Wikileaks exposes public and private communication dilemmas for organisations

The explosion of coverage about Wikileaks and its exposure of US diplomatic correspondence has raised a whole range of political and foreign policy issues and comments; as well as a wide ranging debate about the role of information, social media and its impact, new forms of media and so on. 

From a PR perspective, I find it interesting that leaders and some media commentors have been so outwardly unsettled about the process as though the way you speak publicly about a country and organisation can be radically different about the way you communicate it in public.  To have such a disconnect, I would suggest is not feasible in a global networked society.

Certainly I think we have the right as citizens to know that the ruler of Saudi Arabia is encouraging the USA to bomb Iran or that China is accepting of the idea that there should be a  unified Korea in due course.  These are important pieces of information that should have been brought out of the private sphere into the public sphere.

Might organisational culture issues also be at work here.  Could the diplomatic service of countries be somewhat traditional in their approach to communications - believing it is acceptable to have two modes of operation - the public sphere mode and the private sphere mode and only in  the latter mode where you are totally "honest" about the country and rulers.  Of course Habermas would have been able to point out that "rational discourse" is a facet of a genuine public sphere something which does not appear to be going on - it all appears to be stored up for the private message to Washington.  In terms of reputation, legitimacy, transparency and relationship management having such a gap between public and private communications raises serious issues for an organisation.  In an networked global environment, traditional communications approaches by the diplomatic service or other large organisations - and banks seem to be next in the Wikileaks crosshairs - are no longer feasible and will need to be re-thought.

It should be noted that the British Foreign Office has created a blogging community on its web site giving views from round the world.    Is it a genuine conversation?  Certainly it is an interesting initiative although a search on the site suggested that nobody was confident enough to talk about Wikileaks which suggests that "rational discourse" is somewhat lacking!