You may receive occasional emails from LinkedIn notifying you that you or one of your connections was mentioned in the news. These notifications are the result of LinkedIn’s automated “Mentioned in the News” feature, in which an algorithm searches for online news articles, and matches names in these articles to LinkedIn members or organizations.

Consider how this feature relates to your news release distribution strategy. If you are issuing a news release with positive news about your company—say, a milestone or award—this extra distribution provided by LinkedIn gives your news release more power by bringing it to a greater audience.

But say you are issuing a news release about a neutral or negative subject and prefer to limit the reach. Individuals mentioned by name in the news release should turn off the LinkedIn settings that enable this type of automated sharing to avoid bonus distribution of negative news. You can visit this LinkedIn help page for more information on how to do so—and be sure to consider both your personal page and your corporate page, if you manage one.

Not only is it important to consider how “Mentioned in the News” may impact you or individuals within your organization, but also be aware of any third parties who are mentioned in your news release.

For example, recently a client posted a news release about an award. The headline of the release included our client’s name as well as the organization that sponsored the award program. That award sponsor was seen by LinkedIn as “in the news” based solely on our client’s news release, and the release was shared with members of the organization’s LinkedIn group. This was a good outcome for our client because it meant the third party’s LinkedIn connections also received special notice about our client’s award, compounding further the audience that heard about our client’s positive news.

But there may be times when you want to be sensitive about creating that “in the news” mention for a third party. In that case, don’t put the name of the third party in the headline. That will likely keep LinkedIn from initiating an “in the news” mention about the third party, though it is unlikely anyone will know just how LinkedIn’s algorithm will respond.

While you can’t control how LinkedIn automates “in the news” mentions, you can control whether you’re mentioned and whether you receive emails about your connections who are mentioned. To learn more, see this LinkedIn help page about “Connections in the News.”