Barack Obama has been tagged as the “First Social Media President” by SearchMarketingGurus.com. In his post on the subject, Li Evans marks the event of Barack Obama’s election as way more than the election of the first African American president. His election also marked the first time social media played such a huge role in an election. Barack Obama was the first candidate to go beyond traditional campaign tactics such as blast emails or phone calls.

It is commonly known that Barack Obama and his campaign team mobilized the masses encouraging more people than ever not only to register to vote but to actually vote. Talk about getting personal: Barack Obama exposed himself as an open, easy-to-talk-to guy and not someone just talking at constituents. On his website, Obama for America, people are able to create “MyBO” accounts and be active on the website. The site also includes BarackTV, “Obama Mobile” and an impressive list of links to social networks including the usual suspects of Facebook and Twitter, but also some networks that I’ve personally never even heard of. – an obvious move that Obama tried to/is trying to reach everyone everywhere in everyway.

His social media strategy also included My.BarackObama.com, a blog, a Flickr page, a youtube page. I personally receive the emails addressed to “Ansa” and signed “Barack” and during the campaign, I felt so connected to the man. In another post Evans followed up on the subject. Apparently, Obama has launched a number of new sites to help citizens understand his presidency, starting with Change.gov which included a variety of ways for Obama to really hear and react to what citizens were saying. And the economy? Obama launched Recovery.gov to keep people posted.

Complete transparency and open communication (liked I’ve been saying all along) is the key! Proven by our current president, social media can inspire people to trust in you and follow you. It’s transparent; it’s authentic.  I completely agree.

Notice to the left the image of a transparent canoe. I was looking for images to use in my postings because every time I search for an image relating to transparency, I get something like this. I have gotten a transparent iMac, a transparent hat, a bottle of Coca-Cola and many other random images. Today, I tried yet again to find an image to go along with my posts and the theme of my blog and I found this canoe. Bare with me now: let’s let the canoe represent transparency as a business model and the vehicle that takes a successful business down the river (or path) to successfully communicating with audiences. It makes sense!

And it goes along with the theme of this post….

Coca-Cola, established in 1886, is known for their American icon of a soda. According to their website, the Coca Cola Company owns four of the five top nonalcoholic beverage brands in the world, over 3,000 products, and over 42,000 associates worldwide. Recently, the company initiated a social media initiative that seemed natural to Senior VP of corporate affairs, Clyde Tuggle. He announced that Coca-Cola will be opening an office of digital communications and social media. What I found most profound was his comment as to why: in order to maintain success, the company needs to continue to connect to constituents, “one person at a time”.

So Coca-Cola has the right idea, right? The company wants to connect; they want to have a relationship. As I have said in previous posts, building a relationship takes honesty and openness. The transparency call behind this idea has been answered and I comment the SVP for his initiative.

Image credit:  Seawayblog

In the first video about a minute and 35 seconds in, Edelman makes a great statement when he says that now is the time when CEOs should be reaching out and inspiring constituents. In our class we have learned that interaction is key (especially today). So to answer the question about what to do to rebuild trust, I think that CEOs (and banks for that matter) know the answer: be more open and interactive.

A little after two and a half minutes into the video, Edelman delves into the findings from the Trust Barometer. He states that overall trust in institutions is down right now and it may be in part because of the banking situation. The economic situation has people afraid of losing money in banks and the general distrust in advertising must follow: everyone is trying to make or save a buck.

In the second video, Edelman continues his discussion on the Trust Barometer’s findings and explains how it affects the PR business. The entire second half of the interview is an interesting watch given the questions stated above. Researching why trust is down, I’m learning, is imperative to knowing how to build it back up again. I will definitely be posting more about this topic in the future…

Enter Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer. Each year PR firm Edelman releases a Trust Barometer which is a trust and credibility survey. According to the release there is a decline in over-all trust in businesses. To show how important trust is to a reputation and eventually how much money that company makes, the release showed that:

• 77% said they refused to buy products or services from a company they distrusted
• 72% criticized a distrusted company to a friend
• 62% trust companies less than they did a year ago

What I found extremely interesting about this year’s Trust Barometer is that trust is so low today that it’s actually lower than it was during the Enron fiasco, the dot-com bust, and Sept.11. That, readers, is extremely low.

The connection between trust and reputation will never get old. The statistics show it! Bad information about a company spreads like wildfire and companies lose money and respect – two very important things.

With Apple, investors worried that Steve Jobs illness would mean a new CEO, but Jobs did not initially want to disclose all of the details. The new Skittles.com ruffled more than a few feathers but completely transforming your homepage to social media sites helps…who exactly? Just being more transparent for the sake of transparency is like saying “more communication is always good”.  Just like with communication, the right kind of transparency is strategic and with purpose.

In the video below Rep. Peter Welch calls for more transparency in AIG dealings. The video is almost three minutes long, but pay attention to what he says from :35 in to 2:05 and 2:36 to the end. Mr. Welch clearly defines who more transparency will help in this case and gives a good reason: AIG is 80% taxpayer-owned and thus taxpayers have the right to know where their tax money is going and how it is spent.

In my opinion, it is imperative to define a public who will benefit from transparency and exactly why they will because simply calling for more transparency in not enough. So to AIG, which is more important: possible future clients or the taxpayers that fund you?

So what does this mean for insurance giant AIG? In the midst of the crisis, demand for more transparency has grown louder and louder. Without knowing who bailout money goes to and for what purpose, people will lose trust (according to Rep. Elijah Cummings commenting on the AIG situation in the Washington Post). The problem is that the company is making little to no effort to involve anyone via any medium-let alone a social one.

AIG is in a crisis of its own – a transparency crisis. In the article “Kohn on AIG”, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn claims that revealing too much information might disgrace those named, thus breaking possible future business ties. But if AIG does not disclose more information, they may lose ties themselves. It is truly a conundrum.  Eventually (10 days after the statement), AIG revealed a list of names.

AIG has no transparency policy and in the AIG Story of their webpage only mentions transparency once (explained as a future effort on their part). In his article, “AIG Needs Transparency Now”, Felix Salmon urges the government to get more transparent because it owns AIG and thus knows all of its information.  It is necessary that the government, AIG and its counterparts open up because the information is out there already. As transparency is key, the government and AIG are looking down a dark tunnel of more confusion and distrust if they do not open their doors.

Critics are still mulling over the positives and negatives to the new Skittles.com. According to Freddie Laker in his article in Ad Age, the design is in the right direction. Interestingly enough, (and I certainly had not thought of it this way), he uses Skittles’ number of Facebook friends – 597,705 when this was posted – as an indicator of the early success of the new site. Dramatic influxes have also been scene in their YouTube page’s comments.

This makes sense, but other critics are still slamming the new site. In the social media blog Social Media Explorer, Jason Falls writes about the negative response to the new site. He comments on the fact that Skittles isn’t fully participating in the interaction aspect of social media and even further, not adding to its transparency. Furthermore, this type of campaign may have worked better with products with more “daily rituals” like coffee brands, but not with something like candy. He concludes that the new site is a train wreck, butting heads with more positive outlooks.

In an interesting outlook on the situation, Li Evans of SearchMarketingGurus.com writes that Skittles “doesn’t get” social media. He agrees with Falls that Skittles isn’t actually participating in anything in that it does not actively participate in Twitter discussions. In his article, he references an offensive Twitter feed that appeared on the site. Apparently, the Skittles Twitter page is just a running feed of anything posted with the word “Skittles” in it. Skittles doesn’t even have a Twitter account, so then, how does this help them to be more proactive in new social media? It’s not, and in my opinion (still), I think this is just a trick to get people talking more about Skittles, not for them to be a pioneer of any sort.

When you go to the new skittles.com, you are asked to check a box (sign a waiver) informing them that you understand that anything beyond checking this box is out of Skittles’ control. If transparency or authenticity is what they’re going for, they missed the mark big time. It’s like Skittles is saying “welcome to our site, but beware, anything you see here isn’t actually our site”. Some think this “experiment” will be counterproductive as customers will be turned off by the lack of transparency: they’ll have to dig for any bit of relevant information.

So now what happens when a consumer goes to skittles.com to find something specific? Where is the search box? Where is the navigation bar? The website has completely transformed into a gateway to social network pages. I put skittles.com into the wayback machine and got the previous version of their site. It was extremely colorful (like the candy) with links to games and still just as useless information-wise as their new site. Maybe skittles.com was meant to be…useless.

Investors know better than to take a gamble on a sick CEO. Not to sound insensitive, but if I were investing money in a company like Apple (probably big bucks), I would want to make sure it is a good investment. As everyone knows, lies and confusion are never a good investment.

An article on AdAge.com demonstrates that stakeholders want to know and trust who is in charge.  Who will take the throne after Steve Jobs steps down? Due to his illness, Jobs did not show at the Macworld Expo.  Macworld VP-Editorial Director Jason Snell accused Apple of adding to the hype of Jobs’ illness. It was so necessary that he miss this important occasion, and he still didn’t give a good explanation.

In the last post, I opened up the Apple situation with its most recent blip on the radar, Steve Jobs and his cancer. According to an article cleverly entitled “Wanted: The Truth, The iTruth”, Mark Ververka writes about Apple’s lack of care for the stakeholder. In fact, he says that during the week that Apple was confusing stakeholders their stock fell by 10%.  Come on, Apple…get it together.

Lesson learned? Dear Apple, maybe you should take some advice from those iMac screens…and be more transparent.

Apple is slowly becoming more transparent. But the questionof how to effectively and timely communicate what to the public remains and issue.  The run-down: Apple CEO Steve Jobs fell unexpectedly ill and it was originally reported by Apple that his treatment was simple. Quickly after, Apple released another statement saying that the treatment was much more complex.

Apple was harshly critisized for being less than credible.

Previously much more secretive (article on secrecy), Apple used the announcement of Jobs’ sickness as a way of “stepping out of the dark” so to speak. According to articles evaluating Apple’s handling of the situation, the simple fact that information was proof of the uncertainty Apple faced in being more open.

If Jobs has to leave Apple, stakeholders will want to know how the company survives. Without Apple dispensing information, stakeholders (namely investors) could have a possible meltdown on their hands. The uncertainty can (and will be) solved with openness. Evidence of Apple’s increasing transparency can be seen in the webcasting of their conference calls.