things like people seeing who you’re connected to and whether they can see your activity stream. You can tailor these functions now, though as Courtney points out more granularity would be welcome. You can change these by logging in, then going to the drop down menu below your name and choosing “Settings.”
LinkedIn is a powerful tool, and with a little thought you can make sure you’re putting your most professional foot forward online.