DOES YOUR GENERAL COUNSEL KNOW HOW COMPETITORS ARE THREATENING YOUR COMPANY?

Let’s stop being self-delusional. Competitive Intelligence is widespread, and competitors wake up each morning looking for ways to put your company out of business.

Every single Fortune 1000 company, plus thousands of mid-sized and even small businesses, have already hired smart people to systematically study competitors and look for ways to beat them.

How many Competitive Intelligence Managers and Analysts do you think there are on LinkedIn? If you do a Boolean Search you’ll find approximately 15,000 CI Managers and 28,000 CI Analysts. To be conservative, let’s just call it 40,000 self-identified CI professionals, each of whom earns an average of $75K. That $3 Billion spent annually on CI does not include other professionals who do not admit to doing Competitive Intelligence, and does not factor in dollars spent by companies on 3rd party vendors that provide CI information. 

If you think your competitors are nice guys who only want win-win outcomes and will only play by Hoyle’s Rules, think again. They will use any advantage given them, and will gladly take your customers, suppliers, distributors, strategies and market share. Gladly.

Fact: LinkedIn is the gateway for competitive intelligence professionals to infiltrate your company.

Your General Counsel needs to lock down employee use of LinkedIn today.

The GC may not be able to control what sort of information former employees divulge on social media, which may be considerable, but he or she can certainly prevent current employees from inadvertently giving away trade secrets and valuable competitive information by following a few simple LinkedIn rules:

1. Employees who are not already identified on your website, which means most everyone below the C-Level, should post as little information as possible on LinkedIn, which means no job title, no specific location, and nothing besides legal boilerplate in their Summary or Experience. 
2. Employees should never be allowed to list Skills or Endorsements. Any such crowd-sourced information tells competitors who does what within your company.
3. Employees should never identify the companies they follow, except for their own.
4. Employees must turn off features such as “People Also Viewed” that make it easy for competitors to see peers and internal working groups.
5. Employees should never be allowed to post Recommendations, either given or received. 
6. Employees should never list Publications or Patents. It makes no difference that such information is already public. There is no reason to make it easy for competitors to find the people within your company who create intellectual property.
7. Connections must be locked to everyone. You might think it’s fine for someone’s connections to be able to see other connections, but remember that many of your employees will connect with other current employees. When Joe leaves your company and goes to a competitor, Joe would still be able to see all of those 1st degree contacts, and so would anyone else Joe gives his password to.
8. Employees should never be allowed to post their resume on LinkedIn. You would think this would be obvious, but a surprisingly large number of employees are doing it. It may benefit the individual, but the information clearly hurts the organization. Plus, it just looks bad when current employees are advertising for a new job.

Will employees be unhappy about such restrictions? Well, yes, because no one likes to have freedoms impinged. The alternatives, however, are much worse: loss of revenue, loss of market share, and unemployment. It is not paranoid to think that competitors are watching, but it is delusional to think that they are not.

Whatever anyone says the upside of LinkedIn may be, the downside is considerably worse.

This post originally appeared on www.sizzlinghotbutter.com. Follow JP Mark @feqr on Twitter.