Jeff Ramson explains how corporate transparency can help your business grow this year.

1. How Transparency Can Help
Your Business Grow in 2015

2. Transparency has become an essential part of doing business. With the
freedom to obtain any type of information on businesses in the United
States, being transparent will greatly reduce the amount of people who
go searching for adverse data and will increase brand trust among your
current clients and potential customers.
If you're looking for an easy and cost effective way to grow your
business in 2015, transparency is your answer.

3. PR and Social Media
Over the last few years, power people have discovered the all too great powers of
the social media sphere. One wrong tweet or comment and a little fact checking
can sink a person or business much faster than you think.
Being transparent is part of good public relations. If you have a large following, use
social media as a way to spread the truth about your company, whether good or
bad. If some bad press is about to hit the morning papers, preempt it online by
announcing that it's true and you or the company has taken measures to correct
the issue at hand.
Being honest and transparent about your business is one of the best ways to gain
trust with your current customers. Because trust in the corporate world is often
something that doesn't resonate well with consumers, your clients will be happy
that you were honest and transparent about any issues, and will continue to be
paying customers while referring new people to your company.

4. People Buy People: Be Personal and Honest at
All Times
In today's corporate world of level after level of customer service staff, middle
management and more, consumers often get upset at the lack of personal
customer service and honesty.
Recent studies have shown that more than half of Americans don't trust their
banks, and even more found their banks to be incompetent. These figures show
that, at the lowest level of customer and employee interaction, the service is
extremely bad and the trust is non-existent.
While it may seem hard at first, in order to be fully transparent, you must transform
your business from a faceless company into a company that employs real people.
Doing this will be the first step in gaining your customers' trust and provides a great
platform to begin the transparency process.

5. Engage With Your Audience
The biggest stage in the transparency process is to engage your
customers directly. Use your powerful social media platform to discuss
issues with consumers on a daily basis and answer any question they
have truthfully without hiding anything. Transparency does not allow
for any business to have even the smallest of secrets, because
customers will eventually find out.
Transparency can help grow your business because customer
engagement has made a comeback. Once you start honestly engaging
your customers in every outlet possible, they'll begin to trust you more
and will end up being your main source that drives the growth of your
customer base.

6. Jeff Ramson pioneered the intelligent use of social media to advance
investor relations goals