Andrea Rotondi

I can never hold back a laugh when watching courtroom drama on television. It’s that little part where the judge says, “The jury will disregard the last comment made by the witness.” As if you can just erase things from your memory. Once something is out there, it stays out there, whether we like to admit it or not.

If you are a new brand or a company that has put out very few communications to the public: congratulations. You have the gift of a clean slate. If you haven’t yet been reviewed, promoted, compared, Googled or complained about online, you are sitting in an enviable position. Gather your employees now and repeat the following mantras:

Transparency is essential to gaining trust.

If people lose trust in our brand and our company, it will be very difficult to regain their confidence.

With online content, it might be tempting to think that you don’t have to take such care with your communications. After all, you can just edit your website at any time with a few strokes of the keyboard. Right?

Wrong. Once something is out there, it’s out there. This is a more important lesson when you are thinking about your overall communications strategies and the way you run your company in general. And if you have or are developing an online community around your brand, it is essential.

Say, for example, you have to communicate something about a major change to your product or service. How do you handle it? Are you honest from the beginning? Do you allow your customers to make their own judgments about the change?

Or do you try and control your customers and hide things from them? Are you vague with the truth or worse yet, decide not to communicate anything to them about it at all?

The latter option will always come back to bite you, even if it is some time down the road. If your goal is to build a social business, a business that is friendly to community, that embraces partnership with your clients and stakeholders, you must be genuine and transparent.

This all must sound incredibly naïve. But times have changed. Social media is exposing more and greater aspects of companies and industries than ever before. A bad review, once only read on a printed page somewhere was easier to forget. Today, that same piece of negative information will be re-tweeted, shared, bookmarked and indexed so that one must only type “bad” and “[your brand’s name]” into Google a year later to dredge it all up again.

Each piece of information received about a company (or an individual or anything else for that matter) works as a building block to form the core perceptions that support everything else. Once a person has a perception in their head about your brand, it is going to shape his thinking about anything else he hears from or about it forever. Whether this perception is accurate or positive or negative is all up to you.

Business is part of life and life is messy. But you cannot afford to be casual and callous about what is said about your brand online. And transparency means that you need to actually be doing all the wonderful things you espouse on your website or Facebook Page. Do you offer people an amazing experience knowing deep down that your staff have a terrible reputation for customer service? That, my friend, is a lie.

Here are three things you can do to get the ball rolling today:

1. Start listening. Set up a listening post. Find out what people are saying about your brand, your competitors, themselves and your industry right now.

2. Stop taking shortcuts. Before you decide that it’s just easier to fudge the truth or deal with an issue later, stop and think about how people will feel when they find out what is really going on.

3. Look internally and figure out what you need to change in your company to become something you’re proud to be fully honest about today.

How will you refine your business to meet transparency objectives in 2010?