Transparency Means Little Without Integrity
Posted by brooks in Misc on Aug 27th, 2008 | 3 commentsLibraryThing’s Tim Spalding might just have renewed my belief in transparency. Skip the spin, deliver the truth and stand by your convictions with competitors and users.
Transparency has been a trendy web 2.0 business tenet for awhile and I’ve been a huge fanboi, but after reading Tim’s post I realized I had only seen half the value. The ingredient that’s been missing and always made transparency feel like just another slimy sales / marketing technique was integrity. Eschewing pr and marketing is an attempt to engage users and win trust by being direct and genuine. However, kowtowing to the whims and arguments of customers breaks the trust and voids the contract.
The mantra, “the customer is always right” is often interpreted as, “I’ll say anything to get / keep your business” and that’s, well, slimy. Part of the “transparency” movement is an attempt to completely cut the bullshit and broker honestly. We’re telling the customer directly about our our motivations, roadmap, financial health and products / services–everything the consumer needs to make an easy and effective evaluation. Implicit is the guarantee that customers will be treated honestly and fairly throughout the relationship and that means the courage to stand by your convictions.
Related Posts
3 Responses to “ “Transparency Means Little Without Integrity”
Leave a Reply
So what am I to make of the ‘invitation’ from ‘toolroomtrustee’, a.k.a. hermes.librarything.com (72.12.88.172), that arrived in my junk mail 10 minutes after I visited librarything.com?
LTM
@Lindsey – I don’t work for LibraryThing, so you’re probably better served by taking that kind of question directly to them.
LT is innocent until proven guilty in my book, so you’ll forgive me if I given them the benefit of the doubt until some hard evidence of a spam campaign shows up.
If it turns out they have some sort of dishonest spamming practice going on it would be disappointing to say the least.
Hey. LibraryThing guy here. Toolroomtrustee is apparently a LibraryThing user (see http://www.librarything.com/profile/toolroomtrustee). The user seems on the up-and-up to me, although not very engaged. Anyway, I don’t see that a spammer would have books about Greek science and philosophy.
What did the user invite you to, and how? Did you post your email on LibraryThing? It’s quite possible the user saw something you posted, followed the profile and invited you to something, but without knowing your user name, that’s about all I can say.
If you don’t want to be contacted by other other users, there’s a checkbox for that. You can also send or not send comments to your email. Having an email is also optional, about the only site I’ve ever heard of that was that way…