Our Weakest Link

Social networking can be a great platform for companies to communicate with employees, customers, and shareholders, but it can become an unexpected source of competitive information. It is often surprising to see how much people reveal about their employers through their personal profiles. While social media sites are powerful networking tools, allowing us to reconnect with former classmates, join shared interest groups, and keep track of our contacts, they can have unintended consequences for a business. It is easy to underestimate how much our competition can learn about us based on what we freely provide to them.

Consider the following scenarios where a competitor seeks to find information via LinkedIn or other social networking sites:

• They need one piece of information, such as the name of a program manager on a specific contract and his or her work history
• They are profiling a company in depth and looking for various data points, such as names and titles of people on a contract, certification or years of experience, length of time employed by that company, previous employers (such as government agencies), etc.
• They are trying to learn more about a government opportunity, one where they have very little information except the customer. LinkedIn profiles can provide specifics such as the size of a contract, performance metrics, network or system names, tools, subcontractors, and current and prior incumbents. In this manner, one can sometimes learn more specifics about the opportunity than can be obtained from officially released documents!

This type of information could be potentially discovered about the company unless we manage our content smartly. Ultimately, our social networking objectives should be to weigh the many professional benefits we receive through our individual accounts against the vulnerability of an organization. Take a look at your individual profile from the perspective of the competition. What are you telling them about your employer? Have you shared too much detail about your customers? Did you inadvertently expose any vulnerability about the company or the contract? Companies have begun to develop, and should move forward with instituting social media policies to begin the process of protecting their clients and their shareholders. We need to remind ourselves that people are out there reading our profiles, but they might be reading them to gather intelligence about the company.