Why I Split My LinkedIn Profile

Last week, I decided to split my LinkedIn profile and publishing activities into 2 separate profiles. Why I did that? I had been mixing business and job related posts with posts about my personal opinion on topics that were unrelated to work and which might not be so common to see on business profiles. Mixing personal with business related content is always a risk as personal content is usually opnionated content. Publishing this via my branded profile started to make feel a bit uncomfortable at one point as I was exposing myself to internal discussions aobut brand related concerns.

My Individual Way

I recently haven't read many books nor have I completed a further education program after my Exec. MBA 14 years ago. All my incremental expertise growth builds on an acceptably quick brain and a constant feed of fresh online research, concluded learnings from witnessed or self-executed practical work experience as well as by input from personal exchange with peers and thought leaders. At one point, I realized that 35 years of work experience piled up quite bit of knowledge so I decided to pass take an effort to pass on the interesting parts of it so I can help to make other people grow and may in the end leave some form of heritage behind one day.

Around 2015, I started to take my first steps in digital content creation by publishing personal stories, fails and learnings from life and work - always keeping a critical view on myself. When I engage to learn, I somettimes only comment or I publish a short post. On other days, I write longer articles on a weekend like I do now. I generally write and engage with anything that keeps me up at night – event though my content is in the majority of cases somehow related to my work and passion in digital communication. However, I seldomly relate to my job because it wouldn't be wise to publicly disclose any knowledge or infomation that is strategically or tactically relevant for making our business grow. The only really job related activities are talent scouting for key roles in my department, selected team appreciation posts and of course anything that has to do with active recruiting.

Besides general and (hopefully) inspirational business topics from the Digital Marketing & Transformation world, I also publish stories about digital transformation, innovation, single parenting and any other topic where I think I can potentially contribute to a discussion and new learnings inside my LinkedIn network.

Why do I tell you all this? Well, in my case, LinkedIn has become a central tool for publishing, research and debates so you could say that my LinkedIn profile is now a 'critical infrastructure' for both my personal and professional life. My kids learn about digital content creation mechanics from me and we often discuss the influence of opion leaders on their large audience. Of course, I may be a bit deeper into LinkedIn due to my job responsibility but that only made the associated risks bigger with come along with a growing visibility and reach. Here are some of those risks that I have been thinking about:

Risk No. 1: LinkedIn Profile Ownership / Intellectual Property (IP) Rights

LinkedIn is a business network and members publish their employment / employer on their individual profile so they can be identified, build networks / communities and they can use LinkedIn for recruiting. But publishers need to be aware that maybe our audience can't always tell the difference between corporate content and a personal opionon / engagement that may not represent the company's position as all content is coming form the same profile and same person. So when published content is coming from a branded profile, also personal content might be perceived as a work activity by at least a minority of the audience. This risk is espeically apparent on LinkedIn where users are bound to publish both personal stories and buiness information and it has never been fully clarified who carries the responsibility of mixed content. In fact, I have been thinking about to specific questions lately:

1.????"Who OWNS and stands in for individual LinkedIn profiles, their published content and their network connections? If it's a shared responsibility: Where should we draw the line?"

2.????"If IP rights belong to the company, do employers need to take steps to prevent the loss of assets, contacts and business information that is stored on LinkedIn profiles when employees resign and leave the company?"

The answers to the above questions are needed as they will allow us to fully assign IP rights and help us to build the basis for fair and effective corporate procedures to identify and secure company owned digital assets. I must first be fully clear who carrie the responsibility for what so we can corporate data and knowledge that is now stored on outplaced and third party hosted repositories without corporate access. And still, measures have to stay moderate and focused so they don't unnecessarily limit and (ex-)employee's personal freedom or even jeopardize his/her future career by taking away a career's knowledge and expertise network.

I don’t think that many employers would risk a shit storm by enforcing their ownership and intellectual property rights too much but there is at least a potential risk that publishers and/or employers could get into a conflict due to content that was published or a contact that was talked to through a company owned LinkedIn business profile.

It may sound a bit far off at the moment, but I acutally expect that at least some companies will have a standard will have a standard procedure during employee off-boardings to secure company owned assets - at least for exposed 'job roles' where LinkedIn was extensiviley used as daily work tool. The same measure could also be taken in cases where a company wants to prevent any loss of IP rights on published content when an employee resigns and replaces the company information - potentially handing ownership of all content and contacts from their LinkedIn profile over to the new empoyer.

Risk No. 2: Risk of Guideline Violations / Controversies / Conflicts In My Work Environment

The societal?change process and the mind change of the revolutionary democratization of public communication in the web is still ongoing and a certain share of our population think probably still thinks that corporations need keep as much control as possible over what employees say in public and through branded channels. I can confirm (I once let myself get carried away by a presss article about 20 years ago and my not 100% appropriate toned comment kept popping Google's result page for almost 10 years when searching for my name) that doesn't forget easily and brand damage can last long. Still, we need to train and trust our employees as much as possible as we will not be able to stay 100% risk free and compliant without making restrictions to employee access beyond proportion and might backfire and a employee reaction might hard brands more than single badly worded posts that may drown anyway in the billions of posts that are pushed out to the internet every day.

Over time, engaged LinkedIn users have learned that this platform represents a hybrid world of personal opinions and corporate communication. but the threat is real as we continue to read about cases where untrained or just unfortunate social media communication leads to severe shit storms and (brand) damage.

Employees need to be regularly reminded and trainged on their responsibilities in public communicaiton towards potentially unlimited audiences. At the same time, corporations need to acknowledge that a) not every bad post leads to a shit storm and b) the democratization and fragmentation of public business communication can be neither reversed nor fully controlled.

I don't think that I ever put one of my employers' brand reputation at risk through my social publishing as I have always been fully aware of the guidelines, risks and best practices for personal social media publishing – not least because I personally contributed to many of today's guidelines and reocmmendation in the company. Still, I don't feel comfortable if my personal publishing causes an internal discusion. I guess it's the price you have to pay when your network and content reach becomes bigger - but this growth and influence also made less and less ready to give up my publishing on LinkedIn because it makes me grow and learn so much faster than waiting for a book or course. I feared that I would lose my most important and fastest source of knowledge if I had to stop publishing personal content.

The Risks and Their Mitigation

The above points describe the risks that I felt exposed to in 2 key areas of my LinkedIn engagement from recent years:

1. Content and profile ownership on Social Media and LinkedIn specifically still needs legal clarification. There is a risk of losing valuable contacts and IP rights for private content that I have been publishing via my business profile on LinkedIn (e.g about my agricultural experiments and projects at home)
2. I had to acknowledge that I completely stop all controversies about content that I publish because there will always individuals amongst the thousands of post readers who will not like my posts, disagree with them or fear a negative impact of my content on internal and/or external audiences

So to really mitigate as much risk of conflicts and as I was not ready to sacrifice my personal publishing, I had no other choice than to fully disconnect my personal posts from my employer's brand and my own corporate communication.

Solution

• Renamed my existing LinkedIn profile to an Alter Ego called 'J.C. Rembrandt' (the painter Rembrandt's family name was also 'van Rijn' so that's the connection)
• Removed all employer information (at least of the past 12 months) that identified my corporate role on my existing LinkedIn profile and replaced the organization name with a fictitious organization that I use use to publish via my private website www.rembrandt.group and my privvate eShop www.gemischtwaren.ch
• Deleted all my posts that had a work relation (and yes, I almost cried when I deleted some posts with 10k – 30k reach…)
• Created a new LinkedIn profile with all the employer information and branding to use it for future team appreciation posts and recruiting (only)
• Made a temporary post to guide my network to the new corporate business profile (will be deleted after a few days)

As a direct consequence of these actions, I expect that I can continue to publish and research on my old profile also for work field related topics without risks while the new profile will be used exclusively for corporate activities.

Upsides

The decision to split my publishing is aiming to relieve myself from putting myself at risk for making a mistake while mixing private and corporate communication publishing via a single LinkedIn profile.

With 2 profiles and one of them being unbranded, I can draw a clear line for Intellectual Property rights, ownership and don't risk to get in conflict with any corporate communicaton guidelines

Splitting my profiles and publishing is the solution that makes most sense to me as holding back with my personal publishing would significantly impact the quality of my life and learning path as LinkedIn has become a very important learning and interaction platform for me.

With this solution, I can can also still coach teams, discuss with my network and maybe leave a small but recognized contribution / heritage behind one day.

Downsides

I have to build up a new job related LinkedIn network on my new profile from scratch and I will specifically focus to building up a new talent pool for ky roles in my area of responsibility as job posts and employer branding posts will be published via my new profile.

It will be more difficult to attract job candidates as I can't leverage my 'old' historic publications to attract them as I can't expect now rather lean corporate profile still supports as a company of high marketing & digital communication competence on the same level anymore.

I have to use an Alter Ego on my private profile to avoid that my two profiles are easily linked. So I and my network will have to get used to my new name ;-).

Summary

Almost 20 years after LinkedIn was 'born', we are still in a societal and corporate change process of learning how to deal with public communication and it will most probably take a few years until we find the ideal balance and rules of co-existence between business and personal content.

I think I've done my best to keeps me out of the spotlights while still allowing me to stay active as digital content creator for non-job related topics. This will continue to not grow personally and my professional competence in digital communication – it will also still allow me to to nurture and inspire my work colleagues with new knowledge, trend scouting and innovation thinking.

In the solution finding process, also had to acknowledge that non-branded publishing will will have to stay personal because I believe that story telling and network exchange is what Social Media is about – especially on LinkedIn.

Reference: article on legal ownership and risks: Who owns your LinkedIn account? | TechTarget (computerweekly.com )

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Disclaimer: My current employer never pushed or pressured me to split my LinkedIn profile or to stop publishing about personal topics. The choice of solution and the decision of changing now were solely taken by me and driven by my personal risk assessment.