We are hearing and reading a lot these days about the new Age of Transparency, in which organizations must go beyond traditional, tightly controlled communication and engage in a conversation with their customers, communities, employees and other stakeholders. A recent keynote speech by Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson does a great job of explaining this dramatic paradigm shift. Blogs are now big, but not yet big in the corporate world. We’re seeing a few high-profile corporate blogs, but apart from some noteable exceptions it doesn’t seem as if there’s a big stampede to adopt blogging as a corporate communication channel.

It’s easy to see why. Blogging is by its very nature a decentralized, uncontrolled style of communication that encourages dialogue and spiritied debate, and breaks down traditional boundaries. And large corporations, particularly publicly traded ones with investors to serve, are naturally centalized and tightly controlled when it comes to disclosing information.

So how can an organization reconcile the need to open up conversations with its stakeholders with the requirement for full, plain, timely and true disclosure to its investors, who are supposed to have the right to hear about important information at the same time? Ironically, the rules of disclosure have been getting stricter and more limiting even as technology is providing ways of opening things up.

And when it comes to employee communications, we know that there has always been a strong desire to control information. Anyone who has had to get an internal story approved has experienced this first hand.

So, here’s a question: what do companies need to do to encourage lively conversations among their employees without risking unwanted external leaks, and without exposing themselves to the kind of anarchy, and even bitter insurrection, that many leaders fear would come with losing control of internal communications?

It may well be time to open the shutters of the corporate bellfry and let in the fresh breeze of real human dialogue, but how?

And what role will communicators play in this new world of social media? Do we need to lead, follow, or just get out of the way?

At every Leadership Institute, usually in February, the IABC Research Foundation’s Think Tank convenes to discuss issues. I’ve been attending these Think Tanks for many years now and always find them to be very interesting.

One of the interesting things about them is that how, despite different participants and different approaches, so many of the issues stay the same. The one thing that does seem to change dramatically is anything having to do with technology. At last year’s Think Tank in Seattle I don’t recall a word said about blogs. At this years meeting in Charlotte, N.C. it came up as a serious item for discussion.

Questions were raised about whether and to what extent should a company support a blog? How do blogs fit into the new communication mix? With this conversation as with so many, I sensed some confusion about the role that blogs play in this world of new media.

I felt a bit clearer about blogs because long time IABCer, Bill Briggs and I had just conducted and interview with the famous MicroSoft blogger (well, at least famous to other bloggers). I talked about how companies felt that a certain sense of control had been taken away with the introduction of blogs to which he responded that they never really had control to begin with, they just have less.

Scoble confessed to spending about 18 hours a day doing something related to the blog. And I believe it. During our lunch/interview, his phone (his key blogging vehicle) was receiving so much of his attention that it almost seemed as though it should have had its own place setting. When I asked Scoble how often he gets in trouble for going too far, he said “Weekly.” Still there he is, an employee blogging away about MicroSoft business with, as it appears, the support of the company.

If all it takes is for one blogger to capture the attention of others, including the media, it seems the difference now is that the customer is in direct control — and the communication line from customer to employee is more direct and unfiltered. There is less time — no time really — for positioning an issue for key stakeholder like employees and customers.

The rules are changing and it seems that the communication message is now in the hands of the people who are directly creating or experiencing the product or service. Employees can voice their opinions and the customer is listening. There’s an inherent transparency emerging and there’s no stopping it. Is that statement going too far? Or is this just a novelty that is just another part of the new mix of technology coming our way? What do you think?

While we’re waiting for the official team of employee communications bloggers to get rolling, I thought I’d throw this out for discussion, motivated in part by Jeffrey Treem’s comment, but also by a post Niall Cook wrote on his blog. Cook is a counselor for Hill & Knowlton in London. He recently attended a meeting of some 35 people responsible for some of the biggest intranets in the UK. Cook introduced the notion of social software (blogs, wikis, social networking, social tagging, podcasting, etc.) on intranets. The key objection was loss of message control, prompting Cook to offer this conclusion:

…the role of the corporate intranet needs to change to one of facilitating collaborative communication and then aggregating it for the benefit of others.

I’ve argued this for years, going back to the days when message boards were new-fangled. With the rapid adoption of consumer-generated media (CGM) on the web, it’s inevitable that these tools will infiltrate internal networks. What role should employee communications play? I wholly subscribe to Cook’s notion of facilitating collaborative communication so that it benefits the organization.

Read Cook’s post. If you’re so inclined, you can also listen to today’s installment of For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report; Neville interviewed Niall for 11 minutes on the topic. Then, let’s talk. How realistic is the vision of an intranet made up, at least in part, of tools that allow employees to create collaborative content?