Transparency: Is It Good PR?
With the advent of social media, transparency has become a buzzword bordering on obsession. Companies have clamored to provide end users with more access to the inner workings of the organization, whether in response to a crisis, in an attempt to prevent one, or simply in an effort to become more relevant. President Obama won his post by vowing to bring more transparency to government. Yet is transparency necessarily good PR for an organization, and what are the boundaries?
If we consider consumer attitudes, as many organizations have, transparency seems to be a no brainer. One recent study found that a full 75% of consumers felt “social responsibility”—a concept that encompasses transparency—was important. A 2008 Harris study of transparency and government found “deep dissatisfaction among the American public with both the availability of government financial information and the way it is delivered to the people.”
Specific examples seem to validate the importance of transparency. The hit TV show Undercover Boss stands as a veritable paean to transparency, taking viewers inside companies to show a supposedly unvarnished reality that the CEO discovers him or herself. Yet it’s also excellent PR. When the CEO of 1-800-flowers appeared on the show, company stock shot up 5% overnight. Other companies featured have experienced similar results, to the point where some commentators have dismissed the show as essentially an hour-long PR exercise.
Transparency has become so ingrained as an expectation that its perceived absence can become an occasion for negative PR. That’s what happened following a blatant referee error in a recent World Cup game involving the US and Slovenia. With FIFA rules preventing the referee from explaining the call after the game, spectators were offered only a tweet from FIFA’s president referring them to a previous statement he’d made explaining why there’s no video replay in the world cup. This led a commentator on Time.com to cry foul. “[C]ouldn’t he have offered more transparency about this specific incident than a tweet? Especially a tweet that links a boiler plate web page from March?”
These examples notwithstanding, there is reason to doubt whether transparency always serves an organization’s purpose—or even if it’s necessary at all. Today’s pre-eminent marketer by most standards—Apple—is well known for its lack of transparency, a tendency exemplified in relation to Steve Jobs’ health scare. In the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP has come under fire for its live video feed of oil streaming out from the seabed. The feed had been offered as a gesture toward transparency, yet as some commentators have pointed out, it has only come to serve as a painful reminder of the company’s failure to stop the leak.
To some extent, the limits of transparency are obvious. We don’t want nor need to know everything about a company, just as we don’t want or need full disclosure from people in our lives—a truth depicted in movies like What Women Want and The Invention of Lying. Companies are actually forbidden by law and their obligations to stockholders from revealing certain kinds of information. And as far as legal disclosures go, it’s not clear what purpose, if any, certain of them serve. Did Domino’s do itself any service this past winter when it released a video showing company employees criticizing the quality of its pizza, or when it included quotes on its website from customers complaining that “this new domino’s pizza [$%#^@] sucks”? Maybe; although domestic same store sales did grow 14.3% in the first quarter of 2010, it’s hard to tell how much of it was the new pizza recipe.
In a 2007 blog posting called “Transparency Schmansparency,” a writer for AdAge.com observed that people in the PR business are “storytellers, and we are paid to tell a story that is in the best interests of our clients.” That may be true, but we respect the public’s desire to know for themselves that organizations are acting as good citizens. And this means coming up with some more nuanced principles for when and where and how far to practice transparency. Here we open the floor to you, our readers. Where do you stand on the transparency debate? Is transparency good PR? How much is too much? We’d love to know!
- In: Transparency
Transparency means that a company should not try to “cover up” or “spin” bad news. It is so much more effective to admit if there is a problem and discuss how you will solve it (and then solve it!!!!) then to try to keep it hidden or make it sound better than it is. That doesn’t mean a company should provide blow by blow details, but even before social media, transparency was the most important thing. Think how JetBlue screwed up by keeping people on the tarmac without bathrooms or water for hours and how the next day the CEO went on television and took out full page ads in the New York Times discussing their screw up, made an apology and talked about how they had rectified it. The number of JetBlue customers actually went up within a few short weeks. Back in the old days, we used to just call it “taking responsibilities for one’s actions.”
PR is indeed a storytelling profession–but telling a good story and being open about a company’s successes and occasional failures is not an oxymoron.
There’s a profound difference between honesty and openness.
Honesty needs to be absolute. You can never afford to “spin,” because the truth always comes out.
But when people are overly open, they evoke the audience’s response of “too much information” (TMI). So transparency requires reasonable limits.
For example, when an employee at my company was murdered, a newspaper reporter asked to interview his co-workers. We set a limit: for reasons of employee privacy, we did not make any co-workers available for interviews.
We did not permit “transparency” in that case, and
– importantly — we gave a reason why. When the reporter accepted the reason, the story was dropped.
Where to draw the line on transparency — somewhere before it becomes TMI — takes judgment.
Very good article from Harvard Business Review blog on “strategic transparency” that might be of interest to you: http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2010/06/the-accident-that-bp-got-trans.html
There’s a profound difference between honesty and openness.
Honesty needs to be absolute. You can never afford to “spin,” because the truth always comes out.
But when people are overly open, they evoke the audience’s response of “too much information” (TMI). So transparency requires reasonable limits.
For example, when an employee at my company was murdered, a newspaper reporter asked to interview his co-workers. We set a limit: for reasons of employee privacy, we did not make any co-workers available for interviews.
We did not permit “transparency” in that case, and
– importantly — we gave a reason why. When the reporter accepted the reason, the story was dropped.
Where to draw the line on transparency — somewhere before it becomes TMI — takes judgment.