The transparent communicative organization and new hybrid forms of content

• While the importance of transparency is widely acknowledged, communications practitioners may not completely understand the different dimensions of transparent communication beyond being truthful and making information visible.
• There is a concern among practitioners that the misuse of new hybrid content may mislead the reader, jeopardize the organization’s reputation and affect the credibility of the media.
• Interviews of Finnish communication professionals suggest that advertorial tactics are outdated, and the value of new hybrid forms of content for organizations comes from transparency, visibility and expertise in the consumer-relevant content themes, which may even increase the credibility of the brand.

Building on the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management’s Melbourne Mandate’s understanding of a communicative organization consisting of organizational character, responsibility and listening and engagement, this paper explores these principles in the context of new hybrid forms of online content. This study asks about the role of transparency in the context of commercial hybrid content. Through theoretical consideration as well as interviews of representatives of public relations and marketing communication associations and agencies in Finland, the article presents the practitioners’ perceptions and experiences using the literature on transparency. To better understand the communicative organization of today in the context of hybrid content creation, we propose the concept of the “transparent communicative organization.” We suggest four new propositions for the practice of hybrid forms of engaging publics to support the transparent communicative organization: (1) source identification to enable trust, (2) two-way transparency inviting user feedback, (3) stakeholder-centric arenas to enable engagement, and (4) content on organizational expertise to build long-term engagement. We invite further public relations research to improve and test these preliminary propositions as the use of hybrid content increases.