Ask for What You Want: Corporate transparency or anonymity?

My newest thought leadership essay explores our culture of anonymity, compares the emergence of transparency and wonders what happens when we mash them up.

In it I talk about Customer Relationship 101 (and why some people make it to Hollywood), why it’s so important to ask for what we want, dealbreakers and the real way to build rapport.

This leads to an observation about the Incognito event at Santa Monica Museum of Art and a proposal for a new kind of business that is hybrid transparent/anonymous. It is basically an amalgamation of Yahoo! Answers meets 99 Designs meets Elance. Reading it in context would help you to see where I’m going, but if you want the shortcut, here it is:

What if there were a website that:

• Encouraged companies to anonymously post a problem and ask for suggestions
• Allowed anyone to recommend a solution
• Allowed registered users to create personal profiles and recommend solutions.
• Encouraged companies to give positive feedback (stars, or a thumbs-up rating) to users who contribute the best ideas. (Positive feedback ratings would be saved to the registered user’s profile).
• Floated the best answers to the top (think Digg). (LINK).
• Made the registered user’s profile publicly available, so prospective employers could see how they solve problems.

If companies wanted to select specific kinds of people as contributors, they could sort the public profiles by functional category or rating. Businesses could also opt to offer financial incentives to specific individuals, teams or the public depending on the scope of the problem/project.

In keeping with the theme of this post, I want your feedback. Love it? Hate it? Fire away! Make something happen…