Gone are the days of the stand-alone customer loyalty card (or just plain loyalty for that matter) – we’re now seeing a range of new data, social media feeds and smart phones that are changing the way organisations engage with their clients. We’re in a generational and philosophical struggle between older, closed systems and the new, open culture of the Internet.
The open internet culture has proven to be at odds with both corporate cultures and political regimes.In fact it’s open season on corporations. It’s become a war of wills between the over-connected public with free and instant access to publish and consume information and the traditionally private and secretive enterprise.
Egyptian filmmaker Amr Salama offered this warning: “Businesses now really need to understand something that governments, dictators didn’t understand. Someday you’ll be busted. Anything you do will be known. Social media’s gonna get you, and if you’re lying we’re gonna know.” While we’ve certainly seen this accountablity in the world of politics (See Mashable.com’s list of the 9 Social Media Uprisings that Sought to Change the World in 2011), this phenomena is now taking hold in the global corporate marketplace.
“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.” —Hunter S. Thompson.
Through blog and social networks, the public have become an army waging war on corporate irresponsibility, which is forcing the need for brand transparency. In a twist of fate, social media propelled the demise of media giant: The News of the World. The scandal saw employees accused of engaging in phone hacking, police bribery, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of publishing stories.
When the news hit, the public honesty-police took up the call and microbloggers like Andy Dawson took to the Twitterverse to push known News of the World advertisers like Ford to drop their support of the newspaper. “Within about 90 minutes, it had started to snowball, and my timeline was filled with people tweeting at various companies,” reported Mr. Dawson.
The reaction speed of advertisers to the public outcry that eventually led to the closing of this over century old publication led many pundits to call it “Britain’s Arab Spring”. Rory Cellan-Jones, a technology correspondent for BBC Mobile summarized it best when he quipped: “a random collection of loosely organised people with no one leader have come together to deal a blow to the finances of a powerful media organization.”
The uncomfortable age of transparency
What does transparency means to business? According to the Business Dictionary, transparency is the “minimum degree of disclosure to which agreements, dealings, practices, and transactions are open to all for verification.” I’m betting that corporate executives & financial stakeholders have a completely different interpretation of this than their customers.
Where corporate executives saw investigative reporters as problematic, they now see the public as enemies in the war over brand control. It has forced many analysts to argue for greater transparency from brands yet most don’t know what transparency looks like or how to assess whether or not their companies are, in fact, being transparent. Many see corporate transparency as “grand gestures” (Deb Shultz) or clever marketing and PR tactics.
In my last post, I discussed the challenge to McDonald’s Corp. by consumer watchdog Corporate Accountability International to: “issue a report within six months of the 2012 annual meeting assessing the company’s policy responses to growing evidence of linkages between fast food and childhood obesity, diet-related diseases and other impacts on children’s health”, which was overwhelming rejected by McDonald’s stakeholders.
Should McDonald’s have taken that challenge? Should they have done it before being asked? What’s the risk of not doing so? Disclosure is now an element of transparency where companies no longer attempt to conceal their inner workings. They must figure out how to be “open” to sharing their activities and the impact of those activities with the outside world.
Patrick Doyle, President of Dominos USA said: “there is nothing more import or sacred to us than our customer’s trust” in his video response to the now infamous viral YouTube video of two staff members doing unspeakable things to Pizzas that were apparently served to customers. Trust is a constant theme in corporate marketing but that does it take to really gain that trust? Is it possible for a corporation to be truly open and still maintain their structural integrity? When it being open too much?
Join us this Wed, May 30th, 2012 between 8 and 9 PM for the #bizforum Twitter debate where the community will be exploring this very issue.
Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
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