Does Transparency Really Mean Small Talk?

28 August 2009 by Michael Leis, View Comments

Have been thinking about the pervasive fear from companies about transparency in social media. This naturally got me thinking again about the perceptions and realities that exist in the notion.

Recently Adrian Chan wrote an excellent article that takes on transparency and authenticity as concepts and their various meanings. Within that context, I offered up my own take:

Theoretically, you’re right on, this is an excellent depiction of how these terms are being thrown around and perceived.

The most fundamental problem however is that simply by taking place through a medium, it is already mediated and manipulated. By the technology, by the context of both the sender and receiver, and the perceptions of both parties.

This isn’t any different than Jean-Luc Godard’s “Photography is truth. The cinema is truth 24 times per second.” When you think about it, the statement reveals that the only truth is 24FPS. Everything else is perceived truth: by the creator, and by the viewer.

Fact is, people don’t really want actual transparency or authenticity in social media, from brands or each other. They want more people-involvement. The Web, up until a few years ago, was the epitome of automation and efficiency.

To me, “social media” “Transparency” and “authenticity” are ways of saying, “Show me people.” I think in many ways social media is societal backlash against the last 30 years of first-world corporate era, the age of the mega-company and its many sub-companies with hordes of productivity-driven employees at every level.

Unlike one-to-millions spokepeople (which are still plenty useful), there’s a lot of value in one-to-tens or -hundreds or -thousands communication. It doesn’t mean you know anything more about that person, but that you can project your own perceptions through a digital channel and have something pleasing and identifiable, (and maybe even meaningful) come back.

Right now, social marketing is really people marketing. The people who create the product are part of what helps to sell it. Going back to when I had a local meat company as a client in the mid-90′s, they wanted to offer transparency in their TV ads, straight from the floor. Would this complete authenticity be lauded?

Since then, I’ve been watching social networks and trying to understand just what transparency is made of. And it seems like small talk is the fluffy nougat of a delicious social media strategy.

So much of social media are the informalities, the sometimes banal and always casual, the “where you’re at” and “what you’re doing.”

This allows people to project themselves onto your stream, find the commonalities, and give them an opportunity to reply and engage.

In this case, then transparency also requires writing skills, because the most engagement comes from a certain level of ambiguity, and understanding the difference between being ambiguous and being vague. In this case, maybe ambiguity is the new transparency: at least until the next wave of social technology renders quick-witted writing obsolete.

Not much to fear at all, as long as you keep listening, writing, and responding.

What do you think? What is the practical application of transparency for you or your brand? Please, offer your perspective below, or on twitter @mleis.

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  • Michael,

    Interesting question that. I think ambiguity is intersubjective -- it describes meaning for two or more users, not one. If you're suggesting that ambiguity is one user being vague, we would locate ambiguity in linguistic intent, in the content itself, in the form of the expression. All are distinct and we use these together to great effect, all the time, without even thinking about it. But ambiguity seen as a relational attribute (which is more powerful I think and is maybe more accurate, for a person being intentionally ambiguous is not really being ambiguous unless you take the interpreter's position, in which case you now have an intersubjective view!) gets closer to how social media transform communicative acts. Another reason that I think we need an N user or multiple user model for social interaction design.

    We need to see meanings (IMHO) as negotiations and mutual (if not reciprocated) productions -- not as stable and clear expressions of user intent. Linguistics has shown that a model of meaning based on user intent doesn't work. (Nor does a model, such as cybernetics, that locates meaning in the content or information). All social action is interpreted. That's the action domain. Ambiguity then describes the negotiation (read: compelling, engaging!) involved in non face to face social interaction. Each tool used introduces its own unique qualities. These create arbitrary connections, discontinuities, views, presentation, and order of individual statements/acts and responses. Using a tool well, then, and to your point, is about being competent in the medium and knowing how to participate in ways that engage different kinds of users in ways that are compelling for different reasons (being personal, responsive, factual, informative, reciprocating, generous, and so on).

    If we could have a view of mediated ambiguity that provides us w insight into online social practices we would have a framework for describing if not understanding the different competencies involved in online social participation. Tuned sometimes to resolving ambiguity, but sometimes to stretching it out.

    cheers!
    adrian
  • Adrian, thank you as always for your deeply insightful thoughts continuing through here. Love the idea of the action domain in the interpretation of social negotiation. And yes, ultimately it is not only the ability to be ambiguous depending on the context, but to be able to manipulate that ambiguity: to color it, stretch it, filter it through the lens of others that creates engagement and varied meaning.

    Also, ambiguity needs to be accounted for in the creation of any artistic expression meant to communicate with a public, whether you're designing interfaces, paintings, or brand presences in social and distributed media. Right now, planning and executing in social feels like a combination of screenwriting, radio, and impressionism/pointillism. But that's just me.

    Isn't developing a framework for this our journey without a destination? Is it really possible to nail-down a comprehensive understanding of these nuances? Or is it too idiosyncratic? Just as we continue to understand the ways people interpret communications, the media themselves continue to evolve and change.
  • Michael,

    It's an impossible framework -- just as a framework for film is impossible, or a framework for music, etc etc. There's no accounting for the possibilities of a form if it's approached from the perspective of experience alone, insofar as each user experiences something unique. But we're after a framework of observable patterns, accurate descriptions, and to the extent that a theory of social interaction design can be prescriptive, a range of anticipated outcomes. The design side itself is fairly constrained, so, like architects, we can use convention in our urban planning... As much as social media can seem like a very limited world of experience, I think we're just beginning to learn how it works, what works, what it works for, and for whom. We're developing tv shows in the 50s and most of us know more about building a tv than writing a show. So my take on this is that we are using a very limited set of "best" practices -- repurposed because they provide a familiar experience but selected only because they exist. I think it's worth stepping out of the box and teasing out the principles of interactions because they offer the possibility of at least thinking, if not creating, something different. A design culture (and social media business culture) oriented to making copies would be a sad thing. ;-)
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