Linkedin in many respects serves as a customer relationship management tool (CRM) as an employee of a Thai company can “connect” with customers and prospects though the social media tool.  For those inexperienced with Linkedin, once a connection is established you have access to a person’s contact information including various phone numbers and email addresses.  As a result, an employee can leave their Bangkok employer with virtually all of the company’s client contact information.  For this reason companies need to establish a Linkedin policy agreement as it could see its all of its business and customers walk out the door.

Let’s just discuss for a few moments how easy it is for an employee to connect in seconds with thousands of company contacts.  First, an employee establishes a free account on Linkedin. Next, the employee uploads their company address book into Linkedin which then sends invitation to connect to everyone within that address book.  Now consider this…you have a Customer Service Representative who has been with your company for many years.  Over that time, she has personally responded to the decision makers at every one of your clients.  In addition, she responds to every sales inquiry the company receives.  Wisely, she added everyone’s contact information to her address book so that the company could quickly send out newsletters and sales inquiries.  Then one day she realizes how valuable all of these contacts are so she uploads them to her Linkedin account and decides to interview for a sales position at your biggest competitor.  Unfortunately, for your company, you have a management and human resources team that doesn’t fully understand Linkedin and has no idea what is going on.

In countries throughout the world, companies have filed lawsuits regarding who owns the information contained within someone’s Linkedin account.  In England for instance, the courts have ruled that the contacts you establish while employed by a company are the property of your employer.  The legal argument states that the contacts developed while performing a job within the “four walls” of a company should therefore belong to the employer.  In the US, the courts have ruled differently.  In Sasqua Group, Inc. v. Courtney the court stated that the availability of information in Linkedin invalidated the employer’s’ argument that the information was a trade secret.

In order to avoid any concerns about employees leaving with client information, it’s absolutely critical to have management sit down with the human resources department and possibly general counsel (or the company’s legal representative) to draft a very effective non-compete agreement.  It should clearly outline that an employee may not contact any current, former or prospective client once the individual leaves the company.  In many cases, companies also prohibit employees from working with an industry competitor for a designated period of time to insure the company never has these concerns.  In Thailand, the courts have ruled primarily based on the “reasonableness” of a non-compete so it’s important for multi-nationals who may be operating on a different standard to  consult a Thai based attorney on this matter.

In looking at an employee’s Linkedin account, if you notice that they have in excess of 500+ contacts (the service will only say someone has “500+” once they cross five hundred contacts), it is likely they accessed their company address book to upload these contacts to their Linkedin account.  This means should they ever decide to leave the company, all of the people they met online or in person as a result of performing their job, are available to them in their next position.  So a company needs to be very protective of its client database and its starts by crafting an effective non-compete and social media policy.