Thursday, November 22, 2007 3:43 PM
I like many people now use
Linked-In as my primary source of business contact information, it’s not ideal as I am concern about my privacy and am I really feeding some kind of great big marketing machine? However it is fantastically useful for keeping track of people as they move around.
One of the primary reasons why you have a person as a business contact in the first place is because of the role they currently occupy. When that person moves roles, your link to that role has been lost.
A classic example is an Account Manager. It’s pretty rare these days for someone to stay in that role for more than 2 years, so when they move on you want a smooth almost seamless transition. Today this is not the case. Using Social Networking it could be! It would mean that the Social Network would need to know about the person and treat the role as a separate entity.
Having a living ‘role network’ could also make position verification a lot easier as well. So roles advertised on a CV would just mean a simple check through a roles history to see if that person actually did hold it.
Why stop at roles? You could do this with skills accreditations, courses, group membership and the list can go on and on.
The flip-side is of course the issues of big-brother and privacy reflected in the week news is a perfect example of the level of trust and confidence we have in organisations that hold this kind of information is at an all time low.
Privacy and security laws, rules and standards need to be adhered to at whatever expense; it becomes pointless having any of them if you decided which ones you chose to adhere too and when.
Making life easier shouldn’t be at the expense of trust.