@markhillary asks "When you follow company Twitter accounts, do you like being able to see who runs the account, like a named person on the profile?"
I think that depends how gullible you are. When I get a letter signed by an Important Person, I generally assume it was written by his staff and signed in his absence. And when I get a mass-produced "personal letter" from an Important Person, I assume it was generated by a computer and signed by a programmer.
I got an email recently, which claimed to be a "A Personal Message from Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman and CEO, OMG and Keith Steele, CEO, PrismTech and OMG Board Member". I wrote back and thanked Richard personally - not to the address on the email (which was omg_marketing@omg.org) but to his real email address. For some reason, he ignored this. I hope he's not ill or anything.
And corporate communications sometimes use a fictional identity. Gerald Kaufman MP once tried to phone a person in the Prime Minister's office who had responded to a letter, only to discover that "Mrs E Adams" didn't actually exist. [Source: John Walsh: Beware letters from fictional civil servants (Independent May 2011)]
This kind of thing is convenient for bureaucracies, because it allows incoming communications to be sorted by topic and redirected to whoever happens to be on duty that day. I'm sure the same thing often happens with Twitter, to prevent a corporate spokesperson ever being confused with a private individual.
As for company bosses, politicians and other celebrities, it would be naive to imagine that they always write their own tweets.
"Of course they don't", tweets @markhillary, "but allowing helpers to do broadcast stuff is surely OK if the conversational is genuine?"
Well, that depends on your idea of a genuine conversation.
It seems to me that there are some serious sociological and ethical problems here - of public/private identity, authenticity and trust - and we are only just learning how to operate in this new world.
@markhillary goes on to ask another question. "If you were interacting with a brand like Virgin Media, are you happy conversing with the brand?"
My answer to that question invokes Freud's concept of transference. Our psychological state (happiness, frustration) may depend on what we project onto a given brand or persona that we are conversing with. I generally try to separate my feelings about the company/brand from my feelings about the human being who is standing between me and the company/brand - but I don't always succeed. When we are really angry about something, it is difficult to avoid being rude or sarcastic to the junior employee that picks up the phone, even when we know it's not really their fault. Conversely, if the sales assistant is charming enough, it is tempting to buy something we don't really need.
Of course the CEO never picks up the phone herself. Funny that. When I'm conversing with the Virgin brand, I may fondly imagine that I'm getting Richard Branson's personal attention, but there is a little voice inside my head saying that's unlikely.
There is of course one thing that is likely to make me very unhappy indeed. Suppose I am naive enough to imagine I am having a personal conversation with Richard Branson or Richard Soley. Then the screen falls over and I see it is just some little functionary and not the Wizard of Oz at all. Isn't that just going to annoy me? Isn't it Richard, isn't it? #OMG.
Showing posts with label WizardOfOz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WizardOfOz. Show all posts
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Saturday, January 31, 2004
Trust and Transference
When John talks about the Wizard of Oz, I think this relates to the way we project imaginary stuff onto our so-called leaders (or therapists). Freud called this "transference".
Interestingly there is a growing literature on another notion of transference in relation to online trust. This seems to be something to do with transitive trust - we imagine we can trust B because we imagine we can trust A.
Authority trust breaks down if the authority is imaginary (based on transference) rather than real. Network trust breaks down if the network is imaginary. And so on.
Lacanians define transference in terms of knowledge. The analyst is the one "supposed to know". In public life, we are surrounded by people who are "supposed to know". Lord Hutton is supposed to know the "truth" about the death of Dr Kelly.
To my mind, this is more problematic than mere ownership.
Interestingly there is a growing literature on another notion of transference in relation to online trust. This seems to be something to do with transitive trust - we imagine we can trust B because we imagine we can trust A.
Authority trust breaks down if the authority is imaginary (based on transference) rather than real. Network trust breaks down if the network is imaginary. And so on.
Lacanians define transference in terms of knowledge. The analyst is the one "supposed to know". In public life, we are surrounded by people who are "supposed to know". Lord Hutton is supposed to know the "truth" about the death of Dr Kelly.
To my mind, this is more problematic than mere ownership.
Friday, January 30, 2004
Trusting the Wizard of Oz
originally posted by John
Reading Richard’s link below I recalled my days at www.ourgulf.com where my own experience of putting the building blocks of B2C trust into place revealed the process to be almost entirely one of establishing publicness. E-commerce trust is little more than an undertaking to do – like the famous wood treatment – exactly what it says on the label. Part of my job as business leader was to try somehow to become the personal, authentic, face of that publicness, to build in some kind of ad hominem dimension. Reading it set me thinking:
Publicness was behind the Hutton inquiry. It is also at the heart of the fall-out from its findings. Publicness is the antithesis of trust. It is that loss of authenticity that stems from conformance with a set of imposed preconceptions, options and values.
Trust becomes something quite different as knowledge moves on and doing what the label says is no longer enough. As Aidan and I set out in our book, trust becomes a case of relying on some body to take care of our interests. And, apart from some very general contexts, publicness remains its antithesis. Publicness also is more often than not attended by claimed ownership of knowledge.
Unsurprisingly (publicness is nothing if not predictable) Lord Hutton found in favour of the government’s ownership and against the BBC’s. In doing so he revealed both parties (and himself too) to be Wizards of Oz. He drew back that curtain of publicness behind which established power in our society resides. Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell provided the government with its authentic ad hominem dimension - and very successfully too until the invasion of Iraq. Thanks to the relationship its viewers and listeners have with its presenters, the BBC has many more of these dimensions than the government. (Ask me about trust, for example, and I’d say yes, I feel I can generally rely on the BBC to take care of my interests and no, I can’t say the same for the government (that we may be talking about different interests is immaterial – context is everything). I’d also say I can generally rely on Amazon.com to do what it says on the label as well as tell me what everyone else who bought this book bought as well.)
The real heartbreak of Hutton for me has been the revelation of the thinness of the veneer of publicness we’re content to put up with as a society and what this reveals about trust. Take Blair and Campbell (and possibly Brown and Cook) out of government and the rest are publicness personified. (Can anyone for example seriously see any point in Tessa Jowell or John Prescott or Jack Straw?) That’s bad enough but the picture is worse at the BBC. The interim replacements for Gavin Davies and Greg Dyke – Lord Ryder and Mark Byford are uninspiring enough to have their own brand of publicness. Ryder’s grovelling apology put me in mind of a timid mouse whose sole concern was to be back in his mousehole. Dorothy’s naked Wizard of Oz was positively intimidating by comparison.
Postscript:
My abhorrence of ownership of knowledge probably began when I was a long-ago student (Bradford University MBA Programme 1984). There, I attended lectures given by a guy called Prof Tom Stonier (to whom be thanks), whose famous book, The Wealth of Information, likened knowledge and information to capital and drew parallels with the economic insights contained in Adam Smith's widely-ascribed-to1776 work of similar title (OK it's called the Wealth of Nations). I gave the book - the Stonier not the Smith which I’ve never owned - away many years ago so no longer have a copy but the central message I carry from it to this very day is this: if I have some knowledge and I give it to you, then you have it and I still have it, the act of giving has effectively doubled the knowledge. And when we each add the new knowledge to the knowledge we already have, we are, as a pretty clever species, capable of generating more and more knowledge and more and more questions about knowledge that lead to more knowledge. And so ad infinitum.
At the authentic heart of risk management there is no space for ownership of knowledge. Ownership of knowledge reinforces publicness and makes trust - and by extension risk management - impossible. 'Iran is part of an axis of evil' is a statement, spoken by an idiot, reflecting claimed ownership of knowledge and precluding any possibility of trust. 'Iran is no longer part of the axis of evil' is one too.
Reading Richard’s link below I recalled my days at www.ourgulf.com where my own experience of putting the building blocks of B2C trust into place revealed the process to be almost entirely one of establishing publicness. E-commerce trust is little more than an undertaking to do – like the famous wood treatment – exactly what it says on the label. Part of my job as business leader was to try somehow to become the personal, authentic, face of that publicness, to build in some kind of ad hominem dimension. Reading it set me thinking:
Publicness was behind the Hutton inquiry. It is also at the heart of the fall-out from its findings. Publicness is the antithesis of trust. It is that loss of authenticity that stems from conformance with a set of imposed preconceptions, options and values.
Trust becomes something quite different as knowledge moves on and doing what the label says is no longer enough. As Aidan and I set out in our book, trust becomes a case of relying on some body to take care of our interests. And, apart from some very general contexts, publicness remains its antithesis. Publicness also is more often than not attended by claimed ownership of knowledge.
Unsurprisingly (publicness is nothing if not predictable) Lord Hutton found in favour of the government’s ownership and against the BBC’s. In doing so he revealed both parties (and himself too) to be Wizards of Oz. He drew back that curtain of publicness behind which established power in our society resides. Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell provided the government with its authentic ad hominem dimension - and very successfully too until the invasion of Iraq. Thanks to the relationship its viewers and listeners have with its presenters, the BBC has many more of these dimensions than the government. (Ask me about trust, for example, and I’d say yes, I feel I can generally rely on the BBC to take care of my interests and no, I can’t say the same for the government (that we may be talking about different interests is immaterial – context is everything). I’d also say I can generally rely on Amazon.com to do what it says on the label as well as tell me what everyone else who bought this book bought as well.)
The real heartbreak of Hutton for me has been the revelation of the thinness of the veneer of publicness we’re content to put up with as a society and what this reveals about trust. Take Blair and Campbell (and possibly Brown and Cook) out of government and the rest are publicness personified. (Can anyone for example seriously see any point in Tessa Jowell or John Prescott or Jack Straw?) That’s bad enough but the picture is worse at the BBC. The interim replacements for Gavin Davies and Greg Dyke – Lord Ryder and Mark Byford are uninspiring enough to have their own brand of publicness. Ryder’s grovelling apology put me in mind of a timid mouse whose sole concern was to be back in his mousehole. Dorothy’s naked Wizard of Oz was positively intimidating by comparison.
Postscript:
My abhorrence of ownership of knowledge probably began when I was a long-ago student (Bradford University MBA Programme 1984). There, I attended lectures given by a guy called Prof Tom Stonier (to whom be thanks), whose famous book, The Wealth of Information, likened knowledge and information to capital and drew parallels with the economic insights contained in Adam Smith's widely-ascribed-to1776 work of similar title (OK it's called the Wealth of Nations). I gave the book - the Stonier not the Smith which I’ve never owned - away many years ago so no longer have a copy but the central message I carry from it to this very day is this: if I have some knowledge and I give it to you, then you have it and I still have it, the act of giving has effectively doubled the knowledge. And when we each add the new knowledge to the knowledge we already have, we are, as a pretty clever species, capable of generating more and more knowledge and more and more questions about knowledge that lead to more knowledge. And so ad infinitum.
At the authentic heart of risk management there is no space for ownership of knowledge. Ownership of knowledge reinforces publicness and makes trust - and by extension risk management - impossible. 'Iran is part of an axis of evil' is a statement, spoken by an idiot, reflecting claimed ownership of knowledge and precluding any possibility of trust. 'Iran is no longer part of the axis of evil' is one too.
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