9 posts tagged Transparency

This was a eventful week for brands in social media. Personalities representing brands were in the spotlight for entertaining us in Social Media Marketing and helping us in Social Media Servicing.

Social tools are used for a number of business reasons; to promote a brand, improve reputation, increase engagement, encourage advocacy, and recruit, retain, and nurture relationships. Not only that, they are accessible 24/7. Just because we can use social tools any time, should we use them all the time?

Companies today are doing a lot of redundant work. They build costly infrastructure and process to internally replicate functions that customers and prospects give away for free online. This is clearest in the world of customer service where third-party ecosystems like Get Satisfaction and Yahoo Answers are building a case for social media as a supplement (if not replacement) for the traditional internal customer service and research model.

Privacy concerns seem to be constantly in the news, like the recent furor about ‘full body scanners’ being deployed in airports to peer below our clothes as a response to the Abdulmutallab bomb attempt, or the spasm of concerns following the recent demo of TAT’s Recognizr augmented reality application that can determine the identity of people from cell phone pictures or video streams based on public domain photos.

Frank Eliason at Comcast is probably one of the most well-known customer service managers in the entire Twittersphere. Today he shares with us some thoughts around his talk at the Dachis Group Social Business Summit 2010.

Our guest writer today is Caitlin Pulleyblank, founder and CEO of Open Colony. Her company is pushing the boundaries of what it means to bring social to the executive recruiting business. An avid reader and consumer of culture, Caitlin was on the founding staff of Wired Magazine.

This is a post from Lee Bryant that was originally posted on the Headshift blog. He was invited to give a presentation at the Amsterdam Social Strategy Talk, hosted by Creative Crowds and ViNT. Lee and Tom Steinberg (mySociety) were the closing speakers, talking about the issue of public participation and open data in relation to government innovation. The talk was a very simple introduction to why this topic matters, plus a consideration of some recent critiques of transparency initiatives, decorated by a lovely data visualisation of world population growth from the G-Econ project.

The internet can provide incredible tools for transparency; easy access to large volumes of information, wide distribution to anybody with an internet connection or a library card, and indexing mechanisms to make search easier. We expand upon Lawrence Lessig’s writings “Against Transparency.”

The Dachis Group Collaboratory launched two weeks ago and we have been actively sharing our thoughts on social business design, while allowing the world to view a window on our work. Recently, the documentary “We Live In Public” has been in screenings around the U.S., chronicling the activities of Josh Harris a decade ago and foreshadowing many characteristics of today’s “social” mania. We have only partially opened the window on our work world, but the view it provides has caused us to reflect on what we do. As all of us are participating in the live, unedited feed, some of our worldwide team have some distinct thoughts to share and I hope to hear your thoughts in the comments.