transparency

Does your company operate with a culture of transparency? How transparent are your executives with employees, customers, shareholders? 

There's a quote on Wikipedia that reads: For well-informed participation to occur, it is argued that some version of transparency, e.g. radical transparency, is necessary, but not sufficient. It's unattributed, but I've seen it a few times.

A fertilizer plant blows up, killing at least 14 people who were unaware, along with regulators, that the facility stored vast quantities of explosive material. A fast-food chicken chain invites everyone to take impromptu walkthrough tours of any of its outlet kitchens. These two recent events illustrate the extremes of corporate transparency (both companies are privately-held), and why it needs to be central to our conception of corporate reputation.

Here are the 10 categories and 100 point audit of your digital engagement effort, how will you fare ...

I value what Don Peppers and Martha Rogers write and as such I am making my way through their latest book (Extreme Trust) and using it to write a series of posts on matters that are touched upon by Don and Martha. In the first post I set out the bigger picture – why trust matters, what the challenge is and how transparency will force companies to become “trustable”.

I enjoy reading what Don Peppers and Martha Rogers write. In fact their point of view spoke to me in such a way that it called me to join up and become a part of The Peppers & Rogers Group, for a while, back in 2000. Don and Martha have published a new book Extreme Trust. In this series of posts on trust I am going to share with you, comment upon and explore topics that are addressed by Don and Martha in their book.

"Ethics are the bedrock of WOMMA," starts the web page promoting the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's contest to choose the most ethical word-of-mouth, or "WOM" marketing campaigns. I can't help but think that this is like a seance industry recognizing fair treatment of ghosts and phantasms.

The news coming out of Japan couldn't be worse for the American nuclear industry. Manufacturers, suppliers, and electric utilities must be cringing with every headline, as the information includes science, statistics, and security...all subjects that your average consumer is fairly incapable of understanding (and certainly not via short blasts of news).

The latest WikiLeaks revelation that much of the American government's secret diplomatic cables read like entries in a mean girls' burn book has got politicians and pundits blathering about how it might affect foreign policy, guessing if/where Interpol could apprehend the group's founder, Julian Assange, and wondering when the next batch of secrets will be released (rumored to be Bank of America emails in which execs come across as, gasp, heartless capitalists).

Guest Post by: Jo Stratmann

We’ve already looked at two of the key topics  from our social media in financial services round table event (niche communities and customer driven markets) and now it’s time to move on to a topic that comes up time and again in relation to the financial services industry – the issue of transparency.