One Red Hot Country Mama!

There are over 100,000 blogs created every day according to Technocrati. Wow… that is a lot of new voices instantly communicating to the world – one thing they could be communicating is corporate secrets. A consultancy called "The Attention Company" discussed what that means from a business perspective in their presentation Out There.

In their survey, 8% of people thought it was appropriate to share trade secrets through a blog and 39% thought it was appropriate to share opinions about the performance of the company. It is obvious that this information could affect both competitive positioning and share price.

Blogs are a modern-day medium for secrets – bringing the water-cooler gossip to the world, instantly. The internet allows people to share their stories openly, without the permission of an authority. The conservative PR department, which in my experience sits right next to the legal department, no longer controls the way that employees represent the company to the world.

According to The Attention Company, people who are “Out There”, meaning those who consider it okay to criticize their organization online, have very unique opinions about competition and their organizational lives. They think that knowledge resides at the bottom of the organization, endorse transparency and are not trusting of those that keep secrets.

These people sound a lot like the traditional non-conformists who want to have a voice and don’t want to be tied down by rules. We have all heard stories of employees who were fired for having a blog but with 100,000 being created a day, it seems impossible to keep the “out there” people at bay. Like any “vice squad” trying to rid an area of crime knows, once you bust one criminal, another appears to pick up where he left off.  The presentation concludes that companies should accept the new reality and use the “Out There” people to drive internal innovation and communication. In other words, you are being watched so you better behave!

Outside the business realm, what does it mean to have no more secrets?  We all have family or personal secrets that could get us in trouble. This makes me think of the Girl with a One Track Mind. A British woman, who once worked on the set of Harry Potter, published her sex life online to later have her identity revealed by mistake. Her blog discussed having multiple partners with intimate details.

Because of the social stigma associated with women enjoying the sexuality, she was afraid that she would be treated like an outcast. But she wasn’t – in fact many of her friends and family members supported her. So, it is possible that revealed secrets about who you really are can lead to greater acceptance and more connection with the people that you care about. It will be interesting to see how a world with fewer secrets will look. But as an “Out There” person myself who “doesn’t trust those who keep secrets”, I am looking forward to it.