Principle 5: Be truthful or be exposed

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I’ve worked with many clients who want to engage in new media, yet they endlessly discuss and debate what level of truth they should reveal. It often becomes an issue of what do we want to say to the public. While they may say, “Yes, we want to be truthful,” it always becomes a discussion of how truthful.

The reason for the debate is there’s a feeling that information still needs to be controlled by corporate communications. That would be great if corporations could still control it, but they can’t. With everyone having a voice online, no one individual or institution has a monopoly on information or the truth.

And while time and time again we see examples of truthful campaigns working very well, and at the same time there have been examples of campaigns built on lies falling apart, it is still very difficult to get sign-off from a client to build a fully truthful campaign.

This is becoming less and less of an issue today because the need to be truthful is being hammered as the number one commandment of online communications.

The failure of not being 100% transparent in your associations and dealings is being exposed as a fraud. According to the online digerati, fraud and lying online is the ultimate digital sin. And while online critics often don’t have legal recourse to fight back, they do have ridicule and the largest, fastest, decentralized communications network (the Internet) at their disposal.

You can lie and get away with it

Nobody likes to be duped…unless they know that’s the premise. For example, we like magicians, but we don’t like con men. A fake site can work if you make sure everyone is in on the joke. In that way you’re still being transparent and true to your nature.

What should be of greater concern to a company that chooses not to be transparent or truthful (two debatable approaches) is the fact that the online community loves to seek out and reveal impostors. That’s because an online publisher’s street credibility rises sharply when they do expose a fraud. For this reason companies need to be wary. If you do choose to be fraudulent, you need to realize that everyone online is eagerly looking to expose you.

Even worse, not only will you be exposed, but your exposure will live online endlessly and people will talk about it forever using you as the poster child mistake never to repeat. Companies with major fraudulent failures are unfortunately now eternally living examples of how not to communicate online.

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