I read a piece recently about the transparent culture at Square which I thought was interesting. There was also a great post by Brad Feld a couple of days ago about the value of being ‘vulnerable.’

I think about this allot. Maybe because I’m not great at being open and I have realized over time that this can leave you feeling pretty isolated.

The foundation of any relationship is openness and honesty. This is true in our personal lives but also at work. To be open you have to be prepared to share both the good and the bad. You have to show those vulnerabilities.

It wasn’t long ago that at work that you called your boss ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’ and you were having to knock on a closed office door to receive your orders.

But thankfully things have moved on. I think Google were actually one of the real trailblazers. The more you share with those that work for you the better your relationship will be. And businesses are driven by relationships and teams not by individuals.

To have formal hierarchies and strict control of who is allowed to know what might  very well lead to people doing what they are told to do. But I would argue that they will often be doing this in isolation.

What’s the worst that could happen? Confidential information might get into the wrong hands. People might respect you less for revealing your hopes and fears. I would argue that information is empowering and that this far outweighs any (usually overblown) consequences of it getting into the wrong hands. I also think people will respect and relate to you more if you share more with them. It tightens the bond between people and that can only be a good thing.

To be more open and transparent with people I think is the only way to build a really strong team and a really strong culture. In this way individuals can be more than the sum of their parts. People can feel like they are trusted, empowered and are really part of something way beyond their job role.

The further benefit is that if a manager, or indeed anyone, is open and honest then it is likely that people will be the same in return. This is so important and will make you a better and stronger person or business to get this honest feedback.

Often a manager can be isolated and doesn’t get this honest feedback. They are then missing out on the most important feedback of all – something that can often  drive real change and improvements in management style and business strategy. It can also make you a more tuned in person and more aware of how people feel about you and the actions you take.

Openness and honesty are essential to strong relationships in our private lives and this is something I try to work on almost every day. But it can also translate into the business world. There are certainly signs that this is happening and I think businesses and managers will be better for it.

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Marketers used to talk about a ‘captive audience’ when discussing marketing strategies. The general thinking was a brand wanted to find a captive audience and then bombard them with marketing messages as often as they could get away with or could afford.

In recent years the tables have turned and ‘the audience’ has broken free of its chains and now gets to call the shots. The drivers for this have been mobile devices, new applications and the wireless Internet. We get to decide exactly what content we want to interact with, through what device and at what time.

Content can now be recorded, pulled out of its original form, aggregated, curated and redistributed around the world. The days of a newspaper arriving on our doorstep in the morning, listening to the local radio station and looking forward to watching our favorite TV shows at fixed times are seeming more and more like inflexible and dated concepts.

I was reading a piece in the NY Times recently about how the music industry is changing and how people are discovering music in new ways:

JON PARELES Well, what is the mechanism? I think what’s going on is that audiences like to find music on their own. You’re having so much stuff thrown at you, like you have Rihanna just blasted at you from all directions, and you think: “Wait a minute, I want something that’s mine. I want something that I’m curious about, where my curiosity hasn’t been smothered by the barrage of marketing.”

RATLIFF That’s the new authenticity. You found it by yourself or with a few of your friends online.

I think this search for ‘new authenticity’ will fundamentally change the way all businesses reach their customers.

Brands can no longer just ‘blast away’ at their audiences. There are two main reasons for this. First, because a captive audience is becoming more and more difficult to find. Second, because the Internet gives us more choice and freedom to go out and discover something for ourselves that feels more relevant and more authentic.

The sectors that are the most advanced in their thinking here are the artists and the businesses for whom the content is the product. But I believe that over time all companies will need to become content creators and, ultimately, publishers.

Content marketing is the new marketing. The empowered audience is now able to see through or simply avoid superficial marketing messages. The Internet empowers, connects and makes everything more transparent.

Companies will need to create content that is authentic, captivating and demonstrates knowledge or opinion that builds credibility for their brands and their products.  It will also need to be tailored to different users to ensure a more relevant and personalized experience.

I call this ‘captive content’ that we seek out, engage with and share as our own.

The good news for companies is that it is becoming easier and easier to create, design and distribute content. The Internet, mobile devices and social media combine together to truly democratize the publishing process.

As an investor I believe there will be many opportunities in this space to help companies to create, distribute and personalize their content and that the market has only just got started.

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I don’t understand all the uproar over Instagram’s decision this week to ensure it had some level of access and control over the content that is generated across its service.

There seems to be a sense of entitlement these days amongst consumer web services users that everything should be free. People seem to forget that one of the main purposes of a business is to make money. More than that, a business needs to make money to ensure its very survival!

Instagram enables its users to stylize and share photos across mobile devices. The service is provided for free and has millions of users. But really Instagram is a media company but different from traditional media companies in that its users generate the content.

I would imagine that the on-going costs of developing and delivering this service are huge. The company is now taking steps to make money out of its millions of eyeballs by enabling brands to promote and market themselves within the application. To do this it needs to have some access to its users photos and data. This will help them to ensure that the advertising within the service is targeted at people where it is likely to be more relevant.

I don’t believe that anyone ever really believed that Instagram was going to start selling the photos and that they would start cropping up in greeting cards and corporate brochures. There is just a default reaction of outrage whenever a consumer web company has the nerve to try to commercialize its service.

I just don’t know what people expect? Businesses need to make money so that they can continue to develop and support their products and, ultimately, so that they can survive.  Last time I looked Instagram was a business and not a charity.

Maybe the quid pro quo of ‘You use our service and we use your content’ needs to be made clearer across all of these applications but it’s pretty obvious when you stop and think about it.

It makes me thankful that we only invest in B2B companies. Businesses are prepared to pay for their technology. Indeed businesses actually prefer to pay for their technology so that they know where they stand and can hold the vendor accountable.

Maybe this is the problem. That users don’t know where they stand. But business has been going on for thousands of years with one thing in common: to try to sell a product for more than it costs to produce it.

Nothing has really changed and there’s no such thing as a free lunch..

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