Tactical transparency

There was a time when Milton Friedman was the king of economics, and boardrooms could close the doors behind them while directors schemed about how to maximise profits above all else. A Nobel Memorial Prize winner in Economic Sciences, Friedman was the man that legitimised the ruthless pursuit of profit with his maxim: “Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.”

“Transparency is not a choice. The business environment requires it. It is futile to try to hide bad news because somebody will expose it” - From Tactical Transparency, by Shel Holtz and John C Havens.

Interestingly, the rise of the Internet has coincided with a return to values in big business, as social pressure and the very issue of sustainability has driven corporations to fling open their doors to shareholder, media and public scrutiny. The rise of social media has been a strong force for transparency alongside a growing online media.

Today, transparency is no longer a choice, but a requirement for doing business means being authentic and building genuine connections. A quantum mind leap for some business, transparency entails shifting how you think about your customers, so that you work with them rather than just selling to them.

“If you're worried that someone may be looking, turn around. They are, or soon will be, and hiding is impossible.” - From Tactical Transparency, by Shel Holtz and John C Havens.

In their book, Tactical Transparency, Shel Holtz and John C Havens detail what transparency is, how it will affect your business and how to use social media to your benefit, since your customers and employees are already there - talking about you. They maintain that transparency does not mean sharing all your information with everyone. Instead, they advise that your business shape the discussion with strategic, tactical choices about what and how to share.

Holtz and Havens have tremendous experience with a range of social media, and both this experience and their zest for its possibilities come through clearly. This lively, timely book's core message is simple: In the digital age, transparency is a requirement, not a choice, and so business leaders must decide how to manage it. Your choices are complex, and fraught with emotion and risk. Transparency issues concerning openness and how much data to divulge often unfold in real-time, so business readers need every bit of the guidance and preparation the authors provide.

An overview of transparency

Transparency means being clear and open with your public to give “greater authenticity to your company and your brands”. The exact way you choose to do this is “tactical transparency”, that is, selecting tools and techniques to create authenticity and openness. This deliberate, strategic transparency is a response to “forced transparency”, a reality of doing business in the way-out-there information age. In a wired world, people will talk - are now talking - about your company, how it treats people, and what it does well or badly. You don't have any options about that. Your only choice is how you engage in the conversation.

The rise of social media has been a strong force for transparency alongside a growing online media.

Mandy de Waal, ITWeb contributor

Transparency doesn't mean sharing everything with everyone, giving away industrial secrets, violating employee privacy or flooding the Web with endless data. Effective transparency means your firm's leaders address the world with openness, especially in a crisis. It requires that your employees and executives learn to represent your business and communicate its values. It involves sharing your strategy with your investors and explaining the results of your choices.

Transparency - the decision to engage in open conversation - is essential, in large part, because it is unavoidable. Keeping things secret is increasingly difficult. The proliferation of social media is eroding the boundaries between the personal and the professional worlds. To practice transparency, remember the acronym “OPEN”, meaning “objectivity, purpose, esteem and navigation”.

* Objectivity - You can't be dispassionate when you're invested in something, as you are, literally and emotionally, in your firm. But, you can be honest and real.
* Purpose - Respond immediately by issuing a public apology if your company does something wrong. Don't just talk a good game; act to make things better.
* Esteem - The world will evaluate you and your organisation. Esteem, which is shaped by your communication with the public, is the sum total of those evaluations.
* Navigation - Every company eventually faces opportunities and crises. Have plans in place to guide your firm's crisis responses so that its behaviour benefits its reputation. Companies that practice transparency “do the right thing”. They act ethically and align their actions with their words. They admit “inescapable facts”. For instance, rather than using ads showing female models with ideal bodies, Dove featured women across a range of physical types, thus reflecting the public more accurately. Transparent companies act as if their books were open to scrutiny. This isn't easy, but the leaders of transparent firms are willing to be brave and take risks.

Techniques for transparency

Companies actually find a lot of ways to handle transparency badly. Some misread the shifting nature of the media and refuse to deal with bloggers. Others engage in “astroturfing”, mounting professional PR campaigns that are supposed to look like real grassroots movements. Inauthentic “opaque selling” is another mistake, given that being “opaque” is the opposite of being transparent. Opaque selling involves making a raw pitch emphasising the seller's needs and ignoring the customers' requirements and identities. Spam and junk mail are part of opaque selling. Such hustling, pressuring approaches have been part of the sales game for a long time.

Several forces are driving companies toward transparency, starting with emerging technologies. High-profile corporate misbehaviour has created a public desire to keep closer tabs on businesses. The US Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a governmental expression of that desire; it requires public companies to disclose more information and exercise better oversight.

Tactical transparency is a paradigm shift that takes a radically different approach to business and sales communication. Being transparent means changing your operating framework and emphasising genuine relationships. It requires as much focus and preparation as traditional sales. Try to make your appeal interactive and specific to each customer. Seek connections and commonalities by listening, being responsible and working with clients to reach their goals.

Companies can't and shouldn't disclose everything in response to outside demands, but communicating openly sets a company apart. One way to do this is to launch an executive blog, giving shareholders access to management's thoughts on major issues. Employee blogs demonstrate your firm's willingness to be candid. Set policies for both types of blogs. For instance, an executive can't spend all day answering questions from the public and employees must not expose proprietary information. Both modes of blogging will need a filtering and review system to keep people from posting inappropriate comments.

Get the full abstract from Learn2Think. Simply go to this link, fill in the form and Learn2Think will e-mail you the full abstract of Tactical Transparency for free. The final part of the abstract deals with transparency and crisis, as well as media and social networking.

About the Authors: Shel Holtz, author of Public Relations on the Net, is a principal of Holtz Communication + Technology. John C Havens is lead organiser for PodCamp NYC, and VP of business development for BlogTalkRadio.

Tactical Transparency - How leaders can leverage social media to maximize value and build their brand
Authors: John C Havens; Shel Holtz
Publisher: JOSSEY-BASS
ISBN: 9780470293706
Pages: 297