The following is the main story in this week’s issue of A-Clue.Com, my free weekly e-letter. You’re invited to subscribe here — always free.
In keeping with our theme here, the implications of open source, this week’s Clue involves the nature of credibility.
One key point to understand in evaluating the business implications of open source is the idea of credibility.
In the proprietary world this is a commodity. It is something you can buy, almost independent of your actions. Spend enough money on lobbyists and advertising, pretty soon Verizon and AT&T are beloved members of the household. What, that used to be SBC Arena? Never.
This spills into the world of politics. A candidate is not considered "credible" unless they do well in the "money primary," unless they have enough money to run a "schedule" of "30-second spots." Then the spots are parsed based, not on reality, but on marketing metrics, as though the candidate were a candy bar.
But candidates, and companies, are not candy bars. In reality we are already moving toward a concept I call "open source credibility."
That is, your real performance, and your reaction to bad news, both count, just as in journalism. If you lie to your audience, and try to cover up the lie with spin, you lose, and it doesn’t matter how much money you have.
The Internet forces the truth to leak out.
The first example of this in action was the famed Johnson & Johnson "Tylenol" scare. Business historians spin this as a victory for PR, but in fact it was a win for effective action.
The PR people were able to convince J&J managers to do the right thing.
As the paper noted above says, "Johnson & Johnson’s top management put customer safety first, before they worried about their profit and other financial concerns."
In other words they took care of their credibility, knowing that was the underpinning of everything else.
When you have real credibility you have a pearl beyond price. Bloggers who live in the open source world understand this. We apologize for mistakes immediately, we launch into dialogue immediately, we post corrections within the original stories.
Some think that conservative bloggers don’t care about credibility, and I used to be of that opinion. But I gradually have come to understand that credibility counts most with your audience, with your marketplace. Credibility in this case involves matching your performance to expectations.
Folks will forgive Drudge his lies in the service of the Bush cause. They won’t forgive David Brock (right). He lost all credibility with his audience and became a liberal – it was the only way he could stay in the political game. (This was also the lesson of the Dixie Chicks. They lost credibility with their original audience and have had to find a new one.)
The same is true in the business world. It doesn’t matter what Toyota owners think of Chevy, only what Chevy owners think of Chevy. If you can maintain credibility with "your" audience, you can survive.
Credibility, in the open source world, is not a commodity. That’s what I mean when I write, "We’re all journalists now." I was taught this truth at a very young age, and have tried to hew to it. I live and work with as much transparency as I can.
Gradually, as the open source world which is the Internet filters into the totality of our lives, around the world, this idea of credibility as being something more than a commodity is beginning to take hold.
Those stuck on the other side, with their huge ad budgets and PR staffs, even those with police power behind them, have an increasingly difficult time. They may say that "the Internet makes people cynical," but it really makes most of us skeptical.
On the Internet, you learn pretty quickly about someone’s credibility. The first time you lose faith you may get a slight shock, or a life-changing one, but you do learn. And so you become suspicious, of everyone, of everything, of what’s behind the curtain.
This is not a bad thing. It is part of our transformation from groups of "consumers," who can be sliced-and-diced into market segments and fed whatever the focus groups say works, into individuals, into markets of one, for whom credibility is real, and all-important.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” – W.
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” – W.