So many have written so much about personal branding in a social media era. If you’re in advertising, marketing or related fields, being present and well-connected online is table stakes. Simply put, being fully credible nowadays requires you to have a reasonably well-rounded online profile. (That criterion easily extends to just about any professional services field, like law, real estate, finance, technology and others.)

LinkedIn (and its distant competitors Naymz and Plaxo), Facebook and Twitter are all mainstream or mainstream-trending venues for professional presence. Then there are tools like Google Profile, along with any number of special-purpose platforms to tempt us.

But let’s face it. For business – pure business – LinkedIn might be the most important place to strut your professional stuff. Group activities aside, it’s not as robust as Twitter for real-time interaction. Yet it is for all intents your online resume-portfolio-Rolodex.

But who owns your profile? Most legal experts and LinkedIn members might reflexively declare that ownership is in the hands of the person profiled. But there have been occasional instances of challenge and subversion.

For example, a former client of mine contacted me and asked if I would write a LinkedIn recommendation for him. No problem, it’s just that I already had. Confused by his request, I sent an e-mail asking him what was up. He explained that he had been locked out of his LinkedIn profile when his former company closed shop and took down their e-mail system. My friend’s sole access was via that e-mail address and so he was effectively locked out of his own house.

Using LinkedIn and Twitter I floated the question of who owns or controls our professional online profiles – important parts of our personal brands. The options:

  1. Your employer merely has an interest in your profile. They should care but have no say unless you are misusing or misrepresenting your association with them.
  2. Your employer may provide guidelines on LinkedIn use while you are on their payroll. They might even provide boilerplate copy about the company for you to use. They might even encourage employees to be on LinkedIn. But there is no overt control.
  3. The final option is that a company declares outright control of an employee’s LinkedIn profile so long as the company is listed in the profile.

You might think you know the answer, but I’m getting a range of responses on what should be and what actually happens.

What do you think? Who should control your online brand. And what level of interest from your employer seems fair – from both your perspective and theirs? Share your opinions and examples with us here.