Some of you may have noticed our company stands strong on believing that truth is everything and in our newly designed home page we put it front and center. We believe people are looking hard for ways to know that they are working with people of high ethics - people they can trust. People they can trust because they tell the truth.

I think this is due in part to the economic downturn caused by seemingly unsavory actions by what we have always put our faith in - banks, the institutions we trust with our money. I sure don't think it's the actions of our political leaders...we've always had an interesting issue there. Being truthful is always important in any relationship. Of course it is. Who can argue with that? But even I'll admit that truth is sometimes in the eye of the beholder and don't even get me going with the whole "perception verses reality" discussion. We all want honesty. We all want people to be truthful with us. And of course we want to believe that we want the truth even when it might hurt. But do we?

This brings me to why I was especially interested in an NPR (National Public Radio) news story this week about Google's "reporting" on Brazil's loss to Germany in the World Cup. It comes down to being truthful so there is trust. The story talked about how data scientists at Google watched the World Cup games with translators, cultural experts and copywriters working in their "newsroom" to turn search results on the World Cup into viral facts. They found that doing a Google search on the loss, the top results will say things like "destroy," "defeat," and "humiliate." And while old-school news has always taught that negative news sells, this new "newsroom" is focused on getting content onto everyone's smart phone, and so it seems they have a bias: to comb through the big data in search of happy thoughts because in social media happy things are presented more often than unhappy. Just look at your Facebook page...how often does someone post..."Johnny failed his math test today?" So the Google "newsroom" has a clear editorial bias, does that make us distrust it? Maybe. But maybe not, if the bias is made clear.

So what am I talking about? While a billion+ people had their eyes on the game, in the Google newsroom they were deep into mining the company's confidential, internal databases to see what people are searching for. After every game, the copy editors write up a fact that interprets Google search analytics, designers put the fact into a "statement" and influencers enlisted by Google circulated it on Twitter and Facebook. After Brazil's loss to Germany, Google's "editors" chose not to publish a single trend on what the Brazilians were searching for because it was too negative. Essentially Google decided that negative news wouldn't get as much "traction" in social media, which clearly points out how filtered and biased our searches can be.

This shouldn't and probably doesn't surprise us. That sort of filtering has been around for a while and frankly it's what makes our searching work so well for us most of the time. In my mind though, this isn't the type of "reporting" that we expect. We expect the "truth" from news sources, even though it may not be, mostly because it's fraught with errors. I'm surely not comforted if this is the future of news and reporting. And I hope that we continue to be vigilant to seek out people and businesses that strive to serve us well and be real about what they provide for us. I would have no problem if the Google newsroom let us know that they feel it's important to publish happier news because there's already so much bad stuff out there. I'm just not okay that they or anyone else for that matter, isn't open about any bias they have. Bias alone isn't the problem. It's lack of transparency, the bending of truth, and denial of being wrong that will kill trust and yes, business relationships. Am I the only one who sees that it is just crazy or do we all need to hold ourselves to a higher standard? Am I alone in thinking that openness and candor should be at the top of our business objectives? Am I the only one who believes that trust is so important it has a higher currency quotient than Bitcoin can ever hope to?

In this age of data where businesses like ours are keepers of that data - an organization's lifeblood -  it seems to me that a focus on trust is vital. But I'd like to hear your thoughts. Anyone?

 

Come join our discussion on our blog, or I welcome your feedback through email.