Social Media is supposed to have brought about this new era of transparency. But has it?

My business partner (Jeffrey) and I got into a disagreement regarding this the other day and I thought “Let’s see what the rest of our small world of FaceBook friends and blog readers think”.

Jeffrey, had found a forum post on a product review board on the Dell web site which slammed some new tiny computer that they had recently put out. He emailed me the link saying that transparency was not good in this case. Having read about Dell Hell in Jeff Jarvis’ What Would Google Do?, I was inclined to immediately disagree because Mr. Jarvis made a very good argument to the contrary – that publicly calling Dell out had resulted in him getting what he wanted and that his small set of the articles spread very quickly over the web, becoming a PR nightmare for Dell. Dell finally reacted and learned their lesson and made many other customer service related corrections as a result of this.

However, I have given it some more thought and I have to say I’m not totally convinced that 100% transparency (much less 75% or even 50%) is good for every business, especially small business. Dell is a very large company, many people had never even heard of the Dell Hell incident – I had not until reading his book. Despite the bad PR, Dell remained relatively unblemished. I’m not sure that I could say the same if it were to happen to my small business. They could lose 10s of millions of dollars, perhaps 100s of millions, and remain relatively unscathed. For small businesses that operate in a smaller market those results might be catastrophic.

So ponder on this:

• Would you publish a publicly viewable forum where anyone could write what they wanted about your company and anyone could read what had been written?
  • How would you handle negative commentary?
• How would you react to web site that are erected for the sole purpose of discrediting your company by having users share their negative experiences (e.g. www.dellhell.net)
• Is the concept of transparency more relevant/practical/necessary for big businesses and government than small businesses?
• Does this even matter for service-based businesses?

By the way, what do you think about the transparent canoe? Cool huh?

Tags: dell, dell hell, facebook, jeff jarvis, opaque, small business, Social Media, transparency, what would google do

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