Putting the RIGHT organization's logo on your profile

Reviewed and still accurate as of February, 2020, this is "evergreen" material (so far!). Hope you enjoy it.

Have you ever noticed that on people's LinkedIn profiles, some pieces of their experience show a specific organization's logo, whereas others do not -- they have only a nondescript placeholder?

What is that generic logo, anyway? --- A little toy building from a board game? A tombstone? A USB connector?

I've written this article because I've seen many examples of logos gone wrong on LinkedIn profiles and I want to shed some light to improve the situation.

What does a logo buy you?

When you work for an organization that expresses its branding in a logo, showing that logo on your profile gives you professional credibility. Which logo you display -- the right one, the wrong one or none -- can shape the impression you make on your viewers, both positively and negatively.

• Put up the right logo and viewers can link over to a company page rich in detail about your organization's values, scope and culture. Your viewers can follow the Company page, reading content the organization publishes on LinkedIn.
• Put up no logo and the impression is neutral. Even negative. It's especially negative if a viewer clicks on the logo and LinkedIn runs a wildcard search for the terms in your job title and returns a list of people that tempts your viewer to click into another person's profile.
• Put up the wrong logo and you lose points for judgment and attention to detail. Suspicions of fraud could arise.

How does the logo get onto the profile?

As you edit your profile and add a piece of experience, you key in a job Title and choose a Company, among other details.

Note that LinkedIn uses the term Company for all manner of workplaces including commercial, non-profit and educational institutions and branches of the military and government--even single-person businesses. (A person can create their own company page.)

You add or edit a piece of experience using a form on the browser version of LinkedIn where you edit your profile. Here's a snippet of that form:

To show a non-default logo on a piece of your work experience, the organization name you enter in the Company field has to match a LinkedIn company page with a logo on file. Here are the situations possible, one with a logo and three with none:

1. There is a company page matching the company name and the page administrator has uploaded a logo image.
2. There is a company page but its admin has not uploaded a logo image.
3. The company page was auto-generated by LinkedIn and no admin has yet to claim it, so no one is able to upload a logo.
4. There is no company page matching the spelling you used, so no logo exists.

How the editing interface works and some traps to avoid

The LinkedIn profile editing panel can be confusing in the way it presents its options and you can easily miss out on the proper logo if you do not spell the organization's name just right.

Let's say you worked for a well-known organization like The Coca-Cola Company. I picked it as an example because it's known world-wide and it shows how precise you need to be: the company name starts with T not C.

Choosing the organization name for your job

As you start to type into the Company field, a drop-down list of suggestions appears. The tricky part is to choose correctly from the organization names you are offered.

To put The Coca-Cola Company onto your profile, you'd start typing "The..." and see a selection box appear below the Company field:

Can you make out a slice of The Coca-Cola Company at the bottom of the window? If your screen resolution and browser settings are like mine, you'd need to scroll down to reveal it, or you could just continue typing until you have The Coca in the field, causing the full name to rise to the top, with the logo as you'd expect.

When you click on the organization's logo or name in the selection box, both get plugged into the Company field of the form:

You would continue to complete the fields required by the form and save this portion of your Experience section. All would be good -- when others view your profile, they see the well-known logo and can "click through" to its company page to learn more.

What can go wrong?

You're at a live networking event and introduce yourself:

"I work for Coca-Cola."

When you call the company by the name of its flagship product, everyone should know what you mean. But the company has a legal identity under which it does business.

If you actually work for the Coca-Cola corporate entity, you do not want to omit that leading The in entering experience into your profile. If you start typing with Coca, here's what happens:

None of those are quite right, so you scroll down.

Aha! You decide that Coca-Cola Services looks good, even though the familiar red-and-white logo is missing.

If you indeed work for The Coca-Cola Company, you would not want to choose Coca-Cola Services as your employer since you would lose the recognizable red logo and the credibility it brings. You'd end up with this dull company page:

However, we see that some 1405 members of LinkedIn have indeed chosen Coca-Cola Services as the company they work for. How did that happen? If it's a mistake, then that's a lot of people making it. That number implies that it's a real company, but why is there no logo?

LinkedIn Help articles tell us that an organization can create a Company page and identify an administrator for it. It would be the page administrator's job to upload the official logo. If the admin didn't do that, then the little gray tombstone would hold its place. That could be what has happened with Coca-Cola Services. It is also possible that the company page was created automatically by LinkedIn, which is discussed below.

Anything goes for the company name

This finding surprised me when I stumbled upon it: LinkedIn apparently uses whatever a member types into the Company field as the truth. If a member types anything for a company name, it will "stick" even though it doesn't match anything in the drop-down box, and it does not need to exist at all. In this case, there is no hyperlink to click because there is no company page for the organization.

There is no verification of Company name

As much as LinkedIn does not verify the names of individuals when they create profiles, it also does not verify that they work(ed) for the companies they claim. This is an issue that requires vigilance and some cautious suspicion when receiving invitations from strangers.

Company pages formed by quorum

Another surprise: if enough people key in some "new" company name the same way, LinkedIn will automatically generate a company page with minimal information, such that clicking on the ghost logo on someone's experience will link over to it. This could be the case with the Coca-Cola Services company discussed above.

Why would LinkedIn allow whatever a member types for their Company to be accepted? Two reasons:

• I call it crowd sourcing. Every company entered by a member, where LinkedIn has not heard of it before, represents a new chance to monetize -- to sell that company owner a premium membership with the ability to list job openings and other business-promoting features.
• LinkedIn gets to stay out of the company-cataloging and employment verification businesses. They depend on the integrity of their members to correctly identify the organizations they work for. The burden is fully on each LinkedIn member to give accurate employment information.

Problems faced by Company page administrators

LinkedIn does no verification of the company names that members key in to their Experience items. So there will undoubtedly be some people claiming to work somewhere they don't.

However, a page administrator cannot directly remove anyone from the list of employees on their company's page; instead, the admin must submit a report to LinkedIn.

Takeaways

• Misspell the name of an employer on a piece of your experience and you likely won't get the proper logo on your profile.
• Be aware that anyone can say they worked for any organization, so you should carefully vet invitations from strangers. Google Chrome and reverse image search are your friends.
• If you own a company page, look up in the Help pages how to report those who mistakenly claim employment by you.

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I enjoy writing about technical aspects of LinkedIn. With the early 2017 rollout of a new user experience on the browser, many of the articles I've published on the site need rewriting, but I hope the concepts in them that are still up-to-date will be of help to you.

Thanks for reading; please 'like,' comment on, or share this article if you found it helpful.