Thanks to Will Kern for his 15Meanings blog post on Being Transparent. As corporate bloggers, my team talks about the ups and downs of transparency a lot. As Will states, "It seems easy enough, but is is harder than one might think." (In the spirit of transparency and full disclosure, Will is a colleague and Senior Product Manager here at AOL).

I wager that most corporate bloggers believe that the benefits for the company and the consumer outweigh the problems in most instances. But, the downside is worth thinking about.

Like Will, my team and I will answer any questions as long as we've got the information and are "in a position to give it to you." Please note the key phrases here:

* If we have the information
* If we are in a position to give it to you

On topics over which we have input or control, we're comfortable with being as transparent as possible. And, thankfully, many individuals and groups outside of MESH at AOL keep us informed by reaching out. That enables us to share upcoming changes, new features or other news you all may find useful or even essential.

But, my team's willingness to be up-front and serve as "messaging central" for other groups can make it hard for our customers to know when we're talking just about our areas of responsibilities and when we're just the messengers for others. You know what they do with messengers, right?

Here are some of the realities we work under (and I don't think we're unique):

* Dependencies: Remember the people I mentioned who keep us in the loop? A lot of others don't. People are very busy and in a huge organization it can be hard to know who to involve and when. That's a challenge we can continue to work on.
* Surprises: Sometimes we are as surprised as our customers are. How many times has one of our community users written to say, "What happened to [insert feature here]?" or "Did you know that [insert product here] isn't working?" or "When did they roll out the new version of [insert product here]?" only to have one of us respond, "I don't know. We'll look into it."
* Proprietary Info: Sometimes there are business reasons why we do not or cannot share something.

In the situations I've outline, individuals on my team are often accused of lying, stupidity or not caring. We roll with the punches in those situations because it comes with the territory of customer service. And, we know, especially in the area of community, that people are passionate about their interests and their friends online.

A challenge for us and others is to take employees whose main jobs do not involve customer interaction or messaging and convince them of the value of talking with users early and often. There is always the issue of time. There is also the concern about the potential for negative customer feedback.

This is a big question we'll revisit time and again. For now, what would you identify as the biggest obstacle to corporate transparency?