In this age of social selling the ownership of PERSONAL LinkedIn accounts continues to be debated by some companies. In 2008 English recruiter Hays successfully won a court battle regarding company ownership of personal LinkedIn accounts. today the debate continues over ownership of all personal social media accounts used in a business capacity including Facebook and Twitter.
Let me make it totally clear that I am NOT an attorney but below are some simple tips that might be helpful if you work for someone other than yourself. Once again, I am NOT qualified to give legal advice but here are a few tips that could help out:
- Associate your LinkedIn account with a personal versus company email. If you have your account associated with your company email you might wake up someday to find your account is no longer under your control. While that potential outcome seems rather Draconian why take the chance?
- Be cautious of using company paid services such as Outlook connectors, Salesforce.com applications, etc. to assist you in building up your personal connection base within LinkedIn. This could potentially open the door over ownership of contact info within your LinkedIn account. My limited personal research has only turned up a few cases where the contact info within a personal LinkedIn account had to be SHARED with an employer upon termination but it is still worth considering.
- If you upgrade to a paid version of LinkedIn don’t ask your employer to reimburse you for it. There is considerable power to be derived when it comes to prospecting from an upgraded LinkedIn account. By all means you should definitely consider tapping into the increased search capability, increased InMail capacity, etc. but pay for it YOURSELF! You can always deduct it on your own taxes as a business expense. My own limited research hasn’t turned up any cases related to this but, once again, why take the chance?
- Understand the use of restrictive covenants within your employment agreement. As social media continues to evolve as an integrated element of selling more companies are attempting to build language into employee agreements related to the use and ownership of social media accounts.
All this being said, most employers are never going to raise a stink about such things as the ownership of your personal LinkedIn account. While you will probably never have to worry about this subject it is certainly worth thinking about if you are a LinkedIn “power prospector” that isn’t self-employed.
As comedian Dennis Miller was famous for saying "That's just my opinion, I could be wrong." What is your opinion on this topic?
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