Unspecified

I recently received a quite unexpected outpouring of well wishes and support regarding my new role and/or congratulations on the next step of my career aka my "new job". This happened after I changed the company that I work for on LinkedIn to "Unspecified". Not like Unspecified the band or Unspecified the company but rather "not clearly stated or exact". Allow me to elaborate on why I made this change.

The catalyst for this change is that the company I work for was acquired by a global organization. We recently had an HR orientation meeting where the presenters called out that any posts on sites such as LinkedIn as well as social media sites such as Twitter (newsflash, LinkedIn is social media) were subject to corporate guidelines if our accounts were identified in any way with this particular organization.

Now, I imagine that this is a pretty standard and common policy for most organizations. However, it seemed like a good opportunity to just de-associate my online personas entirely and once-and-for-all from any company that I actually work for. I did this on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and every other social media and online site that I use. Here's why.

While I would never post anything unprofessional or offensive; the Internet is forever after all, why even take a risk of some corporate stiff getting all butt hurt over something that I post or write about? Besides, in this day and age who even knows who is offended by what anymore. Pretty certain that anything and everything offends at least somebody now-a-days. Heck, there is probably at least one person out there right now that is offended by my playful choice of pronouns on this site. And I will admit that I post some fairly controversial opinions at times. Not offensive or unprofessional, but certainly controversial.

A second and related reason, if the United States federal government is not allowed to infringe on my free speech, why in the world would I willingly subject myself to some arbitrary set of rules regarding my speech set by some corporate committee? And, yes, I do realize that LinkedIn and other social media platforms have that exact ability but that's just the cost of doing business on those platforms. I'm not going to willingly impose additional restrictions other than the bare minimum required in order to play ball.

The third reason is that association with my workplace provides zero benefit to myself and amounts to, in my opinion, free advertising for that workplace. I'm paid for the work I do for an organization; I am not paid to advertise for that same organization. In fact, if someone wants to buy the rights to me advertising for their business, I'll gladly sell those advertising rights to the highest bidder.

Maybe there will even be some side benefits like less messages from people spamming me about services to sell me. Or I can at least respond with "I don't work for anyone specific.". And bonus, I won't ever have my inbox flooded with "Congratulations on the new job" messages. I really do appreciate the sentiment though, honestly. Thank-you to everyone looking out for me.

The bottom line with this is that my social media personas are my own. Nobody else gets to say anything about my posts or associate themselves with me unless I say so. I am not defined in any way by who I happen to work for, and I do not define my life by my work. I would love to see more people go the "Unspecified" route, it's the right choice for me and maybe you as well.