Riffing Space

Transparency

As the world becomes more and more transparent, there is emerging an ever widening gap between the new class of information gathering consumers and the organizations that that seek to distort or, at the very least, hide the truth. Seth’s blog (check it out!) this morning got me thinking about the importance of transparency in the new modern economy. You can find out just about anything or anyone with a quick search on google. Companies spend millions of dollars to convince their customers (and potential customers) that their service is great, only to have websites like this one pop up at little or no expense.

Why hide information? In the old economy, it made more sense.

Hiding Information

Do consumers need to know everything about an organization? Obviously not. I am not going to let my competition know about the groundbreaking service that I will be implementing in eighteen months, only to have them take the idea and run with it in twelve. But we don’t have to be transparent about everything. Consumers don’t expect that. Some of them don’t expect much transparency at all.

Building Trust

But this is where they can be surprised. This is where you can build trust. Once a consumer (whether it is for a service or a product) recognizes this transparency, they inevitably will trust you more (a trust in which they have more confidence about as they gain more information). If they know they can trust you, they will be more inclined to trust your product or service.

Wiki-anything?

We are in the age of Wiki-anything. Information is free and readily available. Our value, especially as service providers, is to be a conduit for that information rather than a gatekeeper. To some people this is the same thing. In both instances information is flowing to the consumer. But there is a difference. If you are a conduit, you are not demanding something in return for your information.

Gatekeepers & Conduits

Consider the antiquated real estate industry (which I am a part of). At one point, a consumer would have to go to a Realtor if they wanted to know what houses were listed in the MLS. This was a way of guaranteeing a livelihood for hundreds of thousands of Realtors across the nation. But now consumers have a million places to go to get this information (most obviously, the internet). Did this kill the business? Well, current housing crisis aside, no. There are more agents out there than you can shake a stick at. Obviously it is just a lot more difficult to get and keep clients. And it is this way with most industries today. What used to make you valuable (the information that you had locked away) can now be gotten somewhere else. Now you have to earn your value in other ways. You have to be remarkable. You have to be worth talking about. You have to build a community of true believers around you and your product. You have to be trusted.

How can you do this? Be a conduit. Be transparent.

Just an idea. What do you think?