CorporatePR

Remarks from Demos Evening

Last Thursday evening, I had the great pleasure of participating in a panel discussion about Web 2.0 at the Demos thinktank.  We had about 40 people, and the discussion was lively, both among the panelists and with the audience.  I enjoyed meeting my fellow panelists Livio Hughes of Headshift and Tom Steinberg of MySociety.org, and the conversations both before and after the event with both of them, and moderator Paul Miller were very interesting.

I don't usually prepare remarks ahead of time when I speak, but I am doing it a bit more frequently these days, as I want to be precise about my thoughts and, in this case, I didn't want to use a PowerPoint presentation.  The risk of doing that is to sound like you are reading vs. speaking.  I hope I did a good job overcoming that.  The benefit is that I can easily make the remarks available to you.  You'll find them below.  I didn't follow them exactly, but you'll get the general drift.  I spoke primarily about persuasion and transparency.  Apologies for not adding all the links and references...I'll try to do so later.

More on Ethics and Transparency

Philip Young and I both wrote articles for Global PR Blog Week 2.0 on ethics. [His, mine]  We have commented to each other's posts, along with some other people.  I think it is a pretty interesting discussion, and encourage you to go add your two cents.

Marketing Commons

I finally got around to reading Pete Blackshaw's intriguing article, "Protect the Marketing Commons."  While I am not sure you can perfectly relate the idea of the "tragedy of the commons" to people's attention (commons in Harden's terms means a finite, bounded resource, like a field, which is certainly far more concete than "attention"), the idea we have reached a marketing-for-awareness saturation point is a valid concern.  Pete says we need to come up with answers to the following questions:

• Definition of transparency. What do we really mean by "transparency"? More important, what do consumers think it means?
  
  
• Seeding and shilling. What's the real cost of artificially seeding buzz or not fully disclosing a consumer's relationship with a brand? Who's accountable?
  
  
• Sponsorship disclosure. How explicit should bloggers be about the nature of blog sponsorships? What's the cost of bloggers being labeled as shills?
  
  
• Product placement. Should there be some level of disclosure in product placement, perhaps starting with children? What's the cost of inaction?
  
  
• Truth in advertising. If a movie is advertised as starting at 2 p.m., when should it actually start? Do we have an obligation to disclose or compensate consumers for their attention?

I have started to noodle on the first one (transparency) here and here.  For a good critique of the "tragedy of the commons" read Elinor Olstrom's book Governing the Commons.

Aside:  I am not sure "transparency" is the right word to use for ethical disclosure of conflict of interests, etc.   Aren't we trying to make things visible, apparent?  Transparent is better than invisible, but perhaps that is just an interim step?  Is transparent actually wishy-washy? A weasel-y half-measure?  I don't know.  What do you think?

Transparency and Ethics

I wrote a piece in this week's New Communications Blogzine about ethics.  In it, I proposed the following:

...that truth and transparency are, in fact, two very different things, and that transparency needs to be pulled apart from truth and examined on its own merits....

Wikipedia has a good working definition of transparency. Here’s the kicker: “In government, politics, ethics, business, management, law, economics, sociology, etc., transparency is the opposite of privacy; an activity is transparent if all information about it is open and freely available.”

Let’s repeat: “Transparency is the opposite of privacy.” Of course, you can’t say that about truth, which drives home the difference between truth and transparency. Truth doesn’t require that “all information…is open and freely available.” It only requires that the information that is presented is honest and accurate. And that gap between the information that is presented and making all information available is the one that PR practitioners have fallen into, tarred with the label of “unethical.”

The conflation of truth and transparency is therefore a problem. While I welcome the increased awareness of ethical practices as a good thing, until we start focusing on the important changes that the increasing demand for transparency is bringing to PR practice, I fear that little will change in terms of the currently dismal reputation of PR.

I am planning on writing more about transparency, truth and the reputation of PR for Global PR Blog Week 2.0.  I would very much like to hear from you about the information/transparency gap I describe above.  Do you agree? Disagree?  I think we really need to delve into what this means and think about guidelines for being transparent.  I look forward to your comments.

Transparency, the French Revolution and Blogging

I was amazed to read the following paragraphs, a conversation with Michel Foucault that appeared in the book Power/Knowledge.  It seems blogging and the new participatory communications push could learn some things from THE theorist of the French Revolution: Rousseau.  Read on about transparency, opinion, surveillance, power and the media [my emphasis in bold]:

"When the [French] Revolution poses the question of a new justice, what does it envisage as its principle?  Opinion.  The new aspect of the problem of justice, for the Revolution, was not so much to punish wrongdoers as to prevent even the possibility of wrongdoing, by immersing people in a field of total visibility where the opinion, observation and discourse of others would restrain them from harmful acts." p. 153

"This reign of 'opinion', so often invoked at this time, represents a mode of operation through which power will be exercised by virtual of the mere fact of things being known and people seen in a sort of immediate, collective and anonymous gaze.  A form of power whose main instances is that of opinion will refuse to tolerate areas of darkness." p. 154

Transparency Should Work Both Ways

I've been thinking about transparency a lot lately, and I was intrigued by Andy's post on PROTS and Berlind's post on JOT.  But I think there is a big missing piece here:  the responsibility of the reader/consumer to be transparent.

If blogs, for example, are about conversation, then there is responsibility on both sides to declare their interests.  This also holds true if we say markets are conversations.

Then I read a comment over on BrandShift to Jennifer Rice's post on co-creation:

Company:  What would you like Mr. Customer?
Customer:  I dunno, how about a computer that can accurately forecast stock prices that doesn't cost me anything.
Pfffft!!!!  Whatever!

Exactly!  We have to keep in mind the motivations of the customer/reader.  We should ask that they make their own motivations transparent as well.  With transparency on both sides, you can then enter that hallowed state of communicative rationality (a la Habermas).

[Note: what the hell is communicative rationality you may ask?  Well, find out next week at the IAOC blog when I talk about it in my framework of a new communications model.]

Lots to think about here...stay tuned.

Getting Serious About Transparency

Andy has proposed PROTS:  Public Relations Online Transparency System, saying,

The outcome might be a set of behaviors, practices and polices that really articulate what transparency means in the context of the business - a kind of playbook. Transparency runs deeper than fiduciary responsibility - it cuts to the core of an organization. So this ain't just an issue for the lawyers, accountants or PR people. It's as much a cultural issue as a procedural one.

I would say it is often MORE a cultural/sociological issue than a procedural one.  The developed procedures need to come after an understanding of the former -- especially the power dynamics! Of course, that is a tremendous challenge.

Andy asks if any of our professional organizations would take it on.  Given the leadership of the bigger orgs doesn't care to engage with any of us in the blogosphere agitating on these and other issues, I wouldn't hold my breath. 

I am doing a lot of thinking about power these days (re-reading my Foucault!).  If anyone knows of studies in the area of explicit power dynamics and organizational communications, please point me to them.

Update:  David Berlind's post on transparency and PR-journo relationship.  Good reading.