Which Nike do you work for?

UPDATED on August 15, 2017:

Following her publishing of this post , Celina Appleby of Nike contacted LinkedIn and was able to have the "Nike" and the "NIKE INC" company pages merged. The references below to "NIKE INC" as a separate company page should be considered "history" as the link to it is dead.

Original article follows:

In researching Company pages and logos on LinkedIn, I stumbled across an interesting situation with regard to athletic apparel maker Nike.

I didn't have to call it "athletic apparel maker" -- you already knew who I meant. The name is so recognizable, in fact, that the name on its LinkedIn Company Page is the single word alone.

That's the page you'll see if you click or tap on the famous "swoop" logo on a LinkedIn member's job experience. A clip of the page header is included below.

Nike's official company page at https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/nike can be recognized by its well-known logo and its professional design and content. Everything adds up in terms of numbers: it makes perfect sense that over 55,000 LinkedIn members claim employment there and over 1 million follow the company.

LinkedIn, however, is not particularly strong in its enforcement of company name spellings when members enter jobs into their Experience. As a result, a number of LinkedIn members (about 320) have chosen to enter NIKE INC as their employer's name. LinkedIn was quite happy to create a company page for this alternate firm as if it were altogether different from Nike.

Notice the disclaimer at the right of the graphic below (under Questions about this page?), indicating that NIKE INC does not maintain, endorse, or affiliate itself with the page. And I would claim that it's never going to because Nike already has the one company page it needs.

If you see the company name NIKE INC and a gray ghost logo on a LinkedIn member's job experience, clicking or tapping on it will link to the following page ==> https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/nike-inc . Notice how sparse and inaccurate that page is compared to the official one.

LinkedIn's process of creating company pages automatically has wronged two groups of people in that graphic above:

1. The 320 people who "work for" NIKE INC and are denied the association with the real Nike that they deserve.
2. The 1,347 people who are following a ghost company and will never get one word of sponsored content from it because the page is not maintained.

I turned up one LinkedIn member (below) whose Experience lists positions with both the official Nike and the unofficial one. As I explained in another article, the member provides the key to what logo LinkedIn applies on a job by the way that he or she spells the company (or selects it from a list).

Here's a clip from the person's profile with personal details hidden:

It would not be difficult for the profile owner to convert that ghost logo to the real one. All it takes is to edit the piece of experience (without deleting and re-adding) and simply spell the company, Nike.

Why bother with this?

When viewers click or tap on a logo on your profile, you want them to see an official company page if possible and get the full impact of where it is that you work.

• You act as a brand ambassador for your company.
• Your profile gains the benefit of associating with those of your actual fellow employees.
• You open the possibility of being asked by a connection for help in learning how to work for your company. That's what networking is all about: paying forward.
• You appear more in command of profile editing, so that people get the best impression of you. To keep the gray ghost logo when a "real" one can be had makes you look less professional.

However, this is not to say that every gray ghost logo is a sign of a weak profile. For many people, their companies, current or past, lose their logos because of mergers and acquisitions. In addition, some firms never even create company pages, let alone upload logos to them.

Is some action needed?

If any of your connections work for Nike and they have the ghost logo in their Experience, please refer them to this article. Tell them that if they replace NIKE INC with Nike, they will be looking good. (I realize that the 320 NIKE INC people are less than 1 percent of the Nike people, but I like to see everyone getting all they can from being on LinkedIn.)

And, to generalize across all companies, any time that you edit a piece of your experience and can put the correct, official logo in place of the gray ghost, it's a good thing! The spelling of the name is key, so be aware of the traps left lying around by LinkedIn -- unofficial alternate spellings and auto-generated "company pages" that no company ever intended.

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I enjoy writing about technical aspects of LinkedIn. With the recent wide rollout of the new browser design, some of the articles I've published on the site need some editing, but I hope the concepts in them will be of help to you.

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