New company profiles on LinkedIn – controversy created?  LinkedIn subtly announced company profiles back in March 08.  And as I read and researched yesterday to find out how to add mine for Liberty Interactive Marketing, I realized that you can’t just create a profile for your company.  You have to have been “one of the chosen ones.”

A select group of 160,000 companies were chosen to be included on LinkedIn’s company profiles.  I stumbled upon a former employer of mine (privately held company) and what I found absolutely astounded me. Here’s the list:

a. Career path for XYZ employees after they left XYZ company (a listing of competitors)
b. What other companies these XYZ employess were most connected/associated with (another list of competitors)
c. Key statistics included but were not limited to: company size, top schools, median age, and percentage of male to female
d. A listing of recent employee promotions, new hires, popular profiles (aka star employees) and more.

And at the bottom of the page in light light gray barely visible letters it said:
This LinkedIn Company Profile was created by LinkedIn and is about XYZ Company. This page is not endorsed by or affiliated with XYZ company.

LinkedIn has claimed they are going to start allowing companies to edit these pages, but that was in March – 4 months ago.  In the meantime, this is prime pickings for recruiters and competitive poaching. [SIDE NOTE: Also, how will this editing profile work? In a company of 50, there can be one ring leader, but what about a company of 1,000 or more employees? If all employees are able to edit, how will disgruntled employees be handled? What will prevent users from creating fake profiles to dog other competitors?]

I realize that all this information is provided by the user, but LinkedIn snagged it all and aggregated it without allowing companies to protect themselves.  Do companies need to start adding a sentence to their  employment policy that employees are not allowed to have a profile on LinkedIn?

I feel a bit betrayed by LinkedIn.

Here’s why – we all know that 1:1 marketing has become a major influencer in why many companies are shifting their dollars online.  But remember back in the day, and still to some extent, market research was an aggregation of mass research? Where you knew specific things about a collective group of people but nothing personal. Today, with all the available social networking sites and other Internet marketing tactics we have personal information on our audience. Down to bra size.  We have personal information that we can use to target individuals to get them to buy our product or service.  This is scary. And no, I’m not just realizing this now.  I am a huge proponent of this type of marketing – in fact, I love it and I love being marketed to like this.

But when it comes to data being aggregated involuntarily by a third party that effects a larger body simply because other individuals have posted their personal information, that is where I feel this controversy begins.  And where does it all end?

Back in the day, the great thing about the Internet was that it had a high level of anonymity.  Now, your personal information is up for grabs.

Does anyone else think these new company profiles on LinkedIn are controversial?

First off, what is StumbleUpon?

You can think of it as a very large boob tube of Web stuff from web pages to videos. The cool thing is it delivers Web sites to you based on your preferences (e.g. art, photography, search marketing, SEO, gadgets, real estate, etc.) You can change these preferences at will. The system learns what you like and brings you more. If only TV was this easy, right?

You can search sites from their Web site at www.stumbleupon.com or download the toolbar for Firefox IE (recommended).

While it may seem like mindless pleasure to spend hours on end stumbling just for instant satisfaction and entertainment – there really are other benefits to StumbleUpon and it can serve as an exceptional online marketing tool.

Here’s why you should use StumbleUpon:

1. Research and Discovery – you can change your interest preferences to your liking at any time.  For instance, if I am specifically looking for sites or related photos, videos on the topic of Internet marketing, SEO, SEM, etc. I can change my preference interests to show me sites related to this (Internet and Internet Tools). You can basically cut hours of research and discovery time down by stumbling instead of trying to come up with the right combination of keywords to type into search engines.

2. Surf the Web - literally and organically. We are all friends of the remote control and now you are always in control, your roommate or significant other can’t steal your Stumble toolbar from you.  For good entertainment I recommend Bizarre/Oddities, Beer, and Quizzes interests.  Sit back and channel surf – hours of pure entertainment.

3. Search – Dare I say that this may be the future of search? Well, it should be.  While the big 3 are honing their algorithms to show the most relevant results based on backlinks, content, history, etc.  StumbleUpon is backing into it by asking users to rate, review, and tag these sites.  You can actually use StumbleUpon as a search engine for immediate results (versus option 1 above).  Type in anything that you are looking for and a listing of results will show with thumbnails, number of reviews, tags and recent “thumbs up.”

4. Social Networking and Bookmarking - The community and tools on StumbleUpon (SU) are fierce. The major feature to SU is their expansive social bookmarking abilities. It’s not just one way there are multiple ways to interact and connect – you can view all your favorite sites, view sites that your friends like, that people with your interests like, blog it, talk about it, have folks review it, etc.

Maybe in a later post, I’ll touch on marketing and advertising opportunities through StumbleUpon and how they have impacted the SU community and results.

But for now, get out there and thumbs up someone today. Just don’t let the boss catch you after hours upon hours on StumbleUpon.