Actiance: All your LinkedIn profiles belong to us

Actiance has released an upgrade to its social media monitoring platform that allows financial services firms to keep track of changes made to employee LinkedIn profiles.

The new facility is available as part of Actiance's Socialite platform, which enables companies to manage access and content shared across over 160 features on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Under the upgrade, Socialite intercepts end-user edits of LinkedIn profiles and automatically re-routes the changes to a compliance officer for review. The reviewer is then able to identify the changes made and can either accept or reject the edits as well as making comments.

"LinkedIn is increasingly used amongst professionals to keep in contact with clients and to reach out in a trusted network to new business. However, for regulated firms it can present a challenge to manage, approve and keep track of employee profiles, potentially placing them out of compliance and at risk of hefty fines," comments Vincent de Gennaro, VP Emea of Actiance. "In addition, many people use their profiles as a précis of their CV and having employees giving away details of the projects they are currently involved in isn't always in the organisation's best interest."

Finextra verdict: A LinkedIn profile is more than just a professional calling card, it also acts as an as an open, on-the-record personal CV for perusal by prospective employers and recruitment firms. Compliance issues aside, the Actiance programme gives companies an unwarranted direct line into staff career goals (as employees polish their CV in anticipation of a change in direction), and the power to block updates as they see fit. Is this taking Big Brother-style intrusion into employee rights too far?

Related Companies

Actiance

Channels

Retail banking Wholesale banking

Keywords

Reporting/compliance Social media

Comments: (3)

A Finextra member 08 June, 2011, 10:29

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The secret police are on their way.

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Alexander De Lange - Aurelia Financial Consultants cc - Johannesburg 09 June, 2011, 04:46

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They're here already!

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Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 09 June, 2011, 17:26

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The Big Brother metaphor applies only when employees are being monitored as they're going about exercising their normal rights. We're talking about a very different situation here: The employee is bound to keep company proprietary information confidential. When they declare (say) their involvement with a certain customer project on LinkedIn, they divulge such confidential information to the outside world. While they're doing so to embellish their profiles, it can't be overlooked that (a) they're not acting within their rights (b) they expose their employers to legal action from the aggrieved party (e.g. the customer who never wanted the project to become public knowledge). I don't believe that the company's mitigating action under this context should be termed as Big Brotherly.

For years, employees have been declaring such confidential information on their DOC/PDF resumes and emailing it to the company's competitors and elsewhere. In the past, companies lacked the technology to block such leakage.

With the growing popularity of LinkedIn, the leakage is exposed. Thanks to Actiance, companies are now able to take deterrent action that they've always been entitled to.