Publicness and Transparency

I read Jeff Jarvis’s article in Businessweek about openess and the internet.

Comcast has learned that there is a public discussion about its service happening independently and that is why it assigned staff to monitor and respond to Twitterers’ complaints. Every company alive is hiring search engine optimization experts to help them manage their public face for Google and its users. What more powerful business elixir is there today than Googlejuice?

And then I saw this post from techcrunch about a story of a 104 year old twitter user.

What none of those original stories told you, was that poor old Ivy had not joined Twitter just because it was suddenly the talk of the senior citizens home. No. She joined because home PC maintenance company Geek Squad signed her up, propped her up for a photo opportunity – even using her own account to Twitpic the event – and press-released the hell out of it. And the media fell for it.

The one thing worse than not being transparent is being caught not being transparent.

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