Radical Transparency and Corporate Self–Presentation

Businesses feel compelled to maintain some kind of visibility on social media. This involves not only the visibility of products and services but also the visibility of people who represent an organization. Often an interpersonal, dramaturgical style of self–presentation is adopted as a corporate strategy for social media. This makes sense as these companies are promoting their brands and products on a platform tailored for interpersonal exchanges. At the same time, respondents who work in these organizations adopt branding strategies to promote themselves individually within this sector. These developments conflate individual and corporate visibility on social media, leading to selective visibility of key representatives on behalf of corporations. Being visible is a kind of labor performed by people formally hired by companies as well as by people enrolled informally through social media.

Visibility is paramount to marketing and public relations, especially with the advent of social media. Industry literature calls for "radically transparent" corporations. This material overstates privacy's obsolescence by treating transparency as a best practice:

Secrecy is dying. It's probably already dead. In a world where Eli Lilly's internal drug-development memos, Paris Hilton's phone cam images, Enron's emails, and even the governor of California's private conversations can be instantly forwarded across the planet, trying to hide something illicit – trying to hide anything, really – is an unwise gamble.

Underlying this literature is the belief that the executive class gains a competitive advantage by baring their insecurities and dirty laundry to the world. Yet augmenting a brand's visibility through social media requires the involvement of employees and consultants. Individuals who are already good at making themselves visible on social media are perceived as predisposed to this labor. While most industry literature calls for top brass to make themselves visible, respondents suggest a comfort with visibility among workers is also valued.

Respondents use personal branding to secure employment in social media. Career advancement was seen as the result of effective branding. Here, they draw parallels between corporate branding and personal branding within a corporation. This implies a broad range of identity management tactics, ranging from managing information online to dressing appropriately. Susan is quick to point out that the deliberate management of a personal identity brand should not come at the expense of authenticity:

You can create your image the same way you would create your company's brand. You are a brand, you are potato chips, basically. And you know, you can make sure that you have a strategy in terms of what you post, and you know how you present yourself online, the same way that you would have a strategy in terms of what you wear when you get up in the morning and how you present yourself offline.

For Susan, self–presentation involved in these branding strategies is a concern that pervades every personal and corporate engagement. She claims branding should not compromise authenticity but rather that "telling [a] consistent story" should be prioritized. Some businesses see the combined desire for effective branding and personal authenticity as a product of the heightened visibility created by social media. As a result, networking and building relationships is the product of a kind of passive communication via your online presence:

You have to communicate your brand, your self-brand, and you have to be aware of what's out there about you because information is becoming more public and public, privacy is becoming less and less, (...) that's going to create channels of success and failure for you. Whether it's making sales, creating relationships on the business side, or even just trying to get a job, right? It's all about communicating the right message. (Marc)

Coping with this visibility is treated as a requirement to ascend in a career in terms of self–promotion and nurturing relations with others. But in a more general sense, people who work with social media cope with pervasive visibility in their market. This is because, at the time of the interviews, Facebook required businesses to have a personal identity tethered to a corporate presence. The conflation of personal and professional is especially concerning for smaller organizations:

That's just the nature of the space. Facebook itself, you are you; you're not anonymous, for one, in general. And when you're dealing with people, we're also ourselves. Facebook doesn't allow you to create fake accounts as a corporation. I'm me on the account that I'm responding to players, for instance. And our relationship, and this us, this is not every company; there are sharks out there, and there are medium to small-sized fish like us who decide to do things in a certain way. (Martin)

Business users are able to cope with these conditions by using privacy settings to restrict what details are publicly available. Yet the connection between their personal presence and corporate endeavors is seen as obligatory and overwhelming. Martin changed his setting to prevent strangers from adding him as a friend, stating he "just got overwhelmed by people I didn't know in Louisiana wanting to be my friend on Facebook." Other respondents limited access to their profiles for this reason. Managing a fan page also leads to the visibility of your profile, allowing fans to add the respondent as a friend:

Because the fan pages are actually linked through my profile, a lot of the people (...) who are within those fan pages also end up seeing my name, associating my name, and inviting me as a friend. Most of them I have as a limited profile so it still allows me to see what they're saying without them knowing that I just got married or my daughter just turned two, or any of that personal stuff that I don't necessarily want to share with the general public. (Jared)

Respondents treat personal branding and self–presentation online as an effective tactic, though one that is not appropriate for all businesses. Some small businesses benefit more from personal engagement with social media than others. Liane offers a comparison between a divorce counselor and a debt counselor, stating the former is better suited to render their personal life transparent. Certain professions are associated with particular personal details not fit for public consumption. This suggests an emerging politics of career visibility, where personal disclosure can be an asset or a liability. Returning to the recommendation for CEOs to bare their souls to the world, respondents suggest this is not an easy or likely outcome. Wade claims transparency requires a particular skill–set, and a CEO who is otherwise shielded from public scrutiny is not going to benefit from this approach:

If you're the CEO of a start-up company and you've always largely been a transparent person, and that's your general nature, these tools are probably going to help you facilitate that. If you are an old-school CEO of a Fortune 500 global company, and you're not used to a world of a great degree of transparency, it may not help you become more personally transparent. (...) Aside from the entertainment value, largely customers don't care if the CEO of the company just bought a computer, what he had for lunch today, or that he's suffering from depression. The investors might want to know that. But on average, the average consumer does not.

In the case of the executive class of a large corporation, Wade also suggests the audience to this transparency may be quite specific. To be sure, investors may insist that a CEO remain transparent to them. Other respondents suggest the executive class can avoid transparency measures from which smaller businesses are not exempt.

Open–minded companies are embracing 'radical transparency' whether or not it is an effective approach. Respondents cite success stories like Dell's attempt to publicize complaints about its products. Yet Marc is skeptical of the outcome of this publicity:

A lot of what I've heard about has been just more of a success story with this transparent visibility, you know, than a negative. But I can foresee how that can be a problem, especially if you don't have solutions to the problem, right? It's a risky business with that, it's very risky to post things publicly, but what's funny, and you'll find this with a lot of businesses, their culture is moving towards that direction. Their culture is moving towards transparent visibility that allows everyone to see what they're doing when they're doing it because they want to seem like they have nothing to hide.

He suggests the appearance of transparency is much more important than actual transparency. Yet even radical transparency draws on user-generated content, complaints in this case. This enables corporations to take advantage of user-generated content, all while exercising censure if deemed necessary. Marc cites Research In Motion's approach as an example:

Even with the Crackberry Web site, I think I heard some examples where some things were kind of filtered because they still have complete control over the Web site, of course, right? It's user-generated, but at the same time, they can control what user generates and, if they want, delete them when they can. And I think there were a few instances I heard in the past where they did eliminate things, maybe because they didn't have solutions to the problem or maybe because it was just too negative a comment that may have turned off a few users.

Certain corporations may combine the appearance of transparency with a selective presentation of the self, omitting negative information or emphasizing positive features. Nevertheless, respondents suggest those not involved in large corporations cannot easily accomplish this. Ben offers a cautionary tale of a disgraced social media consultant who ruined his personal brand in a public way. This consultant had an audience of over 150,000 followers on Twitter. At a public event, he claimed these followers pressured entertainer P. Diddy to agree to meet with him. Yet this was entirely false:

By Monday, there was such a backlash because the story he told wasn't true. He made it up. So, I guess out of fifteen hundred people in the audience, there must have been a few of them who didn't believe him and tried to find out if it was true or not. And they did, and it wasn't true. He had to apologize online to everybody that it wasn't true. That's how fast people can find you out if you're not 100 percent out there.

This cost the consultant his career and was a product of his exposure to a large audience and its scrutiny. Ben suggests independent and smaller businesses are not always predisposed to transparency and can be exposed as fraudulent. Exposure is a risk when personal and corporate brands are conflated. Damien treats this as an ongoing endeavor shaped by all visible aspects of a person's career and life:

The personal brand and the corporate brand, the fact of the matter is, every time you open your mouth or every time you publish a photo or a video or whatever, some kind of connection to you, you are creating your brand. I think the challenge that we are going to learn from all of these tools - any technological advances have always been abused on the way. (...) I think with these social media pieces, we all need to understand that every time we open our mouths, we are creating a personal brand.

Self–presentation implicates businesses as they increasingly build a presence on social media. This is either done proactively or reactively when responding to customers. Their self–directed visibility is augmented in reaction to information provided by individuals. As individual use is the template for engaging with social media, businesses' own visibility is modeled in terms of personal information, profiling, and routine updates.