Thought bombs:

Corporations are under increasing pressure to explain themselves to a range of audiences - journalists, consumers, employees, investors, regulators, pressure groups and voters.With increased scrutiny comes the imperative for companies to act with integrity and transparency.In the networked world, one-way conversations risk ringing hollow.Can the principles of wikinomics change public relations for the better?

“If the environment is quickly transforming, fixated control spells disaster .... holding onto what you got doesn't work... just ask Dell Computers which today announces jumping to into bright colors to hopefully boost their lagging sales.Didn't Apple do bright colors years ago?”

_- daaberg on June 27 _6:31am

“The current generation of C-suite executives wield decades of experience, and not a little success along the way, equipping them to be excellent command and control leaders. They won't ditch that experience (their personal crown jewels) without overwhelming evidence that they must - and they may not have the right attributes to adapt, even once convinced.”.

_- Ron June 28 at _1:40 PM PDT

_“The risks of being open may be higher for early adopters than they are for fast followers. This was the case for the Green Party of __Canada__ in their use of a wiki to develop their election platform.While they were trying to change politics, everyone else was still engaged in politics as usual.This left the Green Party vulnerable and exposed ….. the other parties could see what the Greens were planning and the public could see the internal conflict going on within the party. Even though the same things were going on in the other parties, the conflict was kept hidden and thus the Green Party's image was compromised.There is the potential for the same situation for open corporations.”_

- Michael

The premise of open PR is that information will leak out eventually so it's better to join the conversation early than to put out fires after the fact. A company that regularly discloses pertinent information to its stakeholders establishes the kind of reciprocity required to build trust.

However, openness may not always be the right solution. For example, companies that lack confidence in their intrinsic values and/or have a vested interest in preserving their market and industry position would be unwise to facilitate a process that accelerates the erosion of stakeholder trust. This shortsighted, defensive risk management approach to managing the company should be a temporary tactic at best.

To stay competitive, companies must adopt an offensive, trust enablement posture where companies use a combination of mechanisms to secure trustworthy relationships with the stakeholders that contribute to long-run business performance. Even in the short run, companies can open up parts of their company to scrutiny by certain stakeholders, and gradually expose the poorer parts as the company's performance improves. It is dangerous to default to denial and deception, a strategy that routinely backfires in a transparent world. As we say, "If you're going to be naked, you better be buff".

Should companies host a customer dialogue forum or wiki where anyone can add their views?

A wiki that is available to participants via a log on control provides a valuable dialogue mechanism for customer dialogue. Log on control ensures that those who choose to participate are willing to provide an identity and are interested in constructive dialogue. Structuring the wiki with specific topics and domain areas provide a many to many way to converse around topics the company has interest in obtaining feedback around. Giving users the ability to create discussion forums related to the company opens up the customer view that many companies try very hard to gather from exhaustive surveys and customer visits. This mechanism provides a real time capture of topics that customers are interested in.

A customer dialogue wiki also opens up the channel to customer to customer communication related to a companies products and solutions and also provides a birds of a feather community to customers who are sharing the same problems or adopting innovative ways to tackle a particular issue. Many company product solutions are customer driven. Opening up this contributed library of dialogue has a benefit to the company as well as to the customers that use the company products and services to enhance and run their own businesses. This provides another channel of gathering useful information so that a companies products and services can rapidly adapt to the customer needs and provides client direction for product direction and strategy.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that when company chooses to host their own sites for public dialog, it is imperative that they enable a two-way conversation. Questions will be asked and challenges made publicly. The company will need to respond in an intelligent and measured way.

Increasingly, companies will be judged more by the quality of its discussions than the quality of its products and services!