There's a lot of buzz going on about transparency and authenticity and whether or not these concepts apply to social media. The two words have become buzz words in the social media marketing word, but nonetheless they are important words to consider, provided you also consider the actions that accompany them. It's all fine and well to throw buzz words around, but when we look at authenticity and transparency and the actions involved in displaying such concepts, it's not so simple.
What does it mean to be authentic and/or transparent? Is a business truly capable of being one or both of these concepts and still effectively running a business? How much information do we provide? In the age of social media, it is much easier for businesses to face the wrath of angry clients, especially if something comes to light about a service or product or activity the business is doing that customers view in a bad light. Social media exposes businesses to customer scrutiny and the result is a need to, on the surface, be more authentic and transparent. But social media is a world of text, photos and video artifacts, so while there is record keeping, it's also a question of what activities are displayed for those records. If we want genuine authenticity, we need to question what that actually means, and how that is displayed, not just on social media, but in other mediums. The same applies for transparency.
To really be transparent means to have no walls, no secrets, nothing to keep people away from information and to be authentic means to be true to a set of values and principles that define your business. But no business I know if is truly transparent. They may be transparent on some issues, but they can't share confidential information or proprietary content without diminishing their own success. A business necessarily will choose what it can be transparent about, and that's something forgotten in the fervor of social media and calls that everything should be open.
The same is true for authenticity. A business that is authentic will say things that people don't like, but when such upset occurs, an apology is expected and the business, or person is expected to conform to societal expectations. How is that really authentic? The truth is that it isn't. We want authenticity, but we want it in limited dosages, and in specific formats.
Again what does transparency and authenticity really mean? Not much actually. For all that we call for those concepts, the authentic, transparent truth is that people aren't ready to be truly transparent or authentic. Nor are businesses. What we really want is a synthetic, constructed environment, where everyone plays nice. Social media is bringing that about to some degree, but it could bring the opposite...it just depends on how much truth we can really handle.