Blog transparency -- synthetic or authentic?
Are corporate blogs in general transparent? Or is it what we say or hope they are when they really just try to give that impression? The discussion is not new. But it is probably the most important discussion we can have about corporate blogs now that they rapidly are becoming more or less mainstream.
Advanced Organizational Communication wants to introduce a new phrase in this context: Synthetic Transparency. It's based on "synthetic personalization" which is "...a compensatory tendency to give the impression of treating each of the people 'handled' en masse as an individual." Think fast food restaurants, hotels etc. and you know what they mean.
I don't know about you, but this sure got me thinking (well chosen words/phrases have that effect on me). A blog that's just the old press releases is no blog and it will never have the positive effect a blog can have. I think we all agree to that. But I also think that many would agree that we can't talk about everything in a blog. There are information that would hurt us if it became publicly known (deals being negotiated, for example).
Does that mean that blogging by definition is synthetic transparency? In that case, could it be any other way? Or how can we achieve authentic transpareny and still have a job?
Maybe this is just semantics. But I don't think so. I think there's tens of thousands of people out there that want to blog but don't know how to handle exactly this issue. The corporate blogging policies we've seen doesn't give much guidance -- it's more complicated than "Don't tell secrets". Much more complicated. And because of that, much more interesting.