Don't Be Transparent, Be Authentic Instead

Some peo­ple tend to tweet, blog, post, and status-​​update their lit­tle hearts out. Be it on Twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn, MySpace, their own blog, or what­ever. They say it’s all about trans­parency, and trans­parency is good.

But I think we need to be careful.

While we may be open­ing our­selves up for the world to see, we may be open­ing our­selves up a world of trou­ble, too.

Trans­parency may seem like the lat­est fash­ion. But it can also become dan­ger­ous on many lev­els. Some dan­gers are obvi­ous, like being robbed after pub­li­ciz­ing you were out. Oth­ers, not as much, like being rep­ri­manded for say­ing some­thing you shouldn’t have said, or even being fired for insult­ing your customers.

My con­tention is, too much trans­parency can hurt you in many ways.

I agree that social media is great for devel­op­ing and nur­tur­ing rela­tion­ships. That’s what the word “social” in social media means. Or what it should mean, anyway.

But as with all rela­tion­ships, even when con­tin­u­ous, open com­mu­ni­ca­tion is an impor­tant com­po­nent, there should be a lit­tle mys­tique to keep the flame alive. A lit­tle room to allow for explo­ration and dis­cov­ery over a period of time instead of all at once.

In today’s open, Web 2.0 world, pri­vacy is more cru­cial than ever before. Why? Because trans­par­ent or not, every­thing you say online is per­ma­nent, can be found, and can be eas­ily mis­in­ter­preted. Espe­cially when taken out of context.

For exam­ple, I love Twitter’s 140-​​character limitations.

But when a tweet is pub­lished as part of a suc­ces­sion of related tweets, or when posted as a response to another or as part of an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion, a gen­eral search will turn up an incom­plete mes­sage that may be mis­lead­ing and counterproductive.

The key is to know what to keep pri­vate and what to reveal. And what­ever you do reveal, to think strate­gi­cally so that what you say is prop­erly said. In short, it’s know­ing what to say and how to say it. To reveal the right things, in the right way.

(Sounds a lot like copy­writ­ing, doesn’t it?)

Do you need to tweet or blog about your fail­ures? Some­times. But not all of them, and not all the time, either. Same thing with your suc­cesses. You don’t want to give away the store — much less give away any ammu­ni­tion that can be used against you.

Say­ing more than what you need to say makes you both vul­ner­a­ble and open to crit­i­cism, and may also com­mu­ni­cate the wrong mes­sage to your audience.

Remem­ber, there’s a dif­fer­ence between authen­tic­ity and trans­parency. Being too trans­par­ent is not a good thing. Sure, go ahead and project trust­wor­thi­ness, author­ity, and a will­ing­ness to share. Be can­did and forth­right. Be gen­uine and direct.

But remem­ber, scam­mers and com­peti­tors are watch­ing you, too.

More­over, don’t for­get your clients, prospects, part­ners, and affil­i­ates. If you’re too open, you may be com­mu­ni­cat­ing you won’t value their pri­vacy, you can’t keep secrets, and you’re open­ing your­self up to abuse — I call this an uncon­scious par­al­leled assump­tion.

Aaron Wall said it best: “Appear­ing trans­par­ent is prof­itable, being trans­par­ent is not.”

In other words, there’s a dif­fer­ence between being per­ceived as open and being open. Between com­mu­ni­cat­ing a sense of trans­parency and actu­ally being trans­par­ent. Between being authen­tic and author­i­ta­tive, and being defen­sive and self-​​absorbed.

Authen­tic­ity is say­ing things right. Author­ity is say­ing the right things. But trans­parency is say­ing every­thing. And it’s wrong. You don’t need to say every­thing to be trans­par­ent, and you don’t need to be trans­par­ent to be authen­tic and authoritative.

Just say what you mean and mean what you say.