At the turn of the century, no PR department wouldsend a copy of a press release to a competitor at thesame time they sent it to the press. Today a very largeproportion of organizations do. This is part of the newtransparency and PR people are involved.In fact, they don’t sent press releases to competitors,but they do load them onto the website wherecompetitors can download them. In addition, thesenewsrooms are published for others to access, suchas the list of newsrooms. Transparency, however inadvertent, is alive and wellin online PR. A lot has been said about the shift intransparency in recent years. Organizations areinvited to become more transparent, and for PR thisshift is also part of a new imperative as the internetmediates more organizational communication.Transparency has to be considered in a wide context.It is one of the core elements that drive online publicrelations, the others being internet agency, internetporosity, richness in content and reach. These fivebasic elements of online public relations are mediatedby three other components: the platforms or deviceswe use to access the internet, the many and growingchannels for communication, and the context in whichall these elements come together for people to enjoy.Practitioners are at the heart of organizational trans-parency, and knowing its many faces is very useful inonline PR.

Examples of transparency are typified when govern-ment meetings are open to the press and the public,when budgets and financial statements may bereviewed by anyone, when laws, rules and decisionsare open to discussion. Then decisions are seen astransparent and there is less opportunity for the au-thorities to abuse the system in their own interest.Transparency is, in this sense, a building block ofdemocracy. The extent to which political PR practiceis comfortable with the nature of transparency has anumber of advantages. It provides a framework forgood practice.In economics, a market is transparent if much is knownby many: what products and/or services are available,at what price and where. Transparency is the bastionagainst cartels and price fixing, a guarantor of productefficacy and at the core of competition.Transparency in communication is evident when themedia are transparent, such as when there are many,often competing, sources of information; when muchis known about the method of information delivery;and when the funding of media production is publiclyavailable.In each case, the internet is now a major componentin delivering the advantages of transparency andnowhere more so than for organizations and managerswith roles as guardians of reputation.

Monitoring and Managing Reputation Online

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Lect.univ.dr. Daniel CIUREL English for Digital Media Course 6

RADICAL TRANSPARENCYRadical transparency is a management methodwhereby nearly all decision making is carried outpublicly. All draft documents, all arguments for andagainst a proposal, are freely available; the decisionsabout the decisionmaking process itself, and all final de-cisions are made publicly and remain publicly archived.For most organizations, radical transparency offers anumber of disadvantages, including competitivedisclosure for companies, and risks to state secrets forsome government departments. It can exposecorporate intellectual property that may provide aunique competitive advantage, and in many organiza-tions the conflict between radical transparency and lossof competitive advantage is an important concern.

CONTROLLED TRANSPARENCYControlled transparency is the controlled posting andrelease of information to the internet. It can occurthrough e-mail, web-based and other device channeloutlets. It may be institutional, overt, covert and unin-tentional.

INSTITUTIONAL TRANSPARENCYInstitutional transparency is where information about anorganization is made available by a wide range of au-thorities. Many managers find it extraordinary that somuch is made available online without the organiza-tion’s say so. It may be the information about a com-pany on the government’s list held by CompaniesHouse and made available online, a register of mem-bers of a trade association, a list of suppliers madeavailable through a trade journal portal or the registra-tion details of an organization’s website published bythe registrars. There are hundreds, if not thousands ofsuch and products are declared online. It takes the formof information that is required by law, or the rules thatare part of the infrastructure for a licence to operate. It’snot just for companies. This form of transparency ap-plies equally to different organizations.

OVERT TRANSPARENCYOvert transparency is where an organization seeks tomake information available. This can be to markets,consumers, employees and many other organizationsand constituencies. Often this form of transparency ison a website, offered in e-mails or provided to socialmedia participants. For example, many organizationspublish pages about corporate social responsibility oncorporate websites or have listings in Wikipedia, withtrade associations and so forth. Other forms of overttransparency are when an organization (or individual)makes information available to distribution technologiessuch as RSS.

COVERT TRANSPARENCYCovert transparency is where organizations ‘push’ ormanipulate information. Push content includes onlineadvertising and similar marketing promotion. It can beattempts by the organization to get an advantage, forexample in making websites more prominent in searchengine listings (called search engine optimization –SEO), or information delivered to social media.Astroturfing (the practice of falsely creating the impres-sion of independent, popular support by means of anorchestrated and disguised marketing exercise) is theantithesis of transparency.

UNINTENTIONAL TRANSPARENCYA classic case of unintentional transparency is the listingof a company website in Google. It is where informationis available or made available through the offices of theorganization and is ‘harvested’: that is, collected fromwebsites and used to offer information to other internetusers. This harvesting of information can be simply aperson taking information from a page on the organiza-tion’s website and transcribing it; it can be the same thingbut done by a computer; in more recent years it may beuse of information from just part of a web page that couldbe no more than a line of two, an image, video, soundfile or hyperlink to other pages (such as a news story ina newspaper’s website). Web widgets often contribute totransparency as well as contributing to internet agency.Transparency happens because, as part of the licenceto operate (both as a legal requirement and as part ofbuilding trust with constituents), information is availableonline. Some is required by regulatory bodies, and somecomprises references in online directories, associationmembership data or rules of trade bodies. It happenswhen people are named in association with organizations(and that can be as simple as the name of the organiza-tion or website being listed, or because of e-mail ad-dresses published online) and through social media. All organizations are to a greater or lesser degreetransparent. So too are people. The amount ofinformation made available about us all is quiteconsiderable and is growing all the time.

The assertion that PR must adapt and evolveholds true across the range of framings of whatPR might be – it is as valid for those who seethemselves as working in media relations as it isfor those who see themselves as information ormarketing communicators, reputation or issuesmanagers, or more broadly concerned with rela-tionship management.It is not necessary for practitioners to be activeparticipants in online practice but they need to beaware of what is happening online. The truth isthat what is happening online will influence thepractice of PR. People use the internet in waysthat affect all forms of practice, as do organiza-tions. Not knowing what is happening online isnot very sensible.As in all PR, there is a need to monitor the effectsof PR interventions; there is a need to be able tomeasure and weigh such interventions, and thereis a need to be able to evaluate effects. As the in-ternet mediates more of what organizations do,the role of monitoring, measurement and evalu-ation takes on a much more interesting role.There are those people who are known by the or-ganization and who interact, and in addition thereis a large group of people and organizations ‘outthere’ with whom the organization has a tenuousor even unknown relationship. Monitoring thesepublics is not easy.Monitoring the combined range of relationshipsthrough all the platforms and channels and in allcontexts is not possible. To begin with there aresome channels that are just not available to mostorganizations to monitor. Most SMS, instant mes-saging, VoIP telephony and much e-mail hostedon third-party servers are all but invisible. This tells us that, if we can’t monitor it directly, weneed to monitor it indirectly and this is what hap-pens for the vast majority of organizations andactivities.If we accept that markets are conversations, thatsuccessful organizations cannot perform effec-tively unless they enter into dialogue with a rangeof stakeholders, then it follows inexorably that or-ganizations must be aware of and engage withas nearly a full range of communication channelsand platforms as possible. This doesn’t mean allorganizations must utilize all channels (far fromit), but it is vital that they are sufficiently aware ofthese channels and platforms and that they iden-tify which are most appropriate for communica-tion with their particular stakeholders.

Importantly, it seems common sense to be awareof and actively engaged with identifying thosechannels publics choose to use. Only a small pro-portion of organizations can afford to be selectiveabout who they listen to.For example, some sceptics have argued thatpoor spelling and grammar diminish the impactof many blogs. Yes, blogs that are badly written,ill informed or simply boring can all be irritating –but that doesn’t mean they should be dismissedor ignored. If we were launching a new productand discovered that sales were poor, we wouldwant to know why. Perhaps there was a designflaw and this had been pointed out by dissatisfiedcustomers who had written to inform us about asimple fix that would rectify the problem. The internet and associated technologies mayoffer useful channels for promotion and publicitybut their real importance lies increasingly withtheir ability to allow organizations to hear what isbeing said about them. More than ever before,monitoring and evaluation are moving to theheart of public relations activity.In the digital space, page views (doubtless muchobscured by robot visits) have been used along-side crude tallies of visitor numbers to assess in-terest in a topic. Visits to websites do have avalue, but vary widely in cost and value.

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Lect.univ.dr. Daniel CIUREL English for Digital Media Course 6

TOOLS FOR MONITORING:

Google Alerts.RSS monitoring using any of the tools avail-

able. The key to effective blog monitoring is toadd interesting sites until you have about 10.Then look for the next best; if it offers bettercontent, discard one of the others (the networkeffect will ensure that any important contentwill come via the 10 in your list).

Proprietary services. Beware of exaggeratedclaims. Always evaluate more than three for atleast a month.

Search engines. The specialist search en-gines are very helpful. They can be used to findinformation, but more importantly they can helpyou find the experts ‘out there’ who make goodcontributions and who follow and are followedacross the online community (a specialistsearch engine is http://search.twitter.com).