Shit happens.
Let me explain. About a month ago, I organized and threw a Hanukkah party at a casino in London, because I thought that it would be an interesting change of scenery. My co-organizers were two friends who I met on my previous trip to London in September. I found a few sponsors who were willing to pay for the food and drinks and I found a charity, Jewish Heart for Africa, that really defined what the concept of Hanukkah meant to me. The sponsors were MoonBingo and SocialVisor, and (as I wrote in a previous post) MoonBingo even went the extra mile, and gave us £5 discount vouchers on their website.
In trying to ascertain what sort of coverage we would be able to offer the sponsors, one of the co-organizers got in touch with a local video creation company that deals in promoting local fun charity events. Suddenly, we had a video partner with major exposure. A few members of their team attended and videoed the event, my inebriated speech, the lighting of the candles, and a short interview with me.
Through a series of circumstances of bad timing and inclement weather, the video did not get done. Finally, as it was about to be edited, the computer containing the raw footage fell and broke. All the footage was lost.
I should take a step back, to further illustrate my stupidity. I had intended to use the video as a tool to obtain potentially positive write-ups, in a way to convey what the event really was like, more than any PR release could ever do. In my desire to capitalize on video, I lost everything. I could personally handle the loss of publicity, but I felt like I betrayed both the charity and the sponsors. As I did.
End of me being transparent.
The term “transparency” is thrown around the web like a dodgeball at the chubby unpopular kid at recess. With intent and precise aim.
Domino’s, for instance, decided to “own” the fact that they had shitty pizza, and created a whole campaign after they recreated the pizza from “the crust up”. Because they probably saw that they were losing sales. We tend to summon transparency as the last ditch effort to garner some PR on our own terms.
Transparency is simply a tool that we call upon when we have nothing else going for us. Transparency is bullshit. When you have nothing else to lose, it is not impressive that you throw a Hail Mary, even if you are Jewish.
You never invoke “transparency” when you are doing well. Transparency is code for “we fucked up, but before a competitor can exploit our weakness, we will ‘out’ ourselves, and ‘own’ it.”
True transparency is being honest when you have nothing to gain, and everything to lose. It’s admitting before you fix the problem. It’s admitting that you have a problem. Companies cannot practice true transparency. They would spend more time putting out fires than fixing them.
The real problem with complete transparency is that most people do not know how to decipher it, and it is for their benefit that we hide things.
For instance, a hospital does not want to disclose how many patients a doctor lost over the previous year, because it is too much information for the uneducated mind to handle. There are other factors at play, such as preexisting conditions, average age of the patients, or level of difficulty of the previous cases.
I would propose that we don’t really want people or companies to be truly transparent. Just like we don’t want to take a tour of a slaughterhouse or watch videos of the birth of a friend’s child. We want to know the final product, that the company not only admits to its wrongs, but it knows how to solve them as well.
We want the happy ending.
But not all stories end happily. Shit happens, after all.