1.Just to make sure I understand what you're calling for, are you suggesting that companies create public Web pages (or blog posts or wiki entries or whatever) to explain their intended tactics?

If so, the idea does have some merit. In fact, if it's done in a "social" environment, it could be a great learning experience for all involved.

On potential downside: not a concern over transparency for ethics' sake, but concern about protecting valuable intellectual property. To what extent should these tactics be outlined, and at what potential risk to the brains behind the plans?

2.This is a joke, right?

I sure hope so, because you'd be crazy to even suggest that companies make their marketing and PR plans public - putting them at the mercy of competitors, demeaning their persuasive abilities (which is, um, what companies pay the big bucks for), and encouraging even more of the copy-cat-crap going on all over the Web. Actually, the fact that your post misguidedly lumps marketing and PR professionals together as though we do the same thing to begin with is baffling. I'm sure you know better than that.

Transparency is great to a degree, but it can be overdone just like anything else. It's also not a requirement to be ethical in marketing or PR - you can be incredibly ethic in your operations without telling everyone everything you do.

Giving up a full marketing plan publicly (especially a successful one) would be the business equivalent of telling Coke to give up their recipe in favor of "transparency." Full transparency like you're talking about would kill a company's competitive edge. So ha ha... next time save it for April Fool's.

3.Jennifer, to what degree is transparency great and at what point do you become opaque? Transparency refers not to competitive, proprietary, or confidential information, but an open window into how things are done in your organization.

I have struggled for years to draw a distinction between marketing and PR. Unfortunately, the masses don't make such a distinction. I've even had PR people tell me that marketing and PR are the same thing (read some of the comments in which I've participated on Strumpette).

Practitioners disclose their processes all the time. Take a look at http://www.iabc.com/awards/gq/ and click on any of the sample winning work plans. These are ALL examples of what I think we should do for every campaign. Either that or become irrelevant as the trust level between people and organizations continues to plummet.

Laugh all you like. I'm dead serious.

4.You're right. There are a lot of PR people (as well as marketing folks) who don't know enough about their disciplines to tell them apart. But is that an excuse to forward those kinds of misconceptions with any audience? I'd argue that it's not.

A company's marketing strategy is generally confidential information, at least until it's fully been implemented and can be looked at in hindsight by outsiders. I've yet to work for any company that would say what they do "behind the scenes" isn't confidential information in some way. To share a marketing strategy is to hand over your strengths, weaknesses, and plans to competitors. That is competitive information.

Trust is far less an industry issue than a personal one. Each individual company builds trust in their own ways. Google, as a large example, is one of the most trusted companies around with their users (even still with the bulk of webmasters although they probably shouldn't be), and they're far from known for their transparency (often on important issues). So should companies like Google go around giving away their marketing and PR strategies just because it would give some in the marketing and PR industry a warm and fuzzy feeling, when they're doing just fine? Of course not. Let's be realistic here... companies don't need to build trust with us. They need to build trust with their users, consumers, etc.... groups that very often wouldn't even understand their marketing and PR plans.

5.Shel,
While I applaud the intention and rationale behind the idea, I would think that agencies would have to provide more details than they want for this to be effective (as Jennifer Mattern alluded to).

Specifics about approaches taken and other items you outline are too specific. And, they may change, based on initial contacts. So, it would require updating the plan.

The industry as a whole (the PR and other communications industries) will likely always have a bad reputation. So, it means that the honest ones have to work that much harder.

And, the more the honest ones have success, the more our reputation will preceed us and the lazy and dishonest ones will (eventually) go away. Though, they'll be replaced by others as lazy and dishonest.

That is the business we work and have fun in. The pessimist in me sees little hope in developing an effective, enforceable ethics code or procedure.
Mike

6.Mike, if the reputation of the honest and ethical practioners would precede us, we wouldn't be in the position we're in, with bloggers left and right proclaiming PR the refuge of talentless hacks (Chris Anderson and Tom Coates leap to mind).

I'm not proposing that this page that outlines the steps of an effort be published proactively; nobody will care or be interested until the effort has been launched. Thus, a single post saying "Here's how we did it" -- precisely what we include in competition entries that are public -- is all that's needed. It doesn't need to be granular in its detail, just an outline of the approaches taken.

This is going to be forced on us anyway. I wrote about David Berlind's transparency effort almost two years ago. (http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/can_pr_handle_transparency/) While he didn't keep it up, the concept's return is inevitable -- with the reporter posting every email, every conversation, every exchange with a PR representative. Berlind wrote at the time, "?The PR community didn?t respond favorably,? Berlind said. ?The whole PR community went berserk...They didn?t expect it.?

Why we in PR (or marketing, for that matter) think our practices can remain opaque while the rest of the business world is opening theirs is a notion that escapes me. It's not impossible that we'll find the balance between disclosure of our practices and keeping our secret sauce in the valut.

7.Shel,
I can agree more with the post-disclosure timing. So, it sounds like you suggest all agencies post, in effect, a case study for each and every program?

-Mike

8.Yep, Mike; exactly.

9.I like David Berlind's idea! Does that mean I get to blog all the rude and cranky messages and phone conversations with journalists? That'll go down well.
Shel, the idea behind a disclosure document is not bad, but the practicalities of it are enough to kill it stone dead. Most practitioners working inside the big PR companies are already so overburdened with approval forms and documentation that I can't see another form to fill out really making much headway.
I've been on both sides of the fence for 20 years and I can exclusively reveal that there are as many stupid journalists as PR people. Including myself from time to time. That's life.
The difference between journalists and PR people in these situations is that journalists take delight in 'outing' the practitioners, while the PROs have to be a little more restrained for the sake of their clients.
I have a little difficulty with journalists demanding transparency when many media outlets go out of their way to hide details of which journalists work on what beat. No wonder they get so many misdirected pitches

10.Andrew, I used the Berlind example to convey the idea that disclosure is coming whether we manage it or somebody else does. The proposal, on the other hand, has nothing to do with journalists, but rather with a means by which we can portray the processes we use to accomplish our work.

As Dov Seidman points out his how book, "How," the only thing that differentiates a company from its competition is HOW we do things, not WHAT we do (since that can be duplicated by anybody in short order).

As for the time it takes, if we're doing our jobs well, we're writing a project plan anyway. If it takes a decent writer more than 15 or 20 minutes to adapt that plan into a one-sheet case study, you have to wonder what they're doing in this business to begin with.