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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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“Trust Agents” and the complexities of trust

The ability of organizations to develop relationships of “spontaneous sociability,” the ability to form trusting relationships with diverse strangers, predicts when an organization will compete effectively.

If you think the quote above is a conclusion of the Edelman Trust Barometer or a quote from any of the flood of recent social media-focused books, guess again. It was a key finding of a study concluded in 2000 by the IABC Research Foundation titled “Measuring Organizational Trust” (link opens a PDF).

You would think, reading all the conversation about trust in the social space, that bloggers and others active in social media discovered trust. The researchers behind “Measuring Organizational Trust,” however, identified “spontaneous sociability” as an issue before anybody had ever uttered the term “social media.”

In fact, if most of today’s discussions of trust have a fatal flaw, it’s that they focus strictly on the social media dimensions of trust without contextualizing trust around broader relationships and issues. Social media is critical to business today, but trust does not exist in a vacuum. The very definition of organizational trust, according to the study, makes it clear that there’s more in play than blogs and social networks:

The organization’s willingness, based on its culture and communication behaviors in relationships and transactions, to be appropriately vunlerable if it believes that another individual, group or organization is competent, open and honest, concerned, reliable, and identified with common goals, norms and values.

In fact, according to the Foundation study, organizational trust is not a one-dimensional concept. Instead, it is…

  • Multi-leveled—Trust results from interactions that span co-workers, teams, organizational and inter-organizational alliances
  • Culturally-rooted—Trust is closely tied to the norms, values and beliefs of an organization’s culture
  • Communication-based—Trust is the outcome of communication behaviors, including transparency, accuracy and responsiveness.
  • Dynamic—Trust is constantly chaging as it cycles through phases of building, stabilizing and dissolving
  • Multi-dimensional—Trust consists of multiple factors at the cognitive, emotional and behavioral levels, all of which affect a person’s perception of trust

The role of social media and online conversations should be clear in this characteristics, but so should other relationships and criteria. Clearly there is more to influence the degree to which you trust an organization than what a credible peer has to say. When you consider the five distinct dimensions of trust that emerged from the study, it becomes even more obvious that, while ignoring online interactions can be disastrous, relying solely on them can be equally damaging:

  • Competence—Are the organization and its leaders and employees seen as effective? How strongly do we believe the organization will compete and survive?
  • Transparency—How much information is shared, how accurate is it, and how sincerely and appropriately is it communicated?
  • Concern for employees—When the organization is volunerable, does it abandon its feelings of caring, empathy, tolerance and safety toward employees? Did it ever have those feelings to begin with?
  • Reliability—Does the organization and its employees do what they say they’ll do?
  • Identification—How connected do we feel to the organization and its people?

A company’s overarching behavior will do more to inform online discussion and the perspectives of peer opinion leaders than any coordinated online communication effort.

imageThese elements of trust were rattling around in my brain this morning as I flipped through my just-arrived copy of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith‘s “Trust Agents,” the new book from Wiley that went on sale today. Thanks to the popularity of the authors and an aggressive marketing effort, the book’s debut is getting a lot of attention; it’s currently ranked 43 among all books at Amazon.com. The 10 reviews on Amazon so far all award “Trust Agents” five stars, including what has to be a highly influential review from Seth Godin.

A couple of the reviews are particularly encouraging. According to Steven Waterhouse, for example, “Trust Agents” demonstrates “how trust is the foundation of any relationship, why trust is difficult to achieve via online interactions, and what to do to overcome these obstacles.” And Amber Naslund wrote that the book strips away the fog “from complex and intricate concepts like trust, reliability, and the importance of human behavior in a digitized world where attention is at a premium.”

The flyleaf of the book, though, asserts that a trust agent’s words “carry more weight than any PR firm or big corporate marketing department.” There’s truth in this statement, but as the Foundation study makes clear, trust is a multi-layered and complex beast. The sources of trust doesn’t simply shift from one medium to another. How much, for example, do the efforts of a corporate communications department to accurately tell the company’s story influence what trust agents believe and pass along?

I’m anxious to dive into “Trust Agents,” which I’ll do as soon as I finish Emanuel Rosen’s “The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited.” I admire the heck out of Chris (and if I knew Julien, I’m sure I’d admire the heck out of him, too; my only exposure to Julien so far is through the podcast, Media Hacks); Chris is a smart guy (and a nice guy) with a firm grasp on the impacts social media is having on business. I’d bet real money his book is worth the cover price, and then some. (It’s available from more places than just Amazon, by the way.)

I plan to review the book soon on “For Immediate Release.”

Comments
  • 1.Shel,

    Thanks for this -- you make some excellent points. I think we often turn concepts like trust, social capital, influence, and such-like into attributes: things owned or possessed by an individual, an organization, or some other entity.

    In our way of conceptualizing these concepts we conceive of them as properties. I think it's important that we also understand that they are relational. Influence is relational, social capital is relational, trust is relational. These are attributes of relations between a brand and its consumers, an influencer and her followers, an employee and his peers.

    Thinking of trust in terms of relations allows us to better grasp the ways in which communication and social action can serve to build, sustain, develop, or erode trust (as well as influence, social capital). These things are dynamic. Relational dynamics are constantly changing, as exchanges, transactions, communication and so on take place over time.

    Our actions and our communication, always in relation to others, are the means by which we create and extend trust. I'm being philosophical but I appreciate your perspective on trust as something more complex than sometimes presented in the social mediaverse!

    cheers,
    adrian

    Adrian Chan | August 2009 | San Francisco

  • 2.I invented Trust. I did. Just ask anyone. It's me. Mine. All mine!

    It's funny. I *just* took "The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited" back off my bookshelf last night (where, to add to the coincidence, it was sitting beside Tactical Transparency), and read through a few parts. I'm obviously pleased with how the launch went. We hit #30 yesterday at Amazon, and also woke up the other vendors with some numbers. But I wanted to see what I might have missed. (Tons, of course.)

    I love this post, how thoughtful it is, how it brings back memory.

    Jacket copy is for salespeople. It's not my stronger suit. The inside doesn't say mean things about PR as much as it suggests the shift that you probably agree is coming: human PR.

    Thank you. I'm humbled by your review.

    Chris Brogan | August 2009 | Boston

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