Are You Trustworthy?

To paraphrase Lt. Saavik in Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan: "Trust. It is a difficult concept. It is not logical."

Many people look at social media with disdain, others see it as a panacea. Wherever you are on that continuum, you need to be yourself and you need to be trustworthy, lest others view you with wariness.

Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and other social media channels, it’s nearly impossible to pretend to be someone you’re not. It’s also a lot tougher to win people’s trust, according to Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, coauthors of the new book Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust. According to the authors, the qualities that make Web 2.0 attractive to “digital natives” — instant access to wide-ranging research, open invitations to join conversations, universal transparency, etc. — also make it difficult to reach out and do business with strangers.

So how can you get through to customers who no longer respond to typical advertisements, or win over clients who tend to be suspicious of expert claims? As Brogan and Smith have discovered, the Web’s best business communicators are people with a knack for building relationships. They offer these niche marketing tips for earning trust online:

• Crash the gate. Before you can make your own splash, you need to understand who “owns” your target market. These people and companies are the “gatekeepers.” Make a list of all the gatekeepers you can think of. Then, make a list of the upstarts, the “gatejumpers.” (For example, in the auction business, Sotheby’s was the gatekeeper and eBay is the gatejumper.) Identify the qualities that define each list. The exercise will help you determine who your gatekeepers are. Then, decide which rule you can break to make yourself a gatejumper.

• Be human. Before you can become “one of us” in the consumer’s mind, you need to be liked and accepted. Start by sharing a bit of yourself. Use your picture, not your logo, as your avatar on social sites. Promote others 12 times as often as you promote yourself. And always remember to ask about other people first. How are they doing? What are they doing?

• Understand the difference between a friend and prospect. Becoming “friends” on Facebook is liking saying hi at a party to someone you don’t exactly know. It’s a good start. Unless your connection is really a friend, consider being accepted as “friends” to mean that you can pay attention to what your network connection is doing and try to find a conversational entry point. Marketing to a new friend will almost always result in being “unfriended” — and possibly an angry blog post.

• Choose one thing you’d like your community to do. Try running a cause-related event. Simplify the act as much as possible (make the link to it on your site obvious, blog about it on the day of the event, etc.). If the cause stands behind something the community cares about, it will be more successful. Reach cause-related influencers and help them spread the word. Finally, create incentives for participating. Any event is bound to be more successful, more fun, and more meaningful if there’s a benefit for all involved.

Lt. Saavik could learn a little about trust from Brogan and Smith. Building trust is not based on the logical tasks that can be checked off your "to do" list. Rather, it is the consistent outreach and honest human concern for each other that builds the connection and eventually trust.

Where are you in that continuum?

Best to you,

Jim Herrera


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