One thing a business must have is the TRUST of its marketplace. Without TRUST the end is near and nothing can prevent that; not low prices, not useful products nor any other countermeasure.

How does a business lose its trust? You can do your own list, but I know the following types of things would be on it: bad quality; poor customer service; a bad buying experience; denying legit warranty claims; defective products with cover-up; frequent recalls; and shady management among many other things.

It was always hard to establish TRUST and in today’s world, even harder. The public has become cynical and suspicious of our institutions and businesses are no exception.

If you go back over the last 40 years we have a break down of TRUST from the effects of very negative events.

• A President resigned because of a cover-up attempt of an impeachable offense
• Another President was incompetent leading us to 20% interest rates and unemployment
• Another President who told us it depends on what ‘is’ means
• Our government has over-spent us into $14 Trillion of debt and the number is climbing
• Leaders of government and industry have been convicted of fraud and corruption
• There have been questionable wars
• There was the Internet Bubble
• There was the end of the world Y2K that was a non-event
• There was the housing bubble and resulting financial collapse
• Main stream media is widely viewed to be highly biased one way or the other
• We are in the midst one proclaimed crisis after another that often fizzles into a fraction of the predictions blown up to manipulate us: the swine flu, the oil spill, man-made global warming, etc, etc, etc.

So what does this have to do with Internet Marketing?

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social Media is one of the most trustworthy sources of information left in a world of questionable information sources.

Click here to view an article that qualifies the above statement.

Information delivery channels and relationships affect how social media users perceive information and advice. One thing that makes social media marketing powerful is consumers trust in people like them, their friends, family and other online peers.

Businesses need to tap into that trust via the power of what is called “earned media” or by engaging in a conversation with their marketplace.  And where social conversations take place has an effect on their perceived trustworthiness as well as who is taking part in them.

A study of frequent social media users by market research firm Invoke Solutions found that the most trusted information was posted between people who knew each other.  And blog posts were more likely to be trusted completely than posts from other distribution channels like Facebook and trust drops off from there, but is still relatively high compared to traditional information sources.

So if you want to guard your company’s TRUST factor, you need to pay attention to Social Media. We can help. Contact Us.