Beware your neighbour, they might be after a contract
Buyers beware, that person next to you, laughing at your jokes, encouraging you to take advantage of the complimentary drinks and asking you seemingly innocent questions about your work on the KLM flight to Tokyo might not be what they appear.
Sure it’s possible that you’re funny, free booze is definitely the best kind and complete strangers might want to hear what the day-to-day work of a category manager at a pharmaceutical firm is. But it’s more likely that they’ve chosen to sit next to you because they’ve looked at your LinkedIn profile and thought “I could do a bit of business with them”.
This is thanks to ‘Meet & Seat’, a new service by KLM. It means passengers can surf the social networking profiles of other confirmed passengers, who have linked their profiles, and find one they would like to sit next to.
Now, I have no doubt that the main intention of the service is to create a mechanism to put people with shared interests, such as Hungarian Gypsy jazz, next to each other on a long flight. But in the wrong hands, somebody might use it to get prized information from a procurement professional who has had one too many glasses of fizz.
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I’d love to sit at the feet of Felix Chan to get the full benefit of his wit and wisdom. Not sure that KLM allows that though…
Many a true word…..years ago, when I was acting as a consultant to an important company in eastern Europe, I found myself sitting beside another consultant who was reading a briefing paper on the planned takeover of the company I was working for, by a major western company. I learned a great deal about their proposed tactics, which I was able to use to the benefit of my client. It wasn’t long before the other side realised we had this information, but they never worked out where it came from, and it didn’t even cost me a drink….!
Another great source of info is to take a lengthy train journey where some of your client / competitor staff are travelling. Their mobile phone conversations can be very interesting.