Businesses were scared to air any dirty laundry even though we all know
every business has some. If you read the post Your Brand is Everything You Do, you
understand that ultimately consumers are in total control of businesses
they patron. With the proliferation of online platforms and forums,
your customers can pretty much tell the world how they feel about you,
and they do.
How do you combat this? You don’t, you help it by
being transparent. Don’t be scared, check out how these companies are
being pretty transparent with the world and we think it’s working for
them.
1. On the GM blog,
they write about repayments to the government, the recent CEO’s
resignation and introducing us to new corporate hires. This type of
communication is giving us access to important information and showing
that even a behemoth company like General Motors can be transparent.
2. Salesforce.com’s Trust site
shows if there are any up-to-the-minute system outages with their
online CRM services. You can check if the server you rely on for your
customer data is up and running and you can see how fast your
connection times are. Comcast also has an outage check if you are experiencing any issues with your service.
3. When AT&T had a fiber cut in the San Francisco Bay Area,
they turned to Twitter to get the word out about the issue, then had
multiple Tweets even if there was no update so that their 2400
followers knew exactly what was going on. They now have over 20,000 followers.
4. KIVA,
a micro lending non-profit that helps match lenders and entrepreneurs
in 3rd world countries, tells you at any given point where your loans
go and how much have been paid back. On their site they prominently say:
Kiva is a grassroots project started by a team with a
big idea: one-to-one, real-time lending on the
internet to alleviate poverty.We have proven this concept as well as our model, and are
in the process of taking this idea to the next level.
This requires funding. To be clear, 100% of loan funding
raised on our website goes to the Kiva entrepreneurs we
feature.
When
I was researching some larger non-profit organizations, it was tough to
find this type of information anywhere on their site. It could make a
donor nervous to donate!
5.Zappos has been the poster-child for being a successful and transparent company. When Amazon purchased them, the CEO posted his letter to the employees for the world to see. I’d say that’s pretty transparent. They also have an entire employee-written blogosphere for everything from Inside Zappos, Running and even Zappos TV where employees take videos and write fun posts about their day and their passions.
These
are all great examples of companies being transparent, however you
definitely don’t want to go too far. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey
usually publishes his blog
when there is something newsworthy at Whole Foods to talk about. A
recent entry was an explanation of why he decided to rid himself of
“Chairman of the Board” title. However, he may have gone a bit too far
when he stated in a New Yorker article that “no scientific consensus
exists” regarding the causes of climate change. Ouch. He definitely may
have lost a bunch of supporters for that one.
Transparency also
has to be real, and has to be correct in order to gain trust. That big
company called the US has a CEO called President Obama and he promised
to be transparent in his stint as our President with the newly revamped
White House website.
The number one job of this site is to publish information that HAS to
be correct. If someone finds information that isn’t, it’s can be a
field day for the media and his ratings.
Companies that aren’t
transparent or don’t answer their customer’s issues can easily be outed
by their customers with platforms like Twitter, Facebook , Angie’s List, Yelp,
and the millions of forums that allow them to tell their stories. The
bottom line is, the more transparent you are, the more likely you’ll be
trusted.