Valley PR Blog

Lessons learned in Transparencyville

By Angelo Fernando on December 29th, 2006 In Social Media

At a company where I once worked, every regional office had a TV fitted out with an always-on camera for teleconferences. At the beginning, it sounded like a neat idea, of being able to get face-time with the suits in the corporate office. But the tiny camera also gave employees that creepy Big Brother feeling whenever we’d meet in the conference room. So someone (I swear it was not me) in our office came up with a low-tech idea: he brought in a little brown hand towel that was thrown over the camera lens for most of the day.

While the little brown cloth trick will work for cameras, there’s just no way to shut out the gaze of the outside world on what goes on inside our workplaces. Leaky information, errant emails, inappropriate instant messaging (Google ‘Mark Foley,’ and see), and that thing we now call ‘flogs’ have been front and center of a lot of PR and media-stories this year. If there’s one thing that communicators could take away from this, it’s the fact that operating in a super-transparent world is tough –if your techniques are borrowed from an opaque era. Meaning, there’s no point trying to draw the blinds in the situation room, shredding the discussion papers and refusing to share the PowerPoint slides, because word will seep out. In detail.

The 3 biggest lessons learned this year, I believe, were around the transparency effect. There may be more, but my pick could fall into 3 buckets:

1. Faux Transparency: The YouTube video uploaded by ad agency Agency.com pitching for the Subway Account. The intention may have been good –to reveal to a client the makings of a pitch—but the video was patently scripted (pathetically done, too) and cast an unflattering glow on the inner workings of an agency –exactly the opposite effect it had intended. The lessons: Not everyone needs to see the inside of the sausage factory, and your trophies. Transparency ain’t a stunt. A blog would have sufficed if they really wanted to reveal the planning process. They did start one, a few days after the video.
2. Unintended Transparency: The Bank of America employees’ song (Google ‘bofa video’ and you’ll see) that also appeared on YouTube and elsewhere. Two crooners singing a patriotic song filled with clichés may get inside applause, but devoid of context, looks ridiculous to the outside world. The BofA corporate communications folks couldn’t have had a chance in hell containing that one. The lesson: what’s inside gets out. Always.
3. Brown cloth transparency: The most notorious PR scandal this year was respected PR agency, Edelman’s involvement in the Walmart blog, Wal-Marting Across America. Hard to imagine why Edelman would have tried to throw a towel over their involvement. Besides, the bloggers also turned out to be fake. The lesson: Follow the WOMMA code of ethics. Carefully. See: Honesty of relationship, honesty of opinion, honesty of identity.

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