What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [51]
People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
The internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
In every interaction you have with your constituents, speak with a human voice as if you were speaking face-to-face. Be boldly, bluntly honest when admitting your mistakes—and when disagreeing with the public. Lock your PR people away. And remember, everything you say is searchable. Think of Google as the angel on your shoulder keeping you honest.
Be transparent
My life is an open blog. On the “about” page on my site, I try to practice what I preach about transparency. I reveal my business relationships: the companies for which I work, write, speak, and consult. I reveal personal relationships: companies where I used to work, where I have friends, and even where I have been turned down for jobs. I list stocks I own. I sometimes write about religion, so I reveal mine. As I often write about politics, I reveal my views and—to the horror of traditional journalists—my votes. This page is my defense against an accusation that I might try to hide affiliations, opinions, or conflicts of interest. At the end of this book, I will also make relevant disclosures.
I’ll throw out this challenge to you in your organization: Why keep secrets? Or why keep more secrets than you have to? I’ve heard the argument: Your competitors will steal good ideas. But transparency will build a relationship of trust with your constituents and open up new opportunities. The ethic of transparency sums up much of what has come before in this book: the need to involve your constituents in your process, the need to hand over control through openness and information, the benefits of open-source networks, the benefits of the gift economy, the ability to listen.
But I must acknowledge the irony of advocating transparency in a book about Google, which in many ways is as opaque and secretive as Dick Cheney. You can’t get into a Google office without signing a nondisclosure agreement. Google won’t reveal details of its revenue split with sites that run its ads. It refuses to list its Google News sources. It won’t tell us how many servers it has. It chooses not to use open-source software for some functions, like managing its cloud of computers, so it can retain a proprietary advantage.
Still, as we’ve just discussed, Google does develop most of its products in public by releasing unfinished versions and getting help from users. In that sense, it is unusually transparent, willing to work in the open and involve its users in development. I suggest you follow Google’s example in its product development and ignore its silence and opaqueness elsewhere.
Collaborate
If you don’t open up, you can’t collaborate. Collaboration with customers is the highest and most rewarding form of interactivity, for that is when the public tells you what they want in a product before you’ve made it. If you’re lucky, they’ll take ownership in the product you create together. They won’t just buy it, they’ll also brag about it.
I have tried to make this book collaborative. I didn’t put chapters online as I turned them out to have readers correct and edit them, as other authors have done; that is too after-the-fact. Nor did I try to make the book a product of democracy (“vote on what I should say”); deciding what to say is, in the end, my job. Instead, I discussed ideas in the book on my blog as I researched them and thought them through and asked readers for guidance, which they generously gave. The chapter “Google Mutual Insurance” that follows is a product purely of that discussion.
Collaboration is good business. Michael Dell spoke to me about “co-creation of products and services,” a radical notion from a big company whose policy had once been to look at and not touch its blogging customers. Now it tries to make, change, and support products collaboratively. “I