Context as a trust agent
Edelman published last week its 2010 trust barometer. It was encouraging to see that trust in businesses and in governments is rising. At the same time trust in media is significantly declining. The number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information regarding an offering or a provider dropped since 2008 from 45% to 25%. Incredible number.
The increasing trust in business can be connected to the rising transparency and social responsibility that organizations embraced as part of their corporate identity.
In media, on the other hand, rise of social media as a targeting platform for marketers is shaking the inherent trust we have in our social sphere. We trust our friends and peers because they are supposed to be devoid of personal gain in their recommendations – clean, transparent p2p natural flow, reciprocal in value.
I tend to share the doubts about the accuracy of the numbers in this trust barometer, and also believe that the level of trust from friends and peers depends on more complex factors than reflected in the ways the questions were built. At the same time there is no doubt that the rise of the value of the social web for marketers, the growing share of social marketing in the marketing mix of companies and the open revenue based facilitation of the social platforms to allow marketing, targeting and advertising activity, shake our automatic trust.
Once marketers tap into our social spheres, aiming to build profits and reputation for their brands, and take on a cloak of authenticity to capture our attention, we feel manipulated and recoil. When the major social networks compete on becoming targetable communication platforms, we users, lose our town square and become more suspicious.
So, basically, although in the attention economy recommendations from friends are much more than just attention grabbers, surfing above the noise, even people from our social sphere can’t be automatically classified as trust agents in today’s reality where:
A. My social sphere (to me a trusted more intimate personal circle) is being targeted by marketers as social media to manipulate for their profits, sometimes even with explicit incentives, and other times through technological means that are not transparent to me.
B. In an era where you may have hundreds of acquaintances, formerly known as friends, in your social network (or several of them), without any distinction of the level of proximity, intimate acquaintance, or at least the framework or context of acquaintance – being on someone’s social graph doesn’t automatically turn this person into a trust agent.
Therefore I believe that the keys are context and relevance. Trust is amorphic, subjective, non tangible. It stems from a whole subjective set of attributes, values, connotations and beliefs regarding a person, a situation, a recommendation. It establishes a level of credibility to the recommending personal friends that external sources cannot assess.
The 2 folded context/relevance around an interaction is a very strong determinant for a level of trust. The context of the recommending person to me within my social graph, levels of proximity, common interaction grounds. With it comes an attitude to the relevance of the person in my social sphere to the recommendation, the product/service and how that offering might be good for me. The personal context in which these elements are related to me and the offering, enhance my trust.
Context empowers trust, enhances it by creating a relevance based degree of connectedness that exterior marketers cannot be aware of.
The economics of the social web enable marketers to exploit our social sphere for their marketing purposes. Transparency is doubtful, the social platforms we use empower it and these food chains woven around us leave us outside the reward circle.
Contextonomics, the economics of context, on the other hand, cannot be easily manipulated in that way. This currency of the attention economy has a very strong subjective element inherently woven into it. It calls for explicit cooperation.
The value of the personal context around an informative transaction is something that only the parties involved can assess, as a measure of value and trust. Marketers depend on us and our explicit participation. It demands a higher level of transparency, of willing participation – and therefore entitled to a reward – a transparent food chain, between willing participants, for the benefit and reward of all parties involved.
