ARTICULATED

“Transparency succeeds when it is embedded into the culture of a company, not implemented as a program designed to be exercised by only a few.” So says Shel Holtz and John Havens in their book Tactical Transparency: how leaders can leverage social media to maximize value and build their brand. It’s a great read about brand management in the web 2.0 world.

But that concept isn’t just for brand managers at Fortune 500 consumer-product companies, which is who Holtz and Havens largely write for in this particular instance. It’s for communications and PR folks at B2B companies and nonprofits and membership organizations and government entities. For those of us who work for or interact with organizations like that, it is largely up to us to convince our executives and board members that “message control” and “opacity” as we have known them are obsolete. Doing PR like it’s been done for decades won’t work any more.

Technology has created a reality that forces us to interact with our stakeholders in entirely different ways – to free the reins on our people to establish new, nontraditional, far more authentic conversations between the organization and its stakeholders.