Discover how earning trust and building your reputation is the new 'online' currency.

Chris Anderson, author of ‘Free – The Future of Price’ and Chris Brogan ‘Trust Agents’ both highlight that the major currency of the internet (due to the advance of the social web) is fast becoming non monetary.

Now the valued currency ‘online’ is not the dollar or the pound, but trust, reputation and influence.

Any marketing activity your organisation does should be an attempt to leverage a level of trust with your prospect. Now social networks (embraced correctly) are fully enabling us to become more ‘human’ and to build deeper, longer-lasting relationships with our customers, donors and prospects – which, in the long-term, will lead to increased sales or donations.

So are you trusted? Do you have a reputation of someone who shares and helps others? Do you have influence in your online community? This is how you truly succeed in social networks, and how your organisation benefits from this investment of time and effort in the long term.

How do you gain trust?

Chris Brogan highlights some key activities.                                                                

• Be social, be human and be a ‘friend’. Share a bit of your personality and if you mess up, remember the three As: acknowledge, apologise and act
• Help, comment and signpost. When you treat people well, they treat you well back. But don’t expect a favour in return. Do all this without asking for a sale or donation – you will be remembered
• Share and highlight other people’s work if you find it useful or interesting – Chris Brogan promotes others 12 times as much as himself
• Build relationships, and don’t just participate when you have a campaign running. Be in it for the long term. As Liz Strauss highlights: ‘I’m not a one-link stand’

By doing this, you will slowly become a ‘trust agent’ – a person people come to. In time, your reputation and influence will spread and when people are in a position to buy or donate, you will be 'top of mind.'

 “Have a relationship before the sale”                                                                                                               

(Read on for more tips on how to approach online communities)                                                                          

 Photo credit: Iurii Davydov

Establishing trust leads to a better online reputation

• When you have relevant, interesting and valuable information on your blog or website, people will begin to link to your site. The more inbound links you get, the better your page rank, and the more your site rises on Google search rankings.
• Comments - We trust the people that have been there before us, so the more positive comments the better. When people buy, they now look at comments and reviews. By ensuring you have a positive presence, you are ‘pushing’ people through from the ‘consideration’ stage to the ‘buying’ stage.
• If you become trusted and influential, your community will ‘promote/evangelise’ about you – you won’t need to do it. Social media is word of mouth marketing on a global scale. (For instance, I found out about Chris’s book through other people talking about it. Chris has never marketed to me, never mailed me and I have seen no advert for the book. Simple word of mouth recommendations from people I trust in my online community!)
• What is the best way to get people, your customers, to open your emails? The two most important aspects as to whether a customer opens your emails are the subject line and from line.  If they know you and trust you, they are more likely to open your email and respond to your ‘call to action’ 

Why this leads to positive ROI

• We tend to buy from people who are like us – to become ‘one of us’ we need to be part of the community.
• A study of 3,000 active social network users in the U.S. found that almost half (48%) of Twitter users who saw a brand's name mentioned on the site would go on to use a search engine to investigate further.
• By being active in social media and building your reputation, you are also aiding your email and direct marketing communications as your customers become to ‘know’ you.
• Positive sentiment. By participating and listening you can learn, respond and improve your service to meet your customers’ needs more effectively. Over time this will have a positive impact on your brand identity, i.e. what your customers think of you, rather than the brand image you try and market.
• Just being online and being accessible can solve a lot of problems you otherwise would not know about.
• Improves efficiency – rather than constantly taking part in ‘one-to-one’ FAQs by phone or email, by writing a blog or responding to comments on community forums you have the ability to speak to ‘many’. 
• Participating in social media provides outward signs that you are listening; that you care, that you want to part of the conversation and part of the community. What is the ‘opportunity cost’ of not participating? Rather than perhaps asking what ‘will we get?’, ask ‘what will we lose?’. The latter will probably be far greater.

What do you think? 

Other related blog posts

How can we measure Return on Investment’ (ROI) on our participation in social media?
Is participating in social media of value to organisations?
How to get the most out of online communities and social networks

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